Part One: ACT UP: How Angry, Dying Queers Invented Modern Activism

Margaret talks with Francesca Fiorentini about the AIDS activists who changed the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people
fighting bad things, and one of the people who fights
bad things is my guest, Francesco Quarantine Post of Situation Room.
How are you.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
I'm okay.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
I feel like I have a cape on now, I'm
I'm all right. I am yeah, I'm sort of girding
my loins for the future bad things we have to fight,
but excited to talk about the bad things we fought
in the past with you, because maybe that's what we
need to, like, you know, just fuel this anti fascist

(00:42):
movement that we all, whether we know it or not,
are part of.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, we're kind of caught in it regardless.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Of our desires. Sorry, you're in it now.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
No, it's okay, and actually that's a really Oh wait
before I get into using your natural transition into our topic. Instead,
I'm gonna talk about our producer, Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi,
and our audio engineer, danel Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Danel Hey, danel.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Everyone's to say high danel Hi danel Our theme music
is written for us by Unwoman. So this week's topic
isn't happy, but it is pretty victorious compared to most
of what we talk about, and I also think it
has a lot of lessons for where we are at

(01:31):
right now in a very specific way that I will
try not to get too heavy handed with throughout the script,
because this week we're going to talk about one of
the most important activist groups in US history, one of
the most impactful, memorable, and successful movements I've ever studied.
And even when I heard about them, their successes were

(01:53):
like sort of downplayed. They were like, oh, they were great,
little scrappy little group. But the more I read about them,
the more I realized that they kind of invented everything
about modern activism and ran across a lot of our
problems and found solutions for a lot of them. Because
this week we are talking about a little group called

(02:14):
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as act UP.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
I knew, I knew, I knew it, and I knew it.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
I was like, wait, wait, wait, this is so fucking
act UP, which is great because maybe I am like
some listeners because I know in a little bit, but
I don't know a lot.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
And I'm very.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Excited because there's just a million books I should have
read and I haven't done that, and I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
There are a million books about this topic and some
of them disagree with each other, and I haven't read
them all. And I was actually thinking about it. I
was like, it would be really easy to do a
twelve part or whatever on act UP, and I'm only
doing a two parter, and so I'm kind of I'm
going to tell the big and I'm going to tell
some of the details, but there's so many more details

(03:03):
that anyone listening to this should feel free to go
and learn about, because they're like big details. They're like
entire movements and entire cities that did entire successful campaigns.
When we get to understand act UP, we get to
understand something that runs counter to the narrative that people
tell about the AIDS crisis. I had always been presented
with his image of the gay male community, which is

(03:25):
the community most directly affected by the crisis in the US,
or one of the most directly affected communities. It was
not composed of helpless victims. And that's I'd always been
presented the sort of like angelic, dying old white man
as the like you know, icon of Tom Cruise.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
I mean Tom cruise, Tom Cruise in Philadelphia. He wishes
Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
I haven't seen that.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
What that actually so good?

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Usually I do know something that's old enough to be this.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah that re friends h huh yeah. Tom Crass couldn't have
played that role. He couldn't have. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
I have this weird soft spot for that scientologist. But
Tom Hanks at least his acting. Also the fact that
he's probably trapped. But yeah, the uh yeah, the idea
of this like middle class even like the Angels in
America characters kind of like middle class gay white gay

(04:26):
guy who is like, yeah, is the perfect victim for
this disease.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Right, Which is funny because I still like progress from
what came before that, which we'll talk about, which was
like you know, ah, these horrible degenerates got what was
coming to them, right, Yeah, But they were not helpless victims.
The veterans have act up talk about it like it
was a war, and it it was. They fought and

(04:54):
an awful lot of them died, Just a ton of
them died. But the writer Liz Heillyman put it simply,
in the US AIDS initially struck gay men a relatively
cohesive community that had considerable experience in political organizing. Act
UP wasn't like some outside force that came in and

(05:15):
saved people. And it wasn't like one gay man suddenly
had an idea and birthed a whole new form of activism.
Act UP. And this is one of the things that's
so interesting to me about it. It is directly part
of a lineage of decades of struggle for gay liberation
in the US. It brought together experienced organizers from all
sorts of movements and they put together a messy, imperfect, critiquable,

(05:38):
astounding movement that fundamentally shifted the conversation about HIV and AIDS.
It is a movement that saved countless lives, like easily
in the tens of millions. I don't know if I've
covered a movement that I can so directly say like
these five thousand people saved twenty million lives. But that

(05:59):
is a thing you can say say about act UP.
And they let other people's lives end in dignified ways.
They also land the groundwork for activism for decades to come.
And to be honest, I think we're at risk of
losing that connection in lineage, and that's part of why
I'm so excited to talk about them today. I'm kind

(06:20):
of curious. The first time I heard about Act Up.
It was a late nineties I was sixteen, and I
started taking art lessons from this like goth artist and
musician who became my mentor, This guy named Stephen Archer.
He's not related to this story, but he's the first
person I saw an act Up thing on and I
never shout him out, and he's a cool guy. He
had been part of the DC punk and goth scene

(06:41):
in the eighties and so on his leather jacket he
had a black pin with a pink triangle and words
in white that said Silence equals death, and this like
blew my suburban goth kid mind. I had no idea
what I was looking at, you know, and he explained
it to me, and it's such an iconic image and

(07:02):
a statement that it it stuck with me. Act Up
was really good at branding. That's one thing you can
say about them. Yeah, how did you first hear about
Act Up? When? Was how did that so?

