November 13, 2024 • 43 mins
Peter Staley was one of the most prominent members of the AIDS activism group ACT-UP. He is largely credited as one of the pioneers responsible for the creation of life-saving AIDS drugs. He recounts the most harrowing times of the AIDS crisis — and how he persevered.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
The Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
And at nine twenty nine and fifty five seconds, I
say go and we stand up. We unfurl the banner,
and we each have a pocket sized marine foghorn. These
things are fucking loud, and we all raised our hands
and boom. Nobody heard the opening bell. This this piercing screen.
(00:31):
It felt like time was standing still. Everything stopped. Every
the Trader's like, what what the fuck is this? They're
like confused, and then they're putting two and two together.
Those fuckers got inside. I was smiling from ear to
ear because I knew we had pulled it off and
that their anger and their homophobia and their hatred was
(00:52):
going to turn to our benefit.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
As a gin a kid growing up religious and in
the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing
I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying
to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what
I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance,
and love. In this episode, we'll meet Peter Staley, one
(01:21):
of the most impactful AIDS activists in America. We'll learn
how his own HIV diagnosis motivated him to stage some
of the most infamous protests in American history with Act UP,
and how those protests led to the creation of HIV
drugs that would save millions of lives. From My Heart podcasts,
(01:42):
I'm Jordan and Solves and this is what We loved.
(02:11):
The other night, I found myself at a gay club
at two am with my best friend Kevin. The floors
were sticky from vodka, soda spilling, and sweat. They were
blasting the Brat album. Kevin pulled me up onto the
stage to dance in front of everyone, and after a
few songs, I looked out into the crowd. Some people
(02:32):
were making out. One shirtless guy was doing poppers, a
few people were there with their friends like me, and
some were just happy to be dancing on their own.
My eyes filled with tears looking at all of them,
and when I turned to Kevin, he was crying too.
(02:52):
We hugged each other. I think we were just overcome
by the joy. Creating this sh and meeting so many
queer elders affected by AIDS has shown me just how
privileged I am to have moments like that. My next guest,
Peter Staley, is one of the many people. I have
to think he helped pioneer the HIV drugs that literally
(03:16):
brought many queer people back to life from their deathbeds
in the nineties. His activism also ensured wide access to PREP,
the drug that prevents the spread of HIV. In the eighties,
he was the poster child of act Up, the political
organization that pushed the government and society to slow the
wave of queer death caused by AIDS. But he wasn't
(03:40):
always out and proud. In fact, he didn't come out
until he got his own HIV diagnosis, just as the
AIDS crisis was beginning to build. So why don't we
start at the very beginning, When was the moment that
(04:02):
you knew you were gay?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I'd give most credit to uh Kirk and Spock of
the original Star Trek moved right when I was hitting puberty,
around I don't know, ten or eleven, I'd moved to
the suburbs of Philadelphia. And with today's TV, it's it's
almost hard to believe, but back then, there was no
(04:26):
nudity and not a lot of opportunities. When there was
just men's bodies, you know, just shirtless, and there was
occasional shirtless scenes in Star Trek, and that was the
show I loved, and I was like, why am I
obsessed by these stirring spock especially Kirk. And then there
(04:50):
was you know, a couple famous Zulu scenes, one particular
where he becomes a swordsman, old school swordsman, shirtless, running
through the ship, threatening people with his sword, and he
was all hot and sweaty and crazy and ripped. So yeah,
all those are kind of seared into my head. That
(05:10):
was your gay awakening, that was my gay awakening. So
I knew that I was attracted to men's bodies, not
women's bodies. And even before that, I knew that that
was wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Just growing up school yard stuff, the F word was
frequently used towards any kid that was not popular, But yeah,
towards me. I was a bit of a loner and
a music geek.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
What kind of music?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I started studying classical piano as soon as I got
to Philadelphia, like when I was nine, And when I
was thirteen, my parents bought me a grand piano and
I got a much better teacher, professor at the local college,
and he became like a second father figure for me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I read that you went to Oberlin for college? Was
that for classical piano?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
It was that's how I got in.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
And were you still in the closet? I was.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I still hadn't had gay sex. So I get to Oberlin.
I'm there for over a year, still living in the closet,
still pretending to be straight. And my sophomore year, I
see this flyer put out by the Gay and Lesbian Union,
which was one of the earliest gay and lesbian student
groups in the country, founded right after Stonewall. But it
(06:31):
was all over campus, just a eight and a half
by eleven sheet that said a night of gay and
lesbian short films about us, about our lives. They had
the list of films and one of them had a
bunch of asterisks said noe X rated and it was
I forget the name of it. It was like Alan
(06:53):
and Paul or something. It was about two guys. It
was going to be the short documentary about how how
gay men have sex, and it said it was X rated,
and I was like, hmm, I've actually not seen gay sex.
I hadn't even dared to buy a magazine or anything,
(07:14):
so I thought since it was a night of film,
the theater would be dark. I could sneak in a
little late, find a seat in the back. Nobody would
know I was there. It's exactly what I did. And
then we get to Alan and Paul or whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You had to watch all the films first.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Couple other little documentaries and it was the most hysterical
thing ever. It was a bunch of queer old men
in San Francisco who decided to make the director who
decided to make this documentary for younger gays, to show
them how gays hook up and have sex. And it
(07:55):
was done like an animal documentary of how lying mate,
oh wild in the wild, how the lions would scope
each other out, you know, get to know each other first,
touch noses then and with Attenborough's deep British voice going,
(08:16):
and then they spotted each other across the field, and
there was that vocal, not British but in a deep
baritone over the entire thing. And it starts with a
cocktail party and two guys spot each other from across
the room and he describes the gay gaze, you know,
they not looking at each other's eyes and then looking
back and not looking away. And that's how you knew
(08:38):
so you learn about that. And then they go up
and they start chatting and they get friendly really fast,
and then one of them says, let's go, and then
it cuts to them going into a bedroom and meanwhile
the guys sing and then they start the foreplay and
you know, and they start kissing and unbuttoning each other's
shirts and by the time they reached the first button,
(08:58):
I have to cross my leg. I was just they
were very hot men on the film, and I was
just going crazy. I said, Okay, I am going to
do this. I've been wondering for a decade since I
was a little boy, and this is nuts. I am
(09:22):
going to do this somewhere somehow, and I don't want
anybody to find out. I still want to keep my secret.
But I am going to London in early January to
check out the London School of Economics for a possible
junior year abroad. My parents are going to let me
go there by myself for a week, and nobody knows
me in London. I'll be turning twenty while i'm there.
(09:45):
So I land in London in the morning and I'm
walking around and back then there was an active red
light district in Soho, and right on the edges of
the red Light district there was a gay porn shop.
I was like, bullseye.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Six hours after landing, I'm in my first gay establishment.
I'm alone in this square room with magazines and all
the walls, and this thirty something old guy behind the register,
the first homosexual I've ever met.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
And I look at the magazines and I work up
the nerve to talk to him, and finally I say, Hi,
I just got here from the States and wonder if
you could help me with some advice. I think I'd
like to go out dancing tonight. Do you have any suggestions?
