Do today’s gays have it too easy?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:45:00 +0000

"I look at 'How to Survive a Plague' and, in some ways, I’m jealous," said Carl Siciliano, executive director of the Ali Forney Center, which serves at-risk homeless gay youth.

"How to Survive a Plague" is a nonfiction film — nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar — that depicts the early years of the fight against AIDS, specifically the activism undertaken by groups like the radical movement ACT UP to get attention from an establishment more comfortable turning a blind eye.

There's little enviable, it would seem, in their life-or-death fight. And certainly the environment today for gay men — who enjoy all the comforts straight people presume and enjoy in some parts of the country — is far friendlier. And yet there was a political galvanization during those years, at least judging by the kiss-ins and screaming denunciations of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in "Plague," that is lacking today.

"When I think about the parallels, the differences — people do have a lot more inside access and everybody’s not going to die. [Causes today are] not going to generate the same enthusiasm," said Siciliano.

How AIDS activism changed America

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

When we think about the reasons our country became so irreparably divided and broken, we tend to focus on the legacy of the 1960s: Vietnam, the sexual revolution, urban violence, white flight, Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy and so on. That stuff was important, obviously, but for me and many other people approximately of my generation, it was, more than anything, a result of the the Reagan years -- the supposed American renaissance built on mendacity and racism and hatred -- the Freddy Krueger years, the years of AIDS. It was a time when American citizens died by the tens or hundreds of thousands from a disease whose name the president of the United States declined to speak out loud while the people’s elected representatives (some of them, anyway) openly celebrated their deaths on the floor of Congress.

Salon.com > How to Survive a Plague

Do today’s gays have it too easy?

How AIDS activism changed America