Speaker 3 (07:18):
When I was involved in the like anti Iraq war
movements and the global justice movements in New York City.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
There were some like old heads.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
And they weren't old like Vietnam War old heads, but
like the gen X old heads, right, so they're just
like a one generation younger again, like those who are
really active. And I am forgetting his name, but like
when you said Steve, I was like, maybe mine's a
Steve too. But yeah, this guy who was involved, I

(07:47):
think in United for Peace Injustice, who also wore the
like act up pins and you just see it around
New York as like this was once a battleground in
this fight and occasionally would be referenced as Yes, just
something that was like those who were organizing against their

(08:08):
very like for their very own lives because their friends
were dying every single week. And it's like just that
the enormity and the the like urgency of that moment.
I don't know if it can be restated. I mean,
I think we're seeing a version of that now with
the Palasaitian diaspora, people who are fighting against the genocide there.

(08:30):
But it is it is pretty amazing that there was
an entire people that you know, the American public was
trying to sweep under the rug.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, and just really rose to the occasion, you know,
this like monumental horror that they were facing and like
rose up to fight it, and.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
The idea that it would was falling on like like
silent voices, you know, and and being men being met
with nothing just like either yes, you deserve it or
I think that actually is was from what I've read
and heard, the scariest part of the AIDS epidemic, in
the HIV epidemic was like pretending like it wasn't happening,

(09:12):
and that I think is what a lot of the
activists were fighting against.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, we're gonna talk about some of the specific
ways they did it. First, I want to draw historical
lineage through lines that I was surprised to find, but
I was really excited to find because I really like
remembering that we are part of a direct lineage where
you can say, oh, this person knew this person, knew
this person knew this person going back a long ass time.

(09:40):
I'm going to draw this back to the Spanish Civil War,
because why not after the fall of the Spanish Republic
to Franco's fascism, anarchists and other like republic people minded
people fled en mass and a whole bunch of these
anarchists ended up in New York City, where they hung
out with a bunch of theater kids and poets and
theory nerds and eventually hippies and eventually punks.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Fuck yeah, I love this.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
I didn't know there was a lineage between people that
went to go fight in the Spanish Civil War and
the punk scene in New.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
York, so that one's easy to draw. Oddly, interestingly, we
talked about it. There's this group called Up Against the
Wall Motherfuckers that was a late sixties movement in the
Lower East Side that was like white and Puerto Rican.
They were hippies, but they wore all black and motorcycle
jackets and were a gang. They were punks, and then
they liked pretty directly like when the punks came around.

(10:29):
I think there was like a lot of crossover and
they were like fighting cops and throwing down with the
black panthers and made it the whole thing about them.
But the guy who started at ben Mooream, he was
in these like book clubs with veterans from the Spanish
Civil War, And interestingly enough, these people who fled the

(10:50):
Spanish Civil War in terms of how they've influenced later activism.
The export that really spread the furthest wasn't anarchism the
political theory. It was a bunch of the organizing models
that they had developed in that battleground. For the past
few generations, especially the past few decades, mass movements across
the world have tended towards horizontal organizing and the promotion

(11:15):
of direct action as the way to get things done.
And two ideas proliferated. One was the model of the
Affinity Group and the other was the model of the
spokes Council.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
And I like, oh, this is bringing me back, Margaret. Yes,
spokes counsel of the Affinity Group. It's two thousand and four.
Were organizing against the Republican National Convention. There's undercovers everywhere.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
It's fucking great.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah. I walked out of a mass arrest and none
of my friends wanted to get out of it. Like
I had a plan on how to get out of it.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
You've told me this story.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. I have like one story
about the RNC and I tell it all the time
because you got caught, right, you got to rest at that.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Yeah, but I can't remember if we've decided that we
were arrested in the same spot. Did you hop over
and run through a graveyard? No defense.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
I when the police were closing people near Washington Square Park,
they were like, they trapped in it. I think it
was the second day massarrests. On the first day, they
trapped everyone at the end of the block, and then
they started drawing the police line and squeezing people together.
And so I just walked past the police line while
they were drawing it and then stood on the sidewalk

(12:23):
and watched because I couldn't leave because there's still too
many police. Because like, one of my favorite lessons I've
ever learned is that while cops are in the process
of drawing a police line, their command is. Cops are
very simple machines. They can only follow one order at
a time, and the order is draw the police line,
not arrest people. So you can move past it while
they're drawing it. I've used I've gotten on mass arrests

(12:46):
three times using this trick.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Nope, but that would break the affinity group back to
what you were trying to explain.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Right, well done behind Yeah, well, I was like, hey,
let's get out of here, and they were like no,
we're having too much fun. They're like, you know, the
bands playing, and I'm like, I'm getting out of here,
and you were just like bye.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
And then I had survivor's guilt, and then I didn't
make a bunch of money in a lawsuit, but I
eventually lost from a different.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
As I was thirteen thousand dollars as yeah, I bought
a new laptop with that.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Money and other things.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Obviously a lot of people like were like, I live
in Pittsburgh, I'm buying a whole ass house with my thirties.
Technically I know God anyway, so I didn't get to
buy a house. So infinity groups and spokes councils are
the building blocks of a lot of social movements. Or
affinity groups are the building blocks, and spokes councils are
the mortar that holds them together. An affinity group is

(13:45):
basically a group of like five to fifteen people that
shares affinity and common goals and strategies. And I would
say three to nine. Actually five to fifteen is what
people often say. My experience, I often see like three
to nine. But whatever. Spokes councils are decision making and
information sharing bodies where they someone from a group, such

(14:08):
as an affinity group, comes and speaks for that group,
and they are usually fairly directly speaking for that group
and can They're not there to express their own opinion,
They're there to represent the group.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
It's a form of direct, directly democratic decision exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah. And these models infuse an awful lot of the
social movements of the era, I think, especially starting in
the seventies and eighties. If I were to map my
understanding the genealogy of social movements in the US, You've
got these sort of like proper movements fighting for civil
rights through approve channels in the fifties, which then moved
into nonviolent action in the early sixties, moving into more

(14:45):
big militant organizations in late sixties, which then, in response
to repression, moved underground and separated from mass organizing and
moved to clandestinity and like you know, blowing things up
and robbing people and stuff. In the early seventies, how
the weather underground and the Black Liberation Army grew out
of the Students for Democratic Society and the Black Panthers.

