The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA

Benita Roth

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781107106314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108166744
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA explores the history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, Los Angeles, part of the militant anti-AIDS movement of the 1980s and 1990s. ACT UP/LA battled government, medical, and institutional neglect of the AIDS epidemic, engaging in multi-targeted protest in Los Angeles and nationally. The book shows how appealing the direct action anti-AIDS activism was for people across the United States; as well as arguing the need to understand how the politics of place affect organizing, and how the particular features of the Los Angeles cityscape shaped possibilities for activists. A feminist lens is used, seeing social inequalities as mutually reinforcing and interdependent, to examine the interaction of activists and the outcomes of their actions. Their struggle against AIDS and homophobia, and to have a voice in their healthcare, presaged the progressive, multi-issue, anti-corporate, confrontational organizing of the late twentieth century, and deserves to be part of that history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Anti-AIDS Activism in the 1980s and 1990s
• 2 Beginning, Building, and Being ACT UP/LA
• 3 Battling for Women’s Issues and Women’s Visibility in ACT UP/LA
• 4 Intersectional Crises in ACT UP/LA
• 5 Demobilization: ACT UP/LA in the Years 1992–1997
• 6 From Streets to Suits: The Inside(r)s and Outside(r)s of ACT UP/LA
• 7 Looking Back on the Life and Death of ACT UP/LA
• Appendix: Multiple Methods and Multiple Perspectives
• References
• Index
• Plates