Revival ACT

TOWN CRIER ACT UP veteran Jay Blotcher has news for today’s activists.

Photograph: Bill Bytsura

When the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) burst onto the scene in 1987, misinformation about the dread disease was rampant, but responsible action from the media and government was sparse. Over the next several years, ACT UP used controversial tactics to break through to the mainstream, including infiltrating the New York Stock Exchange, storming the CBS Evening News studios and, most infamously, interrupting mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. On Friday 18, founding member Jay Blotcher and other ACT UP alums join filmmakers and media theorists at NYU’s Cantor Film Center for a look at the group’s colorful history and an examination of how its guerrilla tactics can be employed by antiwar protestors, environmentalists and other 21st-century grassroots activists. Speaking from his Hudson Valley home, Blotcher recalls the lessons he learned on the front lines.

Lesson 1: You can’t be too organized.
“This wasn’t some haphazard group—our media committee had members that were publicists at major firms. Michelangelo Signorile, my predecessor as media coordinator, applied showbiz-PR tactics to ACT UP and got us a lot of attention.”

Lesson 2: You don’t need a big budget to make a big statement.“At the outset, ACT UP didn’t have two pennies to scrape together. We faxed press releases surreptitiously from our jobs and stole office supplies to create press kits. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Lesson 3: Don’t trust the papers to get the story right.
“Media objectivity is a myth. When the epidemic hit, the papers ignored the biggest health story of the 20th century. I thought if I prepped them before we went [to St. Patrick’s]—sent out releases explaining why were protesting the Church—they might get the story right. I was living in a fool’s paradise. The articles were totally sensationalistic and Cardinal O’Connor became martyr of the week.”

Lesson 4: Create your own alternatives.
“We helped foster an alternate news stream in the ’80s because we had to get the story out somehow. Now, with the Internet, there are so many options. If you craft your message and your presentation smartly you don’t need The New York Times to validate your existence.”

Lesson 5: Everyone’s not always on the same page.
“We were officially picketing outside St. Patrick’s. The protest inside was planned secretly by members operating on their own. One guy, a former altar boy, crumbled his Communion wafer and announced that withholding safer-sex information was murder. The public was horrified… and a lot of gay groups backed away from us.”

“Expression=Life: ACT UP, Video and the AIDS Crisis” takes place Apr 18, 2008, at 7pm.