(15:05):
On some level, these are really broad strokes I'm drawling with,
And this all does come together because these things are
more related than people are like they're not. I mean,
every movement is separate, but they're also all tied together.
When these clandestine movements were hunted down, what was left
was really interesting and radical community organizing. All of these

(15:29):
hardened revolutionaries doing social work, setting up schools, building infrastructure,
doing the like less confrontational stuff that was still vital
to either social progress or revolution. And then slowly movements
grew back up again, and it was the movements growing
up at this point, the peace movement, the anti nuke movement,

(15:51):
the feminist movement, gay rights, food not bombs, civil rights,
social justice stuff, abortion, clinic defense, Earth First, and act
UP that took on this decentralized leaderless or leader full
depending on who you ask, character that has since defined
protests for so long. An act Up, I'm going to argue,

(16:12):
was kind of an early culmination of this model. It
brought together the veterans of all of these different movements
into one place and focused them on one major goal,
how to help stop the AIDS crisis when it comes
out of all kinds of movements, its most immediate legacy

(16:34):
was the gay liberation movement, which we've talked about in
the show before they get a whole week of it.
A while back, queer folks were decently well organized in
militant and they had been for about a decade at
this point when the AIDS crisis hits. Then in nineteen
eighty one, on June fifth, the CDC announced a strange phenomenon.
A bunch of gay men in LA were getting types

(16:55):
of pneumonia that are seen in immunocompromise people. It's sort
of cropping up among gay men in cities around the country.
Soon enough, by nineteen eighty two, they suspected it was
some kind of sexually transmitted infection that was behind this.
And the first name they gave it was grid gay
related immune deficiency or even more informally and more evilly,

(17:21):
gay cancer.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
No.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Yeah, there were three other groups of pay related.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Like how unscientific do you have to know? What calls?
Ye it's gay related?

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of gays. What
can you who's to.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
Know there's a relation here? I'm not going to look
into it. Who's called gay related?

Speaker 2 (17:42):
Yeah? There was three other groups of people that were
also immediately getting it. Hemophiliacs who needed like blood transfusions
and stuff ivy drug users, and Haitian immigrants. By August
nineteen eighty two, the CDC named it Acquired Immune deficiency syndrome,
or AIDS. And at the start, there were two theories

(18:05):
about what caused AIDS. And what's interesting is that, like
this gets like way political about some people were like
wildly mad at each other about what causes AIDS. Sure,
and I'm not going to get into the ins and
outs of the political parts of it because it is
messy and people that you don't expect would have opinions

(18:25):
that turned out to be incorrect. One of these two theories,
which will call the correct theory but they called the
new agent theory, was that there was a specific pathogen
causing AIDS. The second theory, which we'll call the nope
they were wrong, was the multi factoral theory, which was
basically the idea that there's like something that in semen

(18:48):
where if you get too much of it, it suppresses
your immune system. And this isn't as like wacky bunk
science as it immediately sounds. There was like people who
actually were affected by it and like had some reasons
to think about some stuff like we're developing this theory
and it was incorrect.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
The too much gum theory, yeah, the too.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Much cum theory yeah, which is Yeah. They did a
lot of like work around, trying to work backwards to
be like, Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Sometimes you can be too gay. We're trying to think of.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
A way of less come involved.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah. So there's this new bad thing going around killing people,
and right away people are organizing. By May nineteen eighty three,
two men with aids and a doctor friend and then
one of their partners as an editor, get together and
publish one of the first safer sex guides in history.

(19:49):
Almost all like I used to when I had a
different publishing life. I like once read an awful lot
of old Victorian sex manuals. Yeah, yeah, and old Victorian
sex manuals are like they're all like sex is bad.
If you're going to do it, feel bad about yourself,

(20:11):
and then do the following.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Right and enjoy it whatever you do.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, And there were to be clear, there were people
like smuggling in actual safe sex practices and often going
to jail for it, and it ties into the history
of birth control and all of this stuff. But and
like the wild idea that the female orgasm is real.
Was this like whole big thing people were fighting for
in the early twentieth century anyway, in terms of like

(20:39):
modern sex positive safer sex guides, this is like one
of the first ones, if not the first one. It's
called how to Have Sex in an Epidemic one Approach,
And it was the first advocacy for condoms for gay
male sex because before before that, people did not routinely

(21:02):
use condoms because there was not a risk of pregnancy, right,
So that was one thing, and then they actually were
into the multi factoral theory. They were into the too
much com theory. But like it's not because they were
like fools.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
But this is what's interesting about this moment is like
it kind of reminds you of any epidemic, I mean,
in COVID nineteen right any pandemic where you're like people
are dying literally right now, and you're trying to figure
out whether it's a Chinese virus leaked by a lab
or whether it you know, came from someone eating a

(21:37):
pangolin who had a cold. You know, like it's like,
who the fuck cares, Let's save some lives right now.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
But the but of course it is so much easier
to deflect.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
And you know, I don't know, make some money off
anti China rhetoric by by nasaying.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
By basically just focusing on the forest.