And oh, well, it depends on what you're looking for.
(10:42):
You're looking for guys my age, you want guys your age.
And I'm like, sheepishly going my age. And he said, oh, well,
you'll be wanting to go to Heaven. I'm like, oh
my god.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
They had Heaven the Wow. Okay, yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
The largest gay dance club in Europe. When you walk in,
it's like Heaven exactly. It's at my doorstep. He said,
if you like, I was thinking of going tonight and
we could meet at a pub at like eleven and
then I could show you how to get there, and
I thought that was so nice. I was, oh, that's
so nice. And he's like, you know, he's like making
(11:25):
his moves right right right. I'm clueless, so I said sure.
So we met at the pub and he brings me.
I walk into heaven. We're at this long coat check
in my big puffy winter coat, and the bathrooms are
on the other side of the coach check and all
the stream of guys, shirtless, sweaty, beautiful young men were
(11:48):
walking by to go to the bathroom and they were
all checking me out. I was like the new meat
in town. Wow. And it literally was like walking into
actual heaven. I was like, I was like, oh my god,
this these are my I found my tribe.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I found my tribe the first night. And I had
like multiple opportunities to choose from within two hours, but
believe it or not, I decided to be a gentleman
and go home with the guy that brought me.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
He could tell it was my first time, and he
asked me how old I was and I said, well,
what time is it. He said it's one thirty years
said I just turned twenty.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Wow, so that was your first sort of gay experience.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
January ninth, nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wow. Not long after that is when the New York
Times article comes out about AIDS. To tell me about
your first time learning about that, because it sounds like
it was right as you were sort of coming of
age and coming into your own well.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I didn't see that article. I wasn't in New York.
I went back to Oberlin. I don't think I heard
about AIDS until a year later. In fact, that was
mostly because the American press ignored it. The first nightly
news story on age happened in eighty two, not eighty one,
(13:24):
when the disease broke. I mean, imagine if that happened
with something like COVID. I mean so, I think it
was a year later, and it was just like like
a general newscast. It didn't really register. Nobody was talking
about it on campus. I didn't have any conversations about it,
And it wasn't until early eighty three. Then I get
(13:46):
to New York. I had given up piano and decided
I wanted to work on Wall Street for ten years
and then run for Congress, and on the weekend start
finding the gay bars and everything closeted bond trader on
Wall Street during the day.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Were you out to friends in New York?
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Only the guys I was meeting at the bars that
summer in eighty three, at a gay bar with a
guy about my age and I'm twenty two, who was
also pretty closeted. He said, I hear, it's only really
happening to the older gays who have sucked with like
a thousand guys, which is not completely devoid of truth.
(14:30):
Kind of the early deaths were the crowd in their
thirties and forties who had been partying hard all through
the seventies, and there was just zero condom use in
eighty three. And I didn't pick up the gay newspaper,
but I didn't know any of the politics, nothing, and
stayed oblivious to all of it.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
When was the moment that it became real for you
my diagnosis tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It was two years later. I had had this wonderful,
really fabulous two week tourd affair with a guy my age,
a bartender that had kind of come to a natural finish,
and I obviously had some STD I didn't understand and
know what to do with, and so I asked one
of my gay mentors, one of the older gay men.
(15:17):
Do you know of any gay doctors in New York?
And his doctor was Dan william And unbeknownst to me,
he was one of the frontline AIDS doctors in New
York because he was a gay doctor who had a
huge practice of gay men. He was on the front lines.
And so I went in to see him and I
(15:37):
had the STD taken care of. But then I get
this cold and I go in to see him about
this cough. And by that point he had been losing
so many patients. I didn't know this, And I go
in there and he had gotten into the practice of
any of his gay patients coming in for anything, he
(16:00):
would do a standard CBC complete blood account, and he
had this trick because if it showed a low white
blood cell count, it was a tip to him that
this might be yet another patient of his that had HIV.
So it was just a cold that brought me in.
(16:23):
But the CBC had a low white blood count. And
on November fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, I got called at
my trading desk by the nurse in my doctor's office
at work and he's like, we need you back for
more blood. Work, and I said, what is it? He said,
a low white bud cell count. And I said, well,
what could that be? What might that mean? He said, ah,
(16:45):
he'll talk to you about that. And I'm really you know,
I'm on my trading desk. I'm pushy as all hell.
I'm an aggressive bond trader, right and I'm like, na,
you can tell me what might mean. I really pushed him,
and he said, well, we do see that a lot
in our patients with HIV. And in a flash, all
(17:10):
the denial and ignorance and youth and innocence just emptied
out of me. And I knew It's like duh, I
was this young gay guy fucking in New York, which
is ground zero for this AIDS crisis. I've been hearing
(17:31):
about and thinking I'm immune, so you.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Go in and get the additional tests. What was the
moment of diagnosis?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Like, well, I knew right then it was that. And
the country was in a total panic about AIDS. There
was lots of AIDS all over the news stand but
in the worst scariest possible way, America was in this
a Bola like panic. Parents were pulling kids out of
school if there were rumors about other kids. Shit like that.
(18:02):
A family with hemophiliac boys was burnt out of their
home in Florida. All of this was happening when I
get this news, and I was actually I had a
guy I had met in Amsterdam was staying with me
and I was taking him to Disney World that weekend. Wow,
(18:23):
he even knew less than I did. And we had
to La Guardia. I scoured the news stand for anything
about HB and there was one science magazine that had
a cover story on everything that was known about the
disease from a scientific standpoint, written in layman terms, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
(18:44):
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
And the guy who was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me. He didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me.
And I said, it's part of me, it's genetically integrated.
(19:05):
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Peter had just learned that he was living with HIV.
By the end of that year, nineteen eighty five, there
would be nearly sixteen thousand Americans dead In nineteen eighty seven,
a man named Larry Kramer founded a group called act UP.
It stood for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Made
up of mostly people in their twenties, their goal was
(19:41):
to bulldoze any barrier in the way of ending the
AIDS crisis, insurance companies, big pharma, and the government itself.
Act UP members became experts on infectious disease and masters
of drug policy. They staged dramatic protests that would catch
the media as a time tension and direct public pressure
(20:02):
toward their targets. Peter was on the Treatment and Data Committee.
Their goal was to accelerate treatment for HIV and to
stop the death But Peter didn't hear about act UP
until he got to work one day on Wall Street.
Tell us how you ended up getting involved with act UP.
You are one of the most prominent members of act UP,
(20:25):
But how did you get involved with actub?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Well, on my way to work in March of eighty seven,
you're still a I'm still trading bond Wall Street. I
got handed a flyer on my way to work. It
was the very first act UP demonstration. I didn't see
the demo because I was at my trading desk.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
This is the Wall Street demonstration.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeap Wall Street one we call it. And I was
I was like, oh, wow, uh. And there was a
discussion on the trading floor that was very painful to hear.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Tell me about the Well, the head trader.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Who was one of my mentors at work, he said, well,
if you ask me, they all deserve to die because
they took it up the butt. I just died inside
hearing that. But when I got home that night, I
turned on the national news and there was the demo
on the National news.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
You hadn't taken part in the no I did even.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
See it, and I had the flyer in my hand,
but they looked so determined. And the FDA Commissioner went
on TV and he had some snippets of response saying
that they were going to tweak some regulations here or there.
