The Social Movement: A Case Study Of Act Up By Deborah Gould And David France

Arguably one of the most prevalent and impactful of its kind, the social movement ACT UP emerged as an activist response to the deadly AIDS epidemic that primarily afflicted millions of gay men in the 1980s in the United States. With the epidemic came a lack of government funding for AIDS/HIV treatment, public denouncement of homosexuality by the Catholic Church and prominent political figures, and an overall collective ignorance from a large part of society and its governing structures. As such, the ACT UP movement came to fruition as a means to channel this neglect, grief, and shame into anger that could be transformed into meaningful social and political action. The movement shifted the focus from an internal problem of the gay community

Deborah Gould and David France’s study of the AIDS movement, specifically the ACT UP social movement, describe and demonstrate the essence of ACT UP as the emotions of the queer identity and populations in America during the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to the AIDS epidemic, there was a high degree of ambivalence among the queer populations about their homosexuality; some found a sense of pride and community within their identity while others experienced deep isolation and discomfort. However, as Gould describes it, the AIDS epidemic that began in the early 1980s “greatly magnified the stigma of homosexuality, intensifying lesbians’ and gay men’s shame about their sexual practices and anxieties about social rejection” (Gould, 2002). Lesbians and gay men were left feeling ostracized from society and individualized in their shame. On top of that, the thousands of lives lost daily to the disease only magnified the intense feelings of grief and loss associated with the queer community and its

As for the emotional valence of their collective action frames, the “hostile political environment that queers faced during…the Reagan/Bush years…were important components affecting…positive responses to AIDS activists’ mobilizations of anger and call to militant action” (Gould, 2002). ACT UP utilized these sentiments of anger and frustration toward the government as both a segue and justification for more militant-movement activist strategies such as “angry protests, disruptions, civil disobedience, die-ins, other confrontational actions” that the movement saw as a necessary recourse to enact change as seen in How to Survive a Plague (Gould, 2002). One of the most prominent scenes from the documentary showed a simultaneous art piece and vigil that AIDS activists created called the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt with thousands of patches that commemorated victims of the AIDS epidemic and intended to show the vast number of victims. The quilt was shown on the National Mall in Washington D.C. ACT UP took the opportunity at the quilt display to pass out pamphlets that called for the provoked grief of the viewers to be manifested into action and anger directed toward the government for its inaction throughout the epidemic (Gould, 2002); (France,