Speaker 3 (21:59):
And missing you know, focusing on the trees and missing
the forest of the fact that people are dying. Yeah, absolutely,
and politicizing it. So it's just like and so that's
just crazy because in a year they had lost the
like I mean, I know that there was still the stigma,
but you stopped calling it grid and started calling it
AIDS in just a year.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
And that's just shows you.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
I assume how fast it was spreading, how broad it was,
and how many people were dying.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, which is an awkward place to transition to ads.
And yet we are left doing that because here's dads
and we're back.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
And people, like I said right away, they're doing things
about it. They're saying, like, how do we change our
culture to keep ourselves safe? How do we publish these
books talking about it. Another person who started doing something
about it was this guy named Larry Kramer. He had
never been an activist before he was in the movie business,
and he was sort of infamous in both the straight

(23:06):
world and the gay world. For a novel he wrote
called Fagots that talked about a life of emotionless sex
and drugs and so like the straight people are like, ah,
gay stuff, and then a lot of the gay community
was like, stop spreading our dirty laundry around the world.
He considers himself like a just a bruly, honest kind

(23:29):
of guy. I read a long form interview with him
from the act Up. I didn't write down the name
of this, it's in my sources somewhere, but the act
Up audio. There's an oral history project that some people
did in the early aughts. Anyway, His family was Russian
and Jewish and working class from Maryland. In August nineteen
eighty one, he invited like eighty gay men over to

(23:52):
his apartment so they could talk about what the fuck
they were gonna do. And so within a few months
they started a group called the Gay Men's Health Crisis,
which is the longest running aid service organization and probably
in the world, and it is still around today. Their
first meeting once they were incorporated was at the Church
of Saint Joseph and Greenwich Village, which is a Catholic church.

(24:12):
It's going to come up. A lot of the activism
is going to be against the Catholic Church, but also
a lot of Catholics are going to be involved in
the fighting.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
But also they have like free meeting space, so we're
going to take that meeting space.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, yeah, totally. And most of the people that I
was reading about in act up were either Catholic or Jewish,
whether by heritage or actual faith, with some like Protestants
here and there. Yeah. And so the Gay Men's Health
Crisis was a fairly traditionally organized group. They were a nonprofit.
They had a president, they had a crisis hotline, and

(24:43):
they offered legal aid, access to social workers. They raised
money through like normal fundraiser channels and things like that,
which is good and important, but they were like very
don't rock the boat. They were very don't antagonize people.
You catch more flies with honey or whatever.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
Right, we're going to solve this. This community can solve
this kind of not on our own, but like, yeah,
a little of a bit of a charity case situation
will help, Which is like I can't imagine how many cases,
how many people needed help.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
I mean, it's just like what like that seems just
like a whack a mole.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, it's very quickly, within tens of thousands, and with
New York City alone per year. And Larry Kramer was like,
he was not a I want to be polite guy.
And soon enough he's going to start doing a bunch
of stuff that eventually will have him leaving the group
over difference of opinions about strategy and about whether or
not to be angry. He told Sarah Schulman in an
interview in two thousand and three. We tried to be

(25:43):
very nice to the New York Times and to Ed Coke,
the mayor at the time, and you learn very fast
that you're a faggot. And it doesn't make any difference
that you went to Yale and were assistant to presidents
of a couple of film companies, and that you had money.
And the GMHC didn't like when people raise their voice
is or criticize the mayor. So Larry Kramer's like, whatever

(26:05):
comes next is not going to be rigidly structured and
it's not going to be polite. He wrote an essay
called and twelve and Counting in nineteen eighty three in
a gay magazine that was a screed about lack of
government and response to the spread of the disease. He
blamed the CDC and the NIH, but he also blamed
gay men who were ignoring the problem. And basically he

(26:29):
was like, well, we kind of need to stop having
sex while we get to sort it out. People didn't
like that.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yeah, nobody likes abstinence except for the modern Republican Party.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, totally, who don't actually like it themselves, they want
everyone else to do it. He also started confronting bureaucrats.
He threw a drink and a gay Republican fundraiser's face
for his hypocrisy. There's this really long and contentious history
and gay activism about whether or not you should publicly
out homophobic gay people who are like wielding power from

(27:01):
the right wing.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Oh right, so who do you protect? Right? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Like it goes to like real identity politics, like you know,
like intersectionality questions here.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Totally and also just like how rude do you, like,
do you want to expose someone to homophobia in order
to make a political point?

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Sure s sure, especially by outing them.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah. Forced outing was like absolutely a tactic of gay
liberation going back, like the first gay men's magazine, des
Shwimmer in Germany from the eighteen nineties. I think would
do forced outing of like really yeah, and it's it's
Lady Gray like and I don't I don't know how

(27:48):
I feel about it. I also don't know Lady Gray is.
And Sophie's giving me the like Margaret doesn't know that
to get this reference, isn't.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
That's Lindsay Graham's nickname in DC apparently is Lady Gray.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Okay, And so Larry Kramer spent a couple of years
doing this kind of activism alone. It's not because he
was the only person doing it. It's because he hadn't
connected up with folks who are also doing it. Because
like throwing drinks in like people's faces and stuff is cool,
but it works better when it's coordinated. And so for
all the shit, he basically gets kicked out of this

(28:20):
group he started, and he breaks up with his partner
who's still on the board, and he goes wandering. He
goes to Dico, the concentration camp, and he writes a
play called The Normal Heart. And it's not a coincidence
that he's Jewish and that he's going to concentration camps
and looking at this because he absolutely is perceiving this

(28:41):
as a holocaust that is happening right. Gay men are
dying in mass fifty thousand gay men are dying a year.
Gay men in big cities are going to a funeral
every week, sometimes more. Sometimes you miss one friend's funeral
because you're at a different friend's funeral. Life expectancy after
diagnosis was too. By nineteen eighty four, two French doctors

(29:05):
had figured out that there was this virus HIV that
caused AIDS the most likely origin. Speaking of the politicization
of where does the thing come from? How racist can
we be about it? You know, I'm going to talk
about where the best understanding of where it comes from
is because it ties into colonialism. Most likely it was