Already they were getting a national response. And I said,
(21:42):
this is this is hope. This is the only hope
I've seen. And I got to the very next meeting
and I never missed a meeting after that.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Wow. Well, what was the problem that you were trying
to solve with Act of.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Well, one of the primary things from day one for
Larry Kramer and many in the room was and I
think it was the right thing to make the top focus.
There was so much to work on with AIDS. There
was housing issues, et cetera. But certainly, if we didn't
figure out how to stop the relentless tide of death,
(22:18):
if we didn't work on the research side of it,
on trying to find some therapies that would buy us
some time or even a cure, getting that going in
a major way as it should have happened in eighty
one was job number one, and it's what I focused
on for sure. There was a group called the Treatment
and Data Committee that focused on it like a laser light,
(22:42):
and I joined them pretty early on.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
So ACTUP is really famous for all of these traumatic
attention grabbing demonstrations, and you all had targeted the Food
and Drug Administration, different pharmaceutical companies. One of the demonstrations
was at the Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange.
Tell me why you all chose the Stock Exchange and
(23:08):
the story behind that.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, I finally left Wall Street, went on disability, came
out publicly, became one of the spokespersons for the movement,
started doing lots of national TV and as soon as
I did that, the thing I was dying to do
was design actions and carry them out. I loved the
(23:32):
mission impossible. I just love pulling off the impossible. And
T and D would give me the ideas of the targets.
The Treatment and Data Committee and we had been following
act since its launch, which happened the same month ACT
UP was born. Turns out one drug is not enough
to fight HIV, so it would add a few months
(23:53):
if you were near the end to your life, but
then it would stop working because the virus would mutt
around it. But the company burrows welcome.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Pharmaceutical company, they slapped this obscene price. It seems it
seems low today, seems cheap, but at that time it
was the highest price of any drug in history, ten
thousand dollars a year. The country was shocked at the price.
Even some government officials were like, this is that's shocking, And.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
For contexts, this is the only viable drug market drug
right that's treating AIDS.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
So there was so much pressure that first year that
the company eventually they lowered the price. By the end
of that first year twenty percent, down to eight thousand
and then the precursor to Act UP San Francisco was like,
that's not enough, and they staged a demonstration at a
(24:51):
Burrow's welcome warehouse in January of eighty eight. That blew
my socks off. I was like, Yeah, that's what you do.
You say that's not enough, and you hit them harder.
In September of eighty nine, we decide to do a
huge demonstration on Wall Street in front of the Stock Exchange.
(25:12):
But I'm like, hmm, nobody's actually gotten onto the floor
of the Stock Exchange. So I made that my mission impossible,
and within a few weeks we figured it out how
to get in, how to bypass security.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, how did you figure that out?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
You know? The great thing about age activism is that
it was a queer movement, queer based, and that gives
you the largest spy network in the world.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
You mean to say, there's a gay person.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
We are everywhere. Wow, we are everywhere. There are tons
of us in the White House, and there are endless
numbers of us on Capitol Hill, in the military, on
the Stock Exchange. I was a bond trader, you know,
we are everywhere. And there was an Act UP member
that worked not the stock floor trading floor, but there
(26:06):
were commodities floors next to it. He worked on one
of the commodity's floors and he was my spy. He
told me about where all the entrances were. I told
him to start taking all of the entrances to work
to figure out which looked the least secure. And it
turns out there was one right below the famous arches.
(26:29):
There was an entrance right under there. That's just a
few steps down, one security guard, no metal detector, and
two steps up and you're on the floor stock Wow.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
So how like a trader? Wow?
Speaker 2 (26:43):
So he scoped it out. My boyfriend at the time
was a videographer. We acted like tourists. During lunch break,
we filmed all the traders that were smoking outside, and
then he zoomed in on their badges, and then we
had one of our artists do a mock up, and
we took that to the shops, their countless shops in
(27:08):
New York where you get fake id's made, and we
showed them this thick, hard white plastic with black lettering
that was grooved dug into the plastic, and we made
up fake names and fake numbers, and we had them
all made up and we looked like traders. And their
(27:29):
security had just was haphazard. They had photo IDs, but
they didn't have to show them to get in, and
there were no electronic turnstiles at this point anywhere in
New York that came in the nineties. Yeah, we got lucky.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So you guys go in. Their security sucked. You guys
go in and tell me how the demonstration worked.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Well. We discovered an old antique balcony and nobody was
up there. It was just this old VIP visitors gallery,
but it was over the trading floor. It was perfect
and there was nothing blocking you from walking up the steps.
And we came loaded up. We wore suits, we had
stuff strapped to our bellies, everything we needed for the action,
(28:11):
and we timed it for the opening bell. We walked
in with the smokers who were who were getting their
last cigarette before the nine point thirty bell. We followed
them so there was a rush, so the security guard
would be overwhelmed looking at everybody walking through, just passing quickly.
And we look the part and he let us on
(28:33):
and nine to twenty five we walk up the balcony.
We kneeled down so that we're below the banister and
can't be seen when we're up there. We stay down there.
We unpack everything, including a big long chain which we
chained to the banister in a loop. We pull out handcuffs.
We handcuffs ourselves to do the chain, to make it
(28:53):
a little harder to get us out of there. I
have had a huge banner strapped to my belly, a
big black banner that we unfurled that said sell Welcome, Burrows, Welcome.
And I look at my watch, which is timed perfectly
to the real time. Two of us stay on the floor.
They have hidden cameras in their pockets, and their job was,
(29:17):
once the demo was going full hog and the traders
were all looking up at us, they would pull the
cameras out of their pockets, put them up to their
chest high or so, point it towards us, and take
a couple of pictures, put it back in their pocket,
walk off the floor. And we had a runner outside
(29:37):
who already had notified associated press that we were up
to something. And at nine twenty nine and fifty five seconds,
I say go and we stand up. We unfurl the banner,
and we each have a pocket sized marine foghorn, which
says on the side of it, do not hold close
(29:59):
to your ears because in danger, you'll break an ear drum.
These things are fucking loud, and we all raised our
hands and boom. Nobody heard the opening bell was this
piercing scream. It felt like time was standing still. Everything stopped.
Every The traders like, what what the fuck is this?
(30:20):
They're like confused, and they look up. They see us,
They see the banner sell welcome. They knew about the demo.
They get the memo internally saying there's a demonstration outside tomorrow,
be careful, so they knew there was an aide demo.
