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AIDS activists broke the 'conspiracy of silence,' breathing life into a movement for love [1]

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Date: 2022-12-08

One event birthed the recognition that together, trans and gay Americans possessed the power to change our existence for the better, while the other supercharged the realization of that power.

Iconic gay rights activist Harvey Milk articulated the necessity of being seen during a June 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in which he condemned "the conspiracy of silence" about being gay and lesbian.

"Gay people, we will not win their rights by staying quietly in our closets," Milk said, stirring a throng of some 250,000 marchers that day. "We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!"

But Milk's vision wasn't fully realized until the veil of secrecy that had become adaptive for so many LGBTQ Americans turned into a death sentence in the '80s. Nearly a decade after Milk's prescient rallying cry, a handful of gay activists founded the "Silence = Death" project in 1987 at the height of AIDS crisis. The desperate admonition became the motto of gay and lesbian activists who formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, the direct action group that ultimately waged a fierce campaign to raise the profile of the epidemic, its deadly toll on the gay community, and demand government action.

As Pelosi noted in her op-ed, during her first floor speech in June 1987, she declared that Congress "must take leadership ... in the crisis of AIDS."

That same year, Ronald Reagan finally broke his silence in April, declaring AIDS "public health enemy No. 1” after nearly 20,849 Americans had already died, according to And The Band Played On by legendary gay journalist Randy Shilts. The first major national story introducing a "rare cancer" in 41 gay men had appeared in The New York Times in 1981.

These crisis years became transformative for an up and coming generation of LGBTQ Americans, myself included. The message being both clearly articulated and demonstrated was that no one would save gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals unless we saved ourselves. One didn't have to be highly politically active or even aware to get the memo. I personally didn't start to wrestle with my own sexuality until the early '90s as I was entering the discovery years of my early 20s. When I finally got a handle on things around the mid-90s, I got to work posthaste on busting down that closet door and informing my immediate peers, members of my family, and an inner circle of close friends from high school and college. I didn't consider it activism—it was simply essential to my health and well being in my estimation at the time. It helped that I wasn't exactly a shrinking violet.

But I was not alone by any means. In 1994, a Newsweek poll found that 53% of respondents said they knew someone who was lesbian or gay. But by 2008, that number had grown to 78% in the same Newsweek survey. I was simply part of an emergent movement of queer Americans who came to the same realization at the same time, leading them to have often uncomfortable and even traumatic conversations with friends and family members from coast to coast. If a generation before us had been left to die due to their comfortable silences, we had no choice but to speak our uncomfortable truths with the aspiration of living.

The byproduct of those truths was a political transformation on LGBTQ issues and marriage equality in particular. In 2013, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down marriage bans nationwide, a Public Religion Research Institute poll found that someone who had a "close friend or family member" who was lesbian or gay was almost twice as likely to support the freedom to marry as people who didn't, at 63% support versus 36% support.

Naturally, the more people who came out, the more support for the freedom to marry grew. When Gallup first polled the issue in 1996, just over a quarter of Americans (27%) supported legalizing same-sex marriage. In 2011—a year before President Barack Obama came out in favor of marriage equality—the issue finally cracked 50%. Today, more than 70% of individuals believe lesbian, gay, and transgender Americans should be able to lawfully marry the person they love.

But it was the national coming out movement that Milk hopefully urged and AIDS tragically spurred that fueled the national evolution on same-sex marriage.

On the day of the landmark Supreme Court ruling, then-President Obama delivered a celebratory address from the Rose Garden.

"It is a consequence of the countless small acts of courage of millions of people across decades who stood up, who came out, who talked to parents—parents who loved their children no matter what," Obama noted on June 26, 2015. "Folks who were willing to endure bullying and taunts, and stayed strong, and came to believe in themselves and who they were, and slowly made an entire country realize that love is love.

"What an extraordinary achievement," the president continued. "What a vindication of the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things."

Indeed. Certainly the work of freedom is never done. Republicans are viciously taking aim anew at a younger generation of transgender kids. It’s unconscionable, but just like the activists who came before them, these brave young souls are finding their voices at a time of extraordinary duress and they will undoubtedly pave the way to freedom for generations to come.

Why did Democrats do so surprisingly well in the midterms? It turns out they ran really good campaigns, as strategist Josh Wolf tells us on this week's episode of The Downballot. That means they defined their opponents aggressively, spent efficiently, and stayed the course despite endless second-guessing in the press.

Wolf gives us an inside picture of how exactly these factors played out in the Arizona governor's race, one of the most important Democratic wins of the year. He also shines a light on an unsexy but crucial aspect of every campaign: how to manage a multi-million budget for an enterprise designed to spend down to zero by Election Day.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/8/2140782/-AIDS-activists-broke-the-conspiracy-of-silence-breathing-life-into-a-movement-for-love

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