(29:26):
passed from chimpanzees to humans sometimes around the tourney of
the twentieth century during the like scramble for Africa, when
Europe was just fucking over Africa as hard as they could.
And this probably happened in the Belgian Congo, the place
where King Leopold was murdering millions of people. It also,
and really importantly, and I wish I didn't have to
say it, it didn't jump to humans through humans fucking animals.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
As hot as that sounds.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
It comes through hunting practices almost certainly, where you're just
exposed to the blood of event animals. The virus spread
from Africa, probably the Congo, hitting Haiti in around nineteen
sixty seven, and there's a whole lot that has been
written about how the spread of it was happening because

(30:15):
of like the way in which like social practices and
cultural things and how everyone was living was shifted so
completely by colonization. Right, it hit Haiti probably around nineteen
sixty seven. There's again a lot of different takes about
how it's spread, and there's like political motivations behind people
giving you different ideas of how it's spread, but the

(30:36):
one that seems likely or maybe I'm drawn to this
explanation because it blames capitalism and colonial extraction.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
But you're biased in favor of, you know, just reality.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
That's certainly how I perceive it. Yes, there was this
corrupt politician in Haiti named Luckner Kimbrone, and he was
called the Vampire of the Caribe because he ran sketchy
blood clinics and sold people's plasma to the US, often
killing people for their blood, like perfectly safe, haunting people

(31:10):
in the streets to oh my god, kill them for
their blood.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Oh my god, poor hate. I swear to fucking Knoddy.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
He's like, every time you learn of like some former
awful dictator in Haiti, there's like another guy.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, yeah, And this guy wasn't even dictator. He just
like worked for.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
One of the guys, you know, O side side hustle.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, and like we really the West was like, oh,
you all like gonna have this slave revolution. We're going
to fucking punish you forever.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
We're going to punish you forever.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Sixteen hundred gallons of plasma a month was exported to
the US during this guy's time, and HIV was spreading
between the patients in his clinics because they didn't sanitize
their equipment, and it spread in the US partly from
that exported plasma. Wow, it spread most aggressively in the
gay male community because unprotected anal intercourse is the riskiest

(32:05):
kind of sex for HIV transmission. It also the communities
that hit first in the US Plazitian immigrants was probably
IV drug users. It was called drunkie flu or the
dwindles or junkie pneumonia and no one cared or noticed.

(32:27):
Because if there is a community even more disregarded by
society at large than gay people in the late seventies
and early eighties, it is homeless drug users. It actually
probably hit this community first in like nineteen seventy seven
or so, and nothing was done about it. These people's
deaths aren't even written down, you know. So and fortunately,

(32:51):
actually Act Up is going to be so fucking intersexual.
This is like where they a lot of people will
like critique them, and I'm not going to get too
much into the critiques of them in this episode, but
like a lot of people were like a lot of
the early act Up people are middle class white gay men,
right right, right, but a lot of their immediate supporters
are not. And the people who come in with like
a lot of activist information are not. And they like

(33:13):
challenge themselves and do a lot of work about how
to become and act intersectionally. And one of the things
that they do is they really go to bat for
ivy drug users.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
That's fucking huge, right, because they realize like they need
to be in the same boat.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
They didn't turn against them. It's like, no, no, this
is their problem.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, we're the good sufferers.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Right exactly, which you could sort of see happening.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, it could have happened.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
No, that is another thing.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
That I remembered about this movement was precisely that was
that while destigmatizing you know, being gay, it the AIDS
ANTI you know, the act up movement was also about
destigmatizing IVY drug use.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah. Yeah, and we'll talk about it later. But like
did an awful lot of the work for the modern
Needle Exchange program, and like, yes, they just I don't know.
I had known the broad strokes in some of the
cool specific actions, but like they're just I love. Most
of the time when I do these episodes, I start

(34:13):
off with a group, I'm like, oh, that group's cool,
and then I like read more and I'm like, this
is the coolest thing in the world.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Like why can't we have this?

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah. So meanwhile, queers all over the country are organizing,
and of course this means New York City. Also on
December twentieth, the New York Times ran a headline sale
of Sight to Homosexuals planned because this is where a
building that gets called the Center is still which is
still around, comes into being a community center. It is

(34:44):
now called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center
and fell into some queer hands in nineteen eighty three.
It was originally called the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.
A director described it that whole rush to address the
AIDS epidemic was critical to institution building in the gay community.
There was this realization that if we do it together,

(35:04):
we get it done. If we don't do it together,
we're going to die.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
So a bunch of groups got together to buy it,
including Sage, Senior Action in a Gay Environment and the
Metropolitan Community Church, which was a queer affirming Protestant congregation,
and by the end of the first year, sixty groups
were meeting there. These days, hundreds of groups meet there
because it's still around, and they brought in speakers all

(35:33):
the time. One day in early nineteen eighty seven they
brought in Larry Kramer, the guy we were talking about
you promised to talk about the fight against AIDS. He
started off his talk by having two thirds of the
room stand up, and then he said, you will all
be dead in five years. And then he said, quote,

(35:54):
if my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of
you we're in real trouble. What you're here doesn't rouse
you to anger, fury, rage, and action. Gay men will
have no future here on earth? How long does it
take before you get angry and fight back? Then he
pitched that they start a new political organization devoted to
political action. And he didn't say, this is what it's