And then they're putting two and two together. Those fuckers
(30:40):
got inside. They're in our sanctum. The fagots got in
and they went ballistic. They were frothing. You know, I'd
worked with these guys. I was smiling from ear to
ear because I knew we had pulled it off and
at their anger and their homophobia and their hate was
(31:01):
going to turn to our benefit. And the AP developed
the cameras for us, and the picture that I wanted
was out on the AP wires before we were even
sent to jail. That day, we were going to be
on the front of the New York Times, in the
front of the Wall Street Journal the next day, and
(31:22):
that their anger was also going to be part of
the story.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
What was the result of that demonstration?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
The company lowered the price again. Wow three days later,
Wow boom. And it never gets better than that. It
never feels better that it were. Activism rarely works that fast.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Well, you know, Peter, you're achieving all these victories with
act UP and this is one of them. But around
this time, aid's deaths also keep increasing here over year,
And I wonder if you have a story that kind
(32:03):
of epitomizes what it was like to sort of be
in between that. On the one hand, you're seeing a
lot of success with the demonstrations, but on the other hand,
the numbers that you all want to get lower keep
getting higher.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah, it was. It got hard. I mean, we obviously
we became within a year of our existence, we became
the movement to jour Every American had heard of act
UP by nineteen eighty nine. Let's say, we were on
the national news constantly after that, and we were scoring
(32:40):
lots of victories of the FDA. You know, we got
pretty much everything out of the FDA after our first
big national demonstration. Within nine months we got almost everything
out of them, and pharmaceutical companies started doing what we
asked them, and so all these victories, but the ultimate
(33:02):
goal was just getting worse. So we were winning battles
and losing the war, and it was brutal emotionally. Plus
our lives were getting filled with more and more memorials.
We were losing members. You know, every Monday night meeting
at the Center would start with an announcement of who
(33:23):
had died in a moment of silence, quick moment, and
then we'd move on. I think I think it really
hit me, particularly at Vito Russo's memorial. Vito Russo was
one of actup's greatest and definitely our best public speaker
(33:46):
by a mile, and just widely beloved, one of these
selfless activists who was just an amazing person, and we
all watched them get sick. He got KPOSI sarcoma and
he died in late nineteen ninety and had a huge
(34:10):
memorial that was at the Cooper Union Hall in the
East Village, packed to the hilt, and Larry Kramer was
one of the eulogies an infamous eulogy. He's widely hated
for it by many of the activists that I'm friends with.
He stood up and he thundered, we killed Vito Russo,
(34:39):
and he ripped us to shreds us, the activists for
not having fought hard enough. And while many in the
room were just livid at what he was saying, for
some reason, you know, Larry was like a father figure
to me, and he just hit a nerve and I
(35:03):
just broke down sobbing. It was hard, you know, the
kind of the death beginning to tear us apart, and
then we really were started attacking each other. In the
months and years after that, at.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
The peak of the AIDS crisis, act UP was clocking
serious victories. They had pressured drug companies to lower their
prices on drugs like AZT. They had also pushed the
FDA to speed up approval of potential life saving drugs. But,
as Peter says, while they were winning battles, they were
losing the war. AIDS debts were still increasing year over year.
(35:53):
In nineteen ninety two, Peter broke away from act UP
with his other committee members to form a nonprofit called TAG,
the Treatment Action Group TAG members worked with government scientists,
drug company researchers, and FDA officials to speed up the
development of new HIV therapies. The group also produced a
(36:13):
policy report that influenced the government to increase their AIDS funding.
In nineteen ninety four, President Clinton appointed Peter to the
National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development, and in ninety
five a breakthrough happened. Peter, it's the mid nineties now,
(36:34):
and you've gotten very involved with the scientific community, and
a lot of your activism has involved bringing them in.
I'm wondering what was it like when you first heard
about this new regimen that was coming out.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Act UP tears stuff apart to the bulk of T
and D splits off in January ninety two in to
TAG the Truman Action Group. We start working very very
closely with segments of the scientific establishment in partnership to
get things, to grease the wheels, and to speed things up.
(37:17):
Act UP had already done the bulk of the work
by guilting the country to do something and by loosing
the federal purse strings for EIGHTS research. We were getting
over a billion dollars a year. We had money to burn,
and we just had to spend it wisely and do
the right research, and Tag was intimately involved with the
development of this new class of antivirals called protease inhibitors.
(37:41):
And then many of us were in the room when
the results got released. We had been through so many
moments of dashtope, so many moments that it was it
was very hard to believe. But we also at that
(38:02):
point were very adept at the science and this was
rock solid stuff we were hearing. The studies were good
and the data was just astounding. So it was it
was surreal. And whenever we went to an AIDS conference overseas,
(38:22):
we would add a vacation at the end of it,
you know, to blow off steam. And I was with
David Barr and Mark Carrington and Gregan's Alvus and we
all went to Vancouver Island and chilled out for a
few days smoking weed with David on the beach on
Vancouver Island after the Vancouver AIDS conference and I'm like,
(38:44):
so we're going to live wow? Yeah, And He's like,
I guess. So it just didn't It was so hard
to wrap our head around. But within weeks we all
went on the regimen that have been on the slides,
(39:06):
and a month after that, all of us saw our
viral loads go from the tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands to undetectable, which doesn't mean it's gone. We
knew that it wasn't a cure, but undetectable meant you
(39:27):
might live in a natural lifespan, and it was just
it was hard to wrap our heads around it.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Do you think that in our lifetime we'll see a
cure for this?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I'm convinced we will during my lifetime, and I'm much
older than you, I'm sixty three. Now. There's a lot
of cure research happening now since the theory was proven
that you could with a few cases of people that
have gone through very dangerous bone marrow transplants and been cured.
(40:03):
But bone marrow transplants obviously are not a practical cure
for most of us. But there's a possibility that gene
therapy might save us. And in fact, we just had
the first clinical trial, phase one clinical trial in a
handful of people with HIV doing a gene therapy that
had the potential to cure them theoretically. Sadly, it did
(40:29):
not work out as easily as we had hoped, but
that door has been opened, and I think we'll get there,
So I think I'm gonna see it.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
What do you think that day will be like for you?
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Oh? My god, amazing. There's a scene at the end
of Longtime Companion, a beautiful tear jerker AIDS film, where
they ending in like a dreamlike sequence when Aids is
cured and it's all on fire island speech and all
the characters who have died during the film they're all
(41:05):
back and everybody's hugging each other. I think there'll be
a lot of remembering of those we lost.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
You know, this show is about history, but it's really
about different generations of queer people talking to each other.
What do you want all the young people to know
about all of those years that you fought so hard
for us to be able to live lives that are
(41:43):
so different. What do you want us to know?
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Well, these are different times. These are even harder times
than when an act up was around. It's harder to
change things today. But you can write the next chapters
and just look at the video of us and to
see that, you know, we we were your age and
(42:06):
we pulled it off and you can too, And you're
part of that history. You know. When I got into
act up by, I didn't know any of my queer
history before that, and I was oblivious, and somebody told
me I should sit down and watch a documentary called
The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. I sat down
(42:26):
and watched that had three or four gargantuan cries watching it.
It's a stunning documentary. I'm part of an amazing community,
just amazing history, and we can do that.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
What We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolvus. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or send us a message on Instagram or
TikTok at but we Loved. We are a production of
The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved
(43:14):
was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki,
Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey pat Our executive producers
are Me and Maya Howard. Original music by Steve Boone.
Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Rokel Willis. If you
loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us
(43:36):
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening.
