ACT UP’s leaders never fully appreciated this new enemy of dissension within their own ranks, as acknowledged by co-founder Kramer. “Unfortunately,” Kramer wrote in a June 23 Internet statement, “because ACT UP chapters can be set up by anyone (under the all-too-democratic principles that we tried to live by for so many years), [ACT UP] has been infiltrated by people whose behavior I can only characterize as psychopathic, people who lie and cause great willful damage.”
Last month ACT UP/San Francisco, an 8-year-old rebel group at odds with the older ACT UP/Golden Gate, mailed 450 packets of AIDS-dissident information to Congress. ACT UP/Golden Gate has become so eager to disassociate itself from the “new” ACT UP that the group recently changed its name to “Survive AIDS,” signifying that the dissidents won that particular battle for the ACT UP legacy. ACT UP/San Francisco involves itself in a variety of causes, including providing access to medical marijuana for people with AIDS. The group also has close ties to animal-rights activists who have been accused of vandalism. Jeff Getty, of Survive AIDS, said in an interview that the other group’s extremism and collusion with overly zealous animal-rights groups completely ruined the name ACT UP.
Original ACT UP–ers also said they are worried that the dissidents could play into the hands of the right wing, by providing a justification for slashing AIDS-research funding, a step that could pave the way for other anti-gay measures. On June 6, Representative Gary Miller (R-Pomona) forwarded to every member of Congress a May 15 letter, from a dissident group using the name ACT UP, that called for an end to AIDS funding. In a memo with the letter, Miller wrote, “I understand that ACT UP has taken a new position regarding the federal funding of AIDS.” To date, no other member of Congress has advanced the message of the dissidents, which Miller apparently mistook as a change in policy by the original leaders of ACT UP.
“These [dissidents] have hijacked the ACT UP name in order to push a redundant, failed cause that has been around for nearly 15 years,” says ACT UP/Los Angeles founding member Peter Cashman. “Having been unable to get any credibility or national recognition through their own,” he said, “they deliberately stole our credibility.”
Knoll and Poindexter say they assumed the ACT UP name out of desperation to help save people.
Until recently, most activists, including Cashman, laughed off such comments. But just last week, Kramer felt compelled to post an Internet message for attendees of the AIDS conference in South Africa: “The fallacious deeds and arguments spewed by these distressing malcontents must not be allowed to disrupt the forthcoming and vitally important International AIDS Conference.”
But in fact the message of the dissidents did make a difference. South African President Mbeki made headlines when he announced his belief that some symptoms attributed to the AIDS virus are actually the result of poverty and other problems that have troubled Africa for decades. He expressed concern over introducing costly and potent drugs into bodies that have been weakened by ills other than the HIV virus.
More than 5,000 leading scientists, doctors and medical experts responded directly to Mbeki (and the dissidents) in a document published in the scientific journal Naturejust a week before the conference. The so-called Durban Declaration asserted that overwhelming evidence shows that the HIV virus is the cause of AIDS. Denying this reality would cost countless lives by hampering blood-screening efforts, curtailing the use of condoms and limiting the use of drugs to cut mother-to-child transmission of the virus. Scientists from the U.S. National Academy of Science, the U.S. Institute of Medicine, Germany’s Max Planck Institutes, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal Society of London and the National Institute of Virology in South Africa signed the document.
Indeed, the news coming out of the South African AIDS conference suggests that the AIDS crisis is far from over. The disease is ravaging entire countries on the African continent. In the developing world, neither standard drug treatments nor effective safety education is widely available. Meanwhile, in North America, increases in risky behaviors and a growing infection rate among gay youth and people of color are setting the stage for a resurgence of the disease, according to officials. The ideology of the dissidents, they note, could represent views widely held by those who engage in unsafe practices, such as having sex without condoms or sharing needles while using drugs. The ideology also affords a safe harbor of rationalization.
“Anyone is allowed to ask any questions they want,” says Hitt, the Los Angeles doctor and AIDS expert. “I as well as others agree that it would be fine to have more funding to look into the pathogenesis of the HIV virus. I don’t think that medicine has all the answers to this disease yet.” But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t get AIDS tests or practice safer sex. And the notion of cutting funds to develop an AIDS vaccine and drug treatments, he adds, would be “very dangerous given today’s knowledge.”