(36:17):
got to be and I'm going to be in charge. Right,
he actually did, which is the same thing he did
last time. He said we should start something, and the
thing that got started was too polite for his tastes.
And so then a couple of years later he's like, hey,
we should start something and be angry, And three hundred
people came two days later back to the Center to
form act UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
To unleash power. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
I mean I know that maybe that followed from the
acronym of wanting to say like act up, but.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Like to unleash power. He's like, so fucking tight.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
You can get some good poetry from a backronym, you know,
because you're like, the restrictions help bring out the creative absolutely.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
But now would you call this was this a spokes
counsel or you're going to get some spokes cancel part leader.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
So it's actually from the kind of funny Larry Kramer
talks a lot about how he's like, I don't know
any of that leftist terminology, and the interviewer is like,
but we used affinity groups and direct action. He was like,
when I was in the film industry, everyone was a
Marxist and used Marxist slang, and I refuse to learn
any of it because he's like an old grouch who
kind of rules, you know, right.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
He was just like it was a meeting. I don't
know it was meaning of other meetings.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yeah, exactly, meaning of groups, like are we gonna use
direct actor? Well, we're gonna go fight the fuckers? Like, yes,
direct action, you know. So I think it started off
on an affinity group model. But the way that I
kind of understand it is that this very very initial group,

(37:50):
or at least Larry Kramer is like not a political actor,
doesn't perceive himself as a political actor, but immediately, like
within a couple of weeks, if not at that first meeting,
these like veterans from all of these other movements come
together and help and help form it, and I think
at that point you start getting very explicitly. We talk

(38:10):
about how we use direct action, we are using affinity groups,
and all of their organizing happens through affinity groups. That
it's gonna be really interesting how that happens. But what
else they didn't do is they didn't have advertisers. Actually, okay, wait,
I take that back. Later we're going to talk about
a bunch of like advertising people who are graphic designers

(38:32):
who are an act up who like change the fucking world.
So everyone has a day job, and some people's day
job is to make ads, and some people's day job
is this podcast, which now is going to ads. And

(38:53):
we're back. Okay. You know that famous Margaret Meade quote.
I don't know shit about Margaret Meade, but there's that
quote that's famous. Hell never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's
the only thing that ever has so good. I know.
I've also always had a like because it has to
be a small group, not a like. I think like

(39:15):
one person very rarely like really like you change history
by like connecting in with groups, you know, And I
say this as someone who like, I'm an introvert, and
it makes me sad this realization, you know. But this
group act Up, I feel like, proves this quote better
than anything I've ever read. It's biggest actions captain about

(39:37):
five thousand people. Probably most people who've listened to this
have been to way bigger protests than five thousand people.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
But also it just depends on like, if those five
thousand people are doing direct action, that's fucking crazy. That's
a massive number exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
Act Up is far and away one of the most
successful groups I've ever covered on the show. Despite not
they weren't tiny. It wasn't forty people in clandestine clicks,
but it wasn't huge. I chalk up their outside impact
to a few factors. You got one of them already.
They were at the right place at the right time.

(40:16):
It was a movement that needed to happen. The horizontal
structure of it emphasized the agency of individuals and small groups.
So it wasn't a few thousand people who are like
following the crowd. It's a few thousand people divided into groups,
each of which is like, all right, how are we
going to get this shit done? And so you have
five thousand leaders instead of five thousand people the handful

(40:36):
of leaders. I used to kind of like make fun
of that quote, like when people be like, oh no,
we're leader full on that leader list. I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah No.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
I definitely never heard that until later in life when
I was no longer an activist. But I I do
think it's kind of funny. But then you're like, nah,
that's a good way of thinking about it. You know,
you know which it is true. That's the other one,
Like I mean a calling in versus calling out, you know,
like okay, but you're still calling them out.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
No, but right.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
The affinity group I think is really interesting because it
is sort of you know, it's people who should trust
one another. It can be you know, not that there
were necessarily infiltrators and act up, but it can be
like infiltration proof, you know, a little bit cop proof.
If everyone if you've got five to fifteen people who
trust one another and can vouch for one another, and

(41:28):
they're all kind of like down and have each other's back,
So it's I mean, man, I don't even have like
five close friends. Shit, man, they're all over the plate,
like like I can't even name ten people I want
to hang out with on a Saturday night. So I
think it's it's it's tight, like you know that that. Yeah,
and folks still are organizing in affinity groups. But I just, yeah,

(41:50):
big ups the model of the affinity group.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
Yeah no, no, but I feel you right. It's like
you're like, okay, well, you know, it's probably easier you're
twenty and part of a social scene.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
You know exactly, we're all dumpster diving together, we're all
fucking the same people.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then it'll all fall apart because
we're all fucking the same people.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yes, exactly, and then one of them is also an
undercover and it's all terrible.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah. Yeah, you just described nineteen ninety nine to two
thousand and five.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Other things that they had going for them, they had
a commitment to direct action and to inclusivity and not
policing each other. So it was very like you show
up and be like, oh, we're doing this action, and
people be like okay, not like, oh, we all need
to come to consensus about whether or not it's okay
for you to do that action. You know, so everyone
wanted to do it.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
You go, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, exactly. Also the fact that so much of the
direction came from directly affected people, and one of their
specific things was, we are going to become the experts
on our condition. We are going to be the ones
who are coming up with what the policy should be
from the government about our issues, because we are now

(43:10):
the experts. And they did also they had this dual strategy,
which is basically good cup, bad cop. They would be
both the protesters outside screaming at the politicians and they'd
be the negotiators inside working on solutions. And it's fascinating
and there's like tension there right, Like you know, some

(43:30):
people are like, oh, you're all fucking liberals, don't fight
hard enough, and other people be like, oh, you're all
too unruly and disorganized, you know. But it's like it's
that tension where all this interesting shit comes from.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
Thad, Yeah, I mean, I think what's really you know,
I think there's like sort of a new a trendy
idea nowadays that you're not supposed to do like emotional
labor for people, which like I understand on a certain level,
but on the other level, it's like if you're actually
going to like change hearts and minds and actually get
to work.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
You do need to do some emotional labor for people.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
You need to do I mean, I don't know about
making them care about death, but you kind of do
need to be like this, like Act Up is proving,
you need to be experts on the thing that you're
working around. You need to be educating people in your
community and outside of your community. And that's going to
be the hard work. It's not just going to be like, well,
everyone has to like you know, come to their own senses,

(44:24):
like noah, nah, you're gonna have to be leading the
way on that.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, absolutely, Like do your own research.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
No, you've got to do the research.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
You know, totally. And I feel like there's this difference
between fault and responsibility that society doesn't set us up
to understand, where it's like, is it my fault that
as a trans woman, I like suffer certain bad shit. No,
that's not my fault. Is it my responsibility?