I'll see you next week.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
The Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
And at nine twenty nine and fifty five seconds, I
say go and we stand up. We unfurl the banner,
and we each have a pocket sized marine foghorn. These
things are fucking loud, and we all raised our hands
and boom. Nobody heard the opening bell. This this piercing screen.
(00:31):
It felt like time was standing still. Everything stopped. Every
the Trader's like, what what the fuck is this? They're
like confused, and then they're putting two and two together.
Those fuckers got inside. I was smiling from ear to
ear because I knew we had pulled it off and
that their anger and their homophobia and their hatred was
(00:52):
going to turn to our benefit.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
As a gin a kid growing up religious and in
the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing
I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying
to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what
I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance,
and love. In this episode, we'll meet Peter Staley, one
(01:21):
of the most impactful AIDS activists in America. We'll learn
how his own HIV diagnosis motivated him to stage some
of the most infamous protests in American history with Act UP,
and how those protests led to the creation of HIV
drugs that would save millions of lives. From My Heart podcasts,
(01:42):
I'm Jordan and Solves and this is what We loved.
(02:11):
The other night, I found myself at a gay club
at two am with my best friend Kevin. The floors
were sticky from vodka, soda spilling, and sweat. They were
blasting the Brat album. Kevin pulled me up onto the
stage to dance in front of everyone, and after a
few songs, I looked out into the crowd. Some people
(02:32):
were making out. One shirtless guy was doing poppers, a
few people were there with their friends like me, and
some were just happy to be dancing on their own.
My eyes filled with tears looking at all of them,
and when I turned to Kevin, he was crying too.
(02:52):
We hugged each other. I think we were just overcome
by the joy. Creating this sh and meeting so many
queer elders affected by AIDS has shown me just how
privileged I am to have moments like that. My next guest,
Peter Staley, is one of the many people. I have
to think he helped pioneer the HIV drugs that literally
(03:16):
brought many queer people back to life from their deathbeds
in the nineties. His activism also ensured wide access to PREP,
the drug that prevents the spread of HIV. In the eighties,
he was the poster child of act Up, the political
organization that pushed the government and society to slow the
wave of queer death caused by AIDS. But he wasn't
(03:40):
always out and proud. In fact, he didn't come out
until he got his own HIV diagnosis, just as the
AIDS crisis was beginning to build. So why don't we
start at the very beginning, When was the moment that
(04:02):
you knew you were gay?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I'd give most credit to uh Kirk and Spock of
the original Star Trek moved right when I was hitting puberty,
around I don't know, ten or eleven, I'd moved to
the suburbs of Philadelphia. And with today's TV, it's it's
almost hard to believe, but back then, there was no
(04:26):
nudity and not a lot of opportunities. When there was
just men's bodies, you know, just shirtless, and there was
occasional shirtless scenes in Star Trek, and that was the
show I loved, and I was like, why am I
obsessed by these stirring spock especially Kirk. And then there
(04:50):
was you know, a couple famous Zulu scenes, one particular
where he becomes a swordsman, old school swordsman, shirtless, running
through the ship, threatening people with his sword, and he
was all hot and sweaty and crazy and ripped. So yeah,
all those are kind of seared into my head. That
(05:10):
was your gay awakening, that was my gay awakening. So
I knew that I was attracted to men's bodies, not
women's bodies. And even before that, I knew that that
was wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Just growing up school yard stuff, the F word was
frequently used towards any kid that was not popular, But yeah,
towards me. I was a bit of a loner and
a music geek.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
What kind of music?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I started studying classical piano as soon as I got
to Philadelphia, like when I was nine, And when I
was thirteen, my parents bought me a grand piano and
I got a much better teacher, professor at the local college,
and he became like a second father figure for me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I read that you went to Oberlin for college? Was
that for classical piano?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
It was that's how I got in.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
And were you still in the closet? I was.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I still hadn't had gay sex. So I get to Oberlin.
I'm there for over a year, still living in the closet,
still pretending to be straight. And my sophomore year, I
see this flyer put out by the Gay and Lesbian Union,
which was one of the earliest gay and lesbian student
groups in the country, founded right after Stonewall. But it
(06:31):
was all over campus, just a eight and a half
by eleven sheet that said a night of gay and
lesbian short films about us, about our lives. They had
the list of films and one of them had a
bunch of asterisks said noe X rated and it was
I forget the name of it. It was like Alan
(06:53):
and Paul or something. It was about two guys. It
was going to be the short documentary about how how
gay men have sex, and it said it was X rated,
and I was like, hmm, I've actually not seen gay sex.
I hadn't even dared to buy a magazine or anything,
(07:14):
so I thought since it was a night of film,
the theater would be dark. I could sneak in a
little late, find a seat in the back. Nobody would
know I was there. It's exactly what I did. And
then we get to Alan and Paul or whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You had to watch all the films first.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Couple other little documentaries and it was the most hysterical
thing ever. It was a bunch of queer old men
in San Francisco who decided to make the director who
decided to make this documentary for younger gays, to show
them how gays hook up and have sex. And it
(07:55):
was done like an animal documentary of how lying mate,
oh wild in the wild, how the lions would scope
each other out, you know, get to know each other first,
touch noses then and with Attenborough's deep British voice going,
(08:16):
and then they spotted each other across the field, and
there was that vocal, not British but in a deep
baritone over the entire thing. And it starts with a
cocktail party and two guys spot each other from across
the room and he describes the gay gaze, you know,
they not looking at each other's eyes and then looking
back and not looking away. And that's how you knew
(08:38):
so you learn about that. And then they go up
and they start chatting and they get friendly really fast,
and then one of them says, let's go, and then
it cuts to them going into a bedroom and meanwhile
the guys sing and then they start the foreplay and
you know, and they start kissing and unbuttoning each other's
shirts and by the time they reached the first button,
(08:58):
I have to cross my leg. I was just they
were very hot men on the film, and I was
just going crazy. I said, Okay, I am going to
do this. I've been wondering for a decade since I
was a little boy, and this is nuts. I am
(09:22):
going to do this somewhere somehow, and I don't want
anybody to find out. I still want to keep my secret.
But I am going to London in early January to
check out the London School of Economics for a possible
junior year abroad. My parents are going to let me
go there by myself for a week, and nobody knows
me in London. I'll be turning twenty while i'm there.
(09:45):
So I land in London in the morning and I'm
walking around and back then there was an active red
light district in Soho, and right on the edges of
the red Light district there was a gay porn shop.
I was like, bullseye.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Six hours after landing, I'm in my first gay establishment.
I'm alone in this square room with magazines and all
the walls, and this thirty something old guy behind the register,
the first homosexual I've ever met.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
And I look at the magazines and I work up
the nerve to talk to him, and finally I say, Hi,
I just got here from the States and wonder if
you could help me with some advice. I think I'd
like to go out dancing tonight. Do you have any suggestions?
And oh, well, it depends on what you're looking for.
(10:42):
You're looking for guys my age, you want guys your age.
And I'm like, sheepishly going my age. And he said, oh, well,
you'll be wanting to go to Heaven. I'm like, oh
my god.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
They had Heaven the Wow. Okay, yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
The largest gay dance club in Europe. When you walk in,
it's like Heaven exactly. It's at my doorstep. He said,
if you like, I was thinking of going tonight and
we could meet at a pub at like eleven and
then I could show you how to get there, and
I thought that was so nice. I was, oh, that's
so nice. And he's like, you know, he's like making
(11:25):
his moves right right right. I'm clueless, so I said sure.
So we met at the pub and he brings me.
I walk into heaven. We're at this long coat check
in my big puffy winter coat, and the bathrooms are
on the other side of the coach check and all
the stream of guys, shirtless, sweaty, beautiful young men were
(11:48):
walking by to go to the bathroom and they were
all checking me out. I was like the new meat
in town. Wow. And it literally was like walking into
actual heaven. I was like, I was like, oh my god,
this these are my I found my tribe.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I found my tribe the first night. And I had
like multiple opportunities to choose from within two hours, but
believe it or not, I decided to be a gentleman
and go home with the guy that brought me.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
He could tell it was my first time, and he
asked me how old I was and I said, well,
what time is it. He said it's one thirty years
said I just turned twenty.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Wow, so that was your first sort of gay experience.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
January ninth, nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wow. Not long after that is when the New York
Times article comes out about AIDS. To tell me about
your first time learning about that, because it sounds like
it was right as you were sort of coming of
age and coming into your own well.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I didn't see that article. I wasn't in New York.
I went back to Oberlin. I don't think I heard
about AIDS until a year later. In fact, that was
mostly because the American press ignored it. The first nightly
news story on age happened in eighty two, not eighty one,
(13:24):
when the disease broke. I mean, imagine if that happened
with something like COVID. I mean so, I think it
was a year later, and it was just like like
a general newscast. It didn't really register. Nobody was talking
about it on campus. I didn't have any conversations about it,
And it wasn't until early eighty three. Then I get
(13:46):
to New York. I had given up piano and decided
I wanted to work on Wall Street for ten years
and then run for Congress, and on the weekend start
finding the gay bars and everything closeted bond trader on
Wall Street during the day.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Were you out to friends in New York?
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Only the guys I was meeting at the bars that
summer in eighty three, at a gay bar with a
guy about my age and I'm twenty two, who was
also pretty closeted. He said, I hear, it's only really
happening to the older gays who have sucked with like
a thousand guys, which is not completely devoid of truth.
(14:30):
Kind of the early deaths were the crowd in their
thirties and forties who had been partying hard all through
the seventies, and there was just zero condom use in
eighty three. And I didn't pick up the gay newspaper,
but I didn't know any of the politics, nothing, and
stayed oblivious to all of it.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
When was the moment that it became real for you
my diagnosis tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It was two years later. I had had this wonderful,
really fabulous two week tourd affair with a guy my age,
a bartender that had kind of come to a natural finish,
and I obviously had some STD I didn't understand and
know what to do with, and so I asked one
of my gay mentors, one of the older gay men.
(15:17):
Do you know of any gay doctors in New York?
And his doctor was Dan william And unbeknownst to me,
he was one of the frontline AIDS doctors in New
York because he was a gay doctor who had a
huge practice of gay men. He was on the front lines.
And so I went in to see him and I
(15:37):
had the STD taken care of. But then I get
this cold and I go in to see him about
this cough. And by that point he had been losing
so many patients. I didn't know this, And I go
in there and he had gotten into the practice of
any of his gay patients coming in for anything, he
(16:00):
would do a standard CBC complete blood account, and he
had this trick because if it showed a low white
blood cell count, it was a tip to him that
this might be yet another patient of his that had HIV.
So it was just a cold that brought me in.
(16:23):
But the CBC had a low white blood count. And
on November fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, I got called at
my trading desk by the nurse in my doctor's office
at work and he's like, we need you back for
more blood. Work, and I said, what is it? He said,
a low white bud cell count. And I said, well,
what could that be? What might that mean? He said, ah,
(16:45):
he'll talk to you about that. And I'm really you know,
I'm on my trading desk. I'm pushy as all hell.
I'm an aggressive bond trader, right and I'm like, na,
you can tell me what might mean. I really pushed him,
and he said, well, we do see that a lot
in our patients with HIV. And in a flash, all
(17:10):
the denial and ignorance and youth and innocence just emptied
out of me. And I knew It's like duh, I
was this young gay guy fucking in New York, which
is ground zero for this AIDS crisis. I've been hearing
(17:31):
about and thinking I'm immune, so you.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Go in and get the additional tests. What was the
moment of diagnosis?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Like, well, I knew right then it was that. And
the country was in a total panic about AIDS. There
was lots of AIDS all over the news stand but
in the worst scariest possible way, America was in this
a Bola like panic. Parents were pulling kids out of
school if there were rumors about other kids. Shit like that.
(18:02):
A family with hemophiliac boys was burnt out of their
home in Florida. All of this was happening when I
get this news, and I was actually I had a
guy I had met in Amsterdam was staying with me
and I was taking him to Disney World that weekend. Wow,
(18:23):
he even knew less than I did. And we had
to La Guardia. I scoured the news stand for anything
about HB and there was one science magazine that had
a cover story on everything that was known about the
disease from a scientific standpoint, written in layman terms, and
I snatched that up and read it on the plane
(18:44):
about three times. And when we got to our hotel
outside Disney World, I broke down and just started sobbing.
And the guy who was dating was also named Peter,
and he was so scared for me. He didn't know
what was going on or how to come for me.
And I said, it's part of me, it's genetically integrated.
(19:05):
I'm fucked.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Peter had just learned that he was living with HIV.
By the end of that year, nineteen eighty five, there
would be nearly sixteen thousand Americans dead In nineteen eighty seven,
a man named Larry Kramer founded a group called act UP.
It stood for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Made
up of mostly people in their twenties, their goal was
(19:41):
to bulldoze any barrier in the way of ending the
AIDS crisis, insurance companies, big pharma, and the government itself.
Act UP members became experts on infectious disease and masters
of drug policy. They staged dramatic protests that would catch
the media as a time tension and direct public pressure
(20:02):
toward their targets. Peter was on the Treatment and Data Committee.
Their goal was to accelerate treatment for HIV and to
stop the death But Peter didn't hear about act UP
until he got to work one day on Wall Street.
Tell us how you ended up getting involved with act UP.
You are one of the most prominent members of act UP,
(20:25):
But how did you get involved with actub?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Well, on my way to work in March of eighty seven,
you're still a I'm still trading bond Wall Street. I
got handed a flyer on my way to work. It
was the very first act UP demonstration. I didn't see
the demo because I was at my trading desk.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
This is the Wall Street demonstration.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeap Wall Street one we call it. And I was
I was like, oh, wow, uh. And there was a
discussion on the trading floor that was very painful to hear.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Tell me about the Well, the head trader.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Who was one of my mentors at work, he said, well,
if you ask me, they all deserve to die because
they took it up the butt. I just died inside
hearing that. But when I got home that night, I
turned on the national news and there was the demo
on the National news.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
You hadn't taken part in the no I did even.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
See it, and I had the flyer in my hand,
but they looked so determined. And the FDA Commissioner went
on TV and he had some snippets of response saying
that they were going to tweak some regulations here or there.