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Well?

Speaker 2 (44:49):
No one else is fucking fixing it, right, you know?
And like I appreciate the like allies and like literal allies,
like allies in a war who are helping me do that,
but it's still up to me. It is my responsibility
because it is not anyone else's, even if it's not like.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
I'm thankful for you know, the transactivists that took me
through all you know, new terminology, new pronouns, you know.
That's but exactly if they had been like, no, I'm
not going to teach you, it's like, well, then I
will be dumb.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, exactly for a long time. I will pull in
a china like China shop this, you know.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
So I've read some narratives about act UP that was
kind of like, well, we weren't political until all of
a sudden we had to be, and other narratives that
talk about act UP like it's the supergroup of activism
in the eighties, and I, like I was saying, I
think it's both. I think the initial founders are mostly
desperate gay men, and soon help rushed in from experienced
organizers from a bunch of movements which included gay men

(45:46):
and gay women. And then you have the rank and
file on top of that, which is also largely new
to politics. Because of this horizontal structure, the direction and
guidance of the experienced organizers was like subtle instead of explicit.
It wasn't like, hey, we're coming in were in charge, right,
It's like they're coming in and being like, here's ways
of democratically organizing to figure out what we all want,
and so that kind of almost becomes invisible. They built

(46:10):
up horizontal movement built out of affinity groups that were
each autonomous. It was nonpartisan in both that they didn't
have an ideological label and also that they didn't endorse
political parties. It spread across the country in the world
soon enough. At their first meeting, they were like, all right, great,
what are we going to do about it? And someone
suggested they go after the FDA for being too slow

(46:30):
to approve experimental drugs that could save their lives. Larry
Kramer wrote an op ed about it for the New
York Times, and then they marched on Wall Street the
same day that op ed came out March twenty fourth,
nineteen eighty four. This is their first action. Seventeen people
were arrested pretty much right off. They had doctors and
shit coming and joining, including this woman, this chemist, Iris Long,

(46:53):
who was a straight woman who had no connection to
aid suffering communities. She just was like, Oh, I know
about this stuff. I should go be helpful. So she
was her fucking rules. She showed up, and she was
the one explaining the science and the medicine and of
all like all the things that people were working on,
and helped people become the experts. You know. One of

(47:17):
their first actions was in DC on June first, nineteen
eighty seven, at the White House. Cops are so homophobic
that they're wearing rubber gloves when they arrest the protesters,
afraid they'll catch like gay cancer, which, yeah, shut the
fuck up. By this point, people knew that that was
not the case.

Speaker 4 (47:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
An airline refused to let people with AIDS fly, so
act Up went for two strategies at once with this airline.
They sued them, and they also protested that their offices
like broken their offices. Well they're well, it's open, you know,
and they won. Cosmopolitan magazine ran an article by a psychiatrist,
and the psychiatrist had like put doctor in his name
when he wrote it, but he was actually a psychiatrist,

(47:58):
not a doctor of internal medicine. That he was like
representing himself, you know. And the article was like, hey,
don't worry you straight, you won't get AIDS.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
Dude, and so first tend sex positions to avoid getting AIDS.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
It was basically like, you're not a gay man, You're fine,
you know. And so a bunch of women from Act
Up met up with the author and were like, Hey,
you gonna you're gonna do a retraction, You're gonna apologize,
and he's like no. So they went to Cosmopolitan. They
took a protest to the streets. They forced media attention

(48:33):
on the fact that women can get AIDS, and Cosmo
was forced to print a partial retraction. Nice, which Get
said some of their like intersectionality right away too, like
a lot of their campaigns are like, hey, women can
get AIDS, you know. And it wasn't all like, hey,
we can only focus on the gay men who are
like the most suffering people because we are focusing on them,
but we are also focusing on all these other communities that.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, on the misinformation, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
They They started round the clock protests at a hospital
demanding better clinical trials and that the clinical trials include
more patients with AIDS. They shut down the FDA for
a day at this One of the arrestees was a
well known artist named David Wochnarowitz, who later died of
AIDS in nineteen ninety two. And this is where you
get this photo. He had painted up his jacket with

(49:21):
the now famous words, if I die of AIDS, forget burial,
just drop my body. On the steps of the FDA.
They paired all of their protests with very specific demands
for how experimental drugs could be made available sooner, and
it worked. Within a year. Act Up activists and experts

(49:42):
were regularly negotiating with the FDA and the National Institute
for Health. They obviously had to keep it wasn't just
like hunky dory, Everything's fine now, right. They had to
keep up all this pressure in order to.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
Well, that's interesting. There's like such an inside outside strategy.
They're like, you know, pressuring from the streets, but then
also like hind closed doors, like meeting with folks, and
that's you know, I'm curious about how that was all
divvied up, you know, internally, but just to.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Show like they had it was so clear.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Obviously most a lot of spokes councils and affinity groups
and all that that I've been involved in our very
like broad nebulous movement, like you know, the global justice movement,
or the even the anti war movement, which you could argue,
I mean, even if it was very it was focused,
it was still a massive issue. This is so specific
and so yeah, yeah, it's interesting to see how, Yeah,