Already they were getting a national response. And I said,
(21:42):
this is this is hope. This is the only hope
I've seen. And I got to the very next meeting
and I never missed a meeting after that.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Wow. Well, what was the problem that you were trying
to solve with Act of.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Well, one of the primary things from day one for
Larry Kramer and many in the room was and I
think it was the right thing to make the top focus.
There was so much to work on with AIDS. There
was housing issues, et cetera. But certainly, if we didn't
figure out how to stop the relentless tide of death,
(22:18):
if we didn't work on the research side of it,
on trying to find some therapies that would buy us
some time or even a cure, getting that going in
a major way as it should have happened in eighty
one was job number one, and it's what I focused
on for sure. There was a group called the Treatment
and Data Committee that focused on it like a laser light,
(22:42):
and I joined them pretty early on.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
So ACTUP is really famous for all of these traumatic
attention grabbing demonstrations, and you all had targeted the Food
and Drug Administration, different pharmaceutical companies. One of the demonstrations
was at the Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange.
Tell me why you all chose the Stock Exchange and
(23:08):
the story behind that.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, I finally left Wall Street, went on disability, came
out publicly, became one of the spokespersons for the movement,
started doing lots of national TV and as soon as
I did that, the thing I was dying to do
was design actions and carry them out. I loved the
(23:32):
mission impossible. I just love pulling off the impossible. And
T and D would give me the ideas of the targets.
The Treatment and Data Committee and we had been following
act since its launch, which happened the same month ACT
UP was born. Turns out one drug is not enough
to fight HIV, so it would add a few months
(23:53):
if you were near the end to your life, but
then it would stop working because the virus would mutt
around it. But the company burrows welcome.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Pharmaceutical company, they slapped this obscene price. It seems it
seems low today, seems cheap, but at that time it
was the highest price of any drug in history, ten
thousand dollars a year. The country was shocked at the price.
Even some government officials were like, this is that's shocking, And.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
For contexts, this is the only viable drug market drug
right that's treating AIDS.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
So there was so much pressure that first year that
the company eventually they lowered the price. By the end
of that first year twenty percent, down to eight thousand
and then the precursor to Act UP San Francisco was like,
that's not enough, and they staged a demonstration at a
(24:51):
Burrow's welcome warehouse in January of eighty eight. That blew
my socks off. I was like, Yeah, that's what you do.
You say that's not enough, and you hit them harder.
In September of eighty nine, we decide to do a
huge demonstration on Wall Street in front of the Stock Exchange.
(25:12):
But I'm like, hmm, nobody's actually gotten onto the floor
of the Stock Exchange. So I made that my mission impossible,
and within a few weeks we figured it out how
to get in, how to bypass security.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, how did you figure that out?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
You know? The great thing about age activism is that
it was a queer movement, queer based, and that gives
you the largest spy network in the world.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
You mean to say, there's a gay person.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
We are everywhere. Wow, we are everywhere. There are tons
of us in the White House, and there are endless
numbers of us on Capitol Hill, in the military, on
the Stock Exchange. I was a bond trader, you know,
we are everywhere. And there was an Act UP member
that worked not the stock floor trading floor, but there
(26:06):
were commodities floors next to it. He worked on one
of the commodity's floors and he was my spy. He
told me about where all the entrances were. I told
him to start taking all of the entrances to work
to figure out which looked the least secure. And it
turns out there was one right below the famous arches.
(26:29):
There was an entrance right under there. That's just a
few steps down, one security guard, no metal detector, and
two steps up and you're on the floor stock Wow.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
So how like a trader? Wow?
Speaker 2 (26:43):
So he scoped it out. My boyfriend at the time
was a videographer. We acted like tourists. During lunch break,
we filmed all the traders that were smoking outside, and
then he zoomed in on their badges, and then we
had one of our artists do a mock up, and
we took that to the shops, their countless shops in
(27:08):
New York where you get fake id's made, and we
showed them this thick, hard white plastic with black lettering
that was grooved dug into the plastic, and we made
up fake names and fake numbers, and we had them
all made up and we looked like traders. And their
(27:29):
security had just was haphazard. They had photo IDs, but
they didn't have to show them to get in, and
there were no electronic turnstiles at this point anywhere in
New York that came in the nineties. Yeah, we got lucky.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So you guys go in. Their security sucked. You guys
go in and tell me how the demonstration worked.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Well. We discovered an old antique balcony and nobody was
up there. It was just this old VIP visitors gallery,
but it was over the trading floor. It was perfect
and there was nothing blocking you from walking up the steps.
And we came loaded up. We wore suits, we had
stuff strapped to our bellies, everything we needed for the action,
(28:11):
and we timed it for the opening bell. We walked
in with the smokers who were who were getting their
last cigarette before the nine point thirty bell. We followed
them so there was a rush, so the security guard
would be overwhelmed looking at everybody walking through, just passing quickly.
And we look the part and he let us on
(28:33):
and nine to twenty five we walk up the balcony.
We kneeled down so that we're below the banister and
can't be seen when we're up there. We stay down there.
We unpack everything, including a big long chain which we
chained to the banister in a loop. We pull out handcuffs.
We handcuffs ourselves to do the chain, to make it
(28:53):
a little harder to get us out of there. I
have had a huge banner strapped to my belly, a
big black banner that we unfurled that said sell Welcome, Burrows, Welcome.
And I look at my watch, which is timed perfectly
to the real time. Two of us stay on the floor.
They have hidden cameras in their pockets, and their job was,
(29:17):
once the demo was going full hog and the traders
were all looking up at us, they would pull the
cameras out of their pockets, put them up to their
chest high or so, point it towards us, and take
a couple of pictures, put it back in their pocket,
walk off the floor. And we had a runner outside
(29:37):
who already had notified associated press that we were up
to something. And at nine twenty nine and fifty five seconds,
I say go and we stand up. We unfurl the banner,
and we each have a pocket sized marine foghorn, which
says on the side of it, do not hold close
(29:59):
to your ears because in danger, you'll break an ear drum.
These things are fucking loud, and we all raised our
hands and boom. Nobody heard the opening bell was this
piercing scream. It felt like time was standing still. Everything stopped.
Every The traders like, what what the fuck is this?
(30:20):
They're like confused, and they look up. They see us,
They see the banner sell welcome. They knew about the demo.
They get the memo internally saying there's a demonstration outside tomorrow,
be careful, so they knew there was an aide demo.
And then they're putting two and two together. Those fuckers
(30:40):
got inside. They're in our sanctum. The fagots got in
and they went ballistic. They were frothing. You know, I'd
worked with these guys. I was smiling from ear to
ear because I knew we had pulled it off and
at their anger and their homophobia and their hate was
(31:01):
going to turn to our benefit. And the AP developed
the cameras for us, and the picture that I wanted
was out on the AP wires before we were even
sent to jail. That day, we were going to be
on the front of the New York Times, in the
front of the Wall Street Journal the next day, and
(31:22):
that their anger was also going to be part of
the story.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
What was the result of that demonstration?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
The company lowered the price again. Wow three days later,
Wow boom. And it never gets better than that. It
never feels better that it were. Activism rarely works that fast.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Well, you know, Peter, you're achieving all these victories with
act UP and this is one of them. But around
this time, aid's deaths also keep increasing here over year,
And I wonder if you have a story that kind
(32:03):
of epitomizes what it was like to sort of be
in between that. On the one hand, you're seeing a
lot of success with the demonstrations, but on the other hand,
the numbers that you all want to get lower keep
getting higher.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah, it was. It got hard. I mean, we obviously
we became within a year of our existence, we became
the movement to jour Every American had heard of act
UP by nineteen eighty nine. Let's say, we were on
the national news constantly after that, and we were scoring
(32:40):
lots of victories of the FDA. You know, we got
pretty much everything out of the FDA after our first
big national demonstration. Within nine months we got almost everything
out of them, and pharmaceutical companies started doing what we
asked them, and so all these victories, but the ultimate
(33:02):
goal was just getting worse. So we were winning battles
and losing the war, and it was brutal emotionally. Plus
our lives were getting filled with more and more memorials.
We were losing members. You know, every Monday night meeting
at the Center would start with an announcement of who
(33:23):
had died in a moment of silence, quick moment, and
then we'd move on. I think I think it really
hit me, particularly at Vito Russo's memorial. Vito Russo was
one of actup's greatest and definitely our best public speaker
(33:46):
by a mile, and just widely beloved, one of these
selfless activists who was just an amazing person, and we
all watched them get sick. He got KPOSI sarcoma and
he died in late nineteen ninety and had a huge
(34:10):
memorial that was at the Cooper Union Hall in the
East Village, packed to the hilt, and Larry Kramer was
one of the eulogies an infamous eulogy. He's widely hated
for it by many of the activists that I'm friends with.
He stood up and he thundered, we killed Vito Russo,
(34:39):
and he ripped us to shreds us, the activists for
not having fought hard enough. And while many in the
room were just livid at what he was saying, for
some reason, you know, Larry was like a father figure
to me, and he just hit a nerve and I
(35:03):
just broke down sobbing. It was hard, you know, the
kind of the death beginning to tear us apart, and
then we really were started attacking each other. In the
months and years after that, at.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
The peak of the AIDS crisis, act UP was clocking
serious victories. They had pressured drug companies to lower their
prices on drugs like AZT. They had also pushed the
FDA to speed up approval of potential life saving drugs. But,
as Peter says, while they were winning battles, they were
losing the war. AIDS debts were still increasing year over year.
(35:53):
In nineteen ninety two, Peter broke away from act UP
with his other committee members to form a nonprofit called TAG,
the Treatment Action Group TAG members worked with government scientists,
drug company researchers, and FDA officials to speed up the
development of new HIV therapies. The group also produced a
(36:13):
policy report that influenced the government to increase their AIDS funding.
In nineteen ninety four, President Clinton appointed Peter to the
National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development, and in ninety
five a breakthrough happened. Peter, it's the mid nineties now,
(36:34):
and you've gotten very involved with the scientific community, and
a lot of your activism has involved bringing them in.
I'm wondering what was it like when you first heard
about this new regimen that was coming out.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Act UP tears stuff apart to the bulk of T
and D splits off in January ninety two in to
TAG the Truman Action Group. We start working very very
closely with segments of the scientific establishment in partnership to
get things, to grease the wheels, and to speed things up.
(37:17):
Act UP had already done the bulk of the work
by guilting the country to do something and by loosing
the federal purse strings for EIGHTS research. We were getting
over a billion dollars a year. We had money to burn,
and we just had to spend it wisely and do
the right research, and Tag was intimately involved with the
development of this new class of antivirals called protease inhibitors.
(37:41):
And then many of us were in the room when
the results got released. We had been through so many
moments of dashtope, so many moments that it was it
was very hard to believe. But we also at that
(38:02):
point were very adept at the science and this was
rock solid stuff we were hearing. The studies were good
and the data was just astounding. So it was it
was surreal. And whenever we went to an AIDS conference overseas,
(38:22):
we would add a vacation at the end of it,
you know, to blow off steam. And I was with
David Barr and Mark Carrington and Gregan's Alvus and we
all went to Vancouver Island and chilled out for a
few days smoking weed with David on the beach on
Vancouver Island after the Vancouver AIDS conference and I'm like,
(38:44):
so we're going to live wow? Yeah, And He's like,
I guess. So it just didn't It was so hard
to wrap our head around. But within weeks we all
went on the regimen that have been on the slides,
(39:06):
and a month after that, all of us saw our
viral loads go from the tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands to undetectable, which doesn't mean it's gone. We
knew that it wasn't a cure, but undetectable meant you
(39:27):
might live in a natural lifespan, and it was just
it was hard to wrap our heads around it.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Do you think that in our lifetime we'll see a
cure for this?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I'm convinced we will during my lifetime, and I'm much
older than you, I'm sixty three. Now. There's a lot
of cure research happening now since the theory was proven
that you could with a few cases of people that
have gone through very dangerous bone marrow transplants and been cured.
(40:03):
But bone marrow transplants obviously are not a practical cure
for most of us. But there's a possibility that gene
therapy might save us. And in fact, we just had
the first clinical trial, phase one clinical trial in a
handful of people with HIV doing a gene therapy that
had the potential to cure them theoretically. Sadly, it did
(40:29):
not work out as easily as we had hoped, but
that door has been opened, and I think we'll get there,
So I think I'm gonna see it.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
What do you think that day will be like for you?
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Oh? My god, amazing. There's a scene at the end
of Longtime Companion, a beautiful tear jerker AIDS film, where
they ending in like a dreamlike sequence when Aids is
cured and it's all on fire island speech and all
the characters who have died during the film they're all
(41:05):
back and everybody's hugging each other. I think there'll be
a lot of remembering of those we lost.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
You know, this show is about history, but it's really
about different generations of queer people talking to each other.
What do you want all the young people to know
about all of those years that you fought so hard
for us to be able to live lives that are
(41:43):
so different. What do you want us to know?
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Well, these are different times. These are even harder times
than when an act up was around. It's harder to
change things today. But you can write the next chapters
and just look at the video of us and to
see that, you know, we we were your age and
(42:06):
we pulled it off and you can too, And you're
part of that history. You know. When I got into
act up by, I didn't know any of my queer
history before that, and I was oblivious, and somebody told
me I should sit down and watch a documentary called
The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. I sat down
(42:26):
and watched that had three or four gargantuan cries watching it.
It's a stunning documentary. I'm part of an amazing community,
just amazing history, and we can do that.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
What We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolvus. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or send us a message on Instagram or
TikTok at but we Loved. We are a production of
The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved
(43:14):
was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki,
Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey pat Our executive producers
are Me and Maya Howard. Original music by Steve Boone.
Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Rokel Willis. If you
loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us
(43:36):
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening.
I'll see you next week.
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