(50:32):
when you can really hone in, you can fucking win.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah, totally. They talk a lot about like, hey, you
should have and I don't think this is the only
way to run a movement, but they were fairly effective
with the strategy of like, come up with specific, articulable
demands that are winnable and then go out and win them, right,
and use that to build power, instead of using that

(50:57):
to be like, Haha, we've won our little reform, you know,
instead be like, okay, we've won that reform. Now what's next.
We've gained power, you know. From nineteen eighty one to
nineteen eighty six, the government spent a total of two
hundred and fifty million dollars on AIDS research. By nineteen
ninety one, when act Up was in full swing, the

(51:19):
government was spending a billion dollars a year. And this
is a direct correlation. You asked me earlier before, Well,
we weren't recording whether I was gonna talk shit on
Anthony Fauci, and he's one of their main targets during
all of this, right, But it's like the quotes I
have from him are kind of like Fauci told someone

(51:39):
from Act Up, the more you're demonstrating, the more money
I'm going to get to work with.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Yeah, that's yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
I mean that, right, It's like you have This is
the I think the thing that people miss is like
and back to the calling in is like those folks
in power you are, they are your targets. And if
they are amenable targets like meaning if they're not like massive.
If Fauci had been a psychotic homophobe, right, I don't

(52:10):
think they would have gotten that funding. Right, his job
would have been to deny that funding. So it matters
who your targets are, even though they should still be
your targets.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
I think it's funny. Maybe even last week or something
brought up This a thing I think about all the time,
Liz rent Free in my head is the art of
war from a million years ago. One of the rules
is don't fully surround your enemy. You have to give
your enemy an out otherwise they fight to the death. Right,

(52:44):
you need to have a way in which and I
see this a lot with like other stuff where you're like,
if I'm trying to convince someone to stop being transphobic,
my goal is to stop them from being transphobic and
not to just yell at them forever.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Like you know, my goal is to have them out
for them.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Yeah, exactly. You know, whenever people are like, ah, this
person used to be a transphobe, like that rules they
used to be. That's great, that's progress. You know, I
used to be a transphobe. I grew up in the
nineties and I was afraid of myself, Like what do
you want?

Speaker 1 (53:14):
You know?

Speaker 3 (53:14):
No, And I think that's the biggest critique of like
left movements that every a lot of people have, which
is there's not enough on ramps. There's not enough again
the calling in and like it's not I think, you know,
Michael Albert used to say, you know who's who wrote
like what is it para con participatory economics? He's like
a yeah, movement economist about like our movements aren't sticky enough,
you know, like they you should want to be involved

(53:36):
in them and rather than feeling just repelled by them
or like they're totally antagonizing, and that's not to say
you shouldn't be militant.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Those two things are very different.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
No, totally.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
And it's actually one of the things that it's not
too much in the script, but one of the things
I read a bunch of times about act UP is
that one of the ways in which people wanted to
be part of it was that it was also a
cultural thing that you go and become part of, and
you are part of something and like and it's kind
of ironic and interesting, like everyone's hooking up right right,

(54:09):
you know, and everyone's like maybe yeah, hopefully yeah, I mean,
or you know, they're in conditions where they don't care
anymore or whatever, you know, Like, but it's like, you know,
they're creating an entire culture and like something that's like
worth being part of. And all of their work and
like this work pressuring about AIDS research. This leads directly

(54:30):
to the development of proteas inhibitors that are now taken
by millions of people worldwide. I think it's like twenty
million people worldwide take this are Wow, it's not every
day that you can save millions of lives. And when
we come back on Wednesday, we're going to talk about
a whole lot more of the specifics about all the
cool shit they did, how they took on the Catholic Church,
how they reinvented political art, how they developed methods of

(54:52):
fighting burnout. I know that's not like a big sexy topic,
but it is to me. And how they change the
way that harm reduction works in this kind. But that's
on Wednesday. There's no way you can look it up. Now,
that's huge.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
I'm excited for Wednesday because.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
No one else has ever covered this story whatever anyway.
But if people want to know more about what you do,
how can they do that me all?

Speaker 3 (55:17):
You can find me on all podcasts, apps and YouTube
and twitch, Habituation room at Franny Feo on YouTube and Twitch.
My podcast is weekly. It's a news comedy and everything
in between. And there's lots of bonus episodes, so yeah,
I get at that.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Hell yeah. Cool Zone Media has new podcasts out that
you've probably already heard. Because if you haven't heard sixteenth
Minute of Fame, I don't. I live under a rock
and I've heard of it, and I've even heard of
some of the topics that covers. But you can listen
to sixteenth minute of Fame. It is about all the

(55:59):
crazy memes that happen on the Internet and like what
happens after the fifteen minutes of Famer up. But since
it's a Jamie Loftis production, it's about that the same
way that the book Raw Dog is about the history
of hot dogs and what hot dogs taste the best,
which is to say, it's about an awful lot more
than that, and it's like super interesting. Even if I
like the book Raw Dog and I'm a vegan, that's
my endorsement, and so you can listen to that podcast.

(56:22):
I have a book that is currently kickstarting, is a
fiction book as a young adult book. It is called
The Sapling Cage. And if you're listening to this in
the future, it's not currently kickstarting, it's kickstarted. But I
know it was successful because we met our funding goal
within an hour, and within the first day we hit
three times our funding goal, So it clearly people like it.

(56:44):
They some of them have read it even and you
could too, could go read it by backing it on
Kickstarter or getting from the library or whatever method you
like to use to acquire books. And that's what I
gote on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Cool people who did cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Us out on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.