Any volume with a title like this one should rightly include protests related to LGBTQ rights, and indeed this one does, with thoughtful chapters on both the Stonewall Uprising and the ACT UP movement.
The chapter on Stonewall combines a lively description of the fateful night in June 1969 with a broader look at LGBTQ life in New York City and beyond. It notes that same-sex attraction was considered a mental illness—“sexual deviation”—at the time, and that laws and policies were designed to target and contain such deviation. Nevertheless, LGBTQ people found community and support, and began a movement for their rights that began even before Stonewall. Importantly, too, the book notes that the terms used for some LGBTQ people at the time are not the same ones we would use today, and that some of those labeled transvestites or drag queens then might choose to identify as transgender or gender nonconforming today.
The chapter on ACT UP begins in 1981, with the first mention by the Centers for Disease Control of a strange new disease. It rightly explains that although the disease hit gay men the hardest, HIV spread not only via gay men’s sexual encounters, but also via sex between (presumably cisgender) men and women, shared needles from intravenous drug users, blood transfusions, and from birthing parent to fetus in the womb. Fear of the disease triggered a panic, impacting not only gay men but also people like Ryan White, a teen who had contracted the disease from a blood transfusion. Drug companies, health insurers, and the government were slow to act, however, the book explains—and the gay community finally took matters into its own hands, led by playwright Larry Kramer, who founded ACT UP. The chapter describes the organization’s powerful slogans and edgy actions, and raises the question of “What is enough to achieve your ends and what pushes so far that it hurts the larger cause?” The book is generally sympathetic to ACT UP, however, concluding that public protest and angry people are often what it takes “to make the world a better, safer, more just place.”
Other events covered in the book are the Boston Tea Party (1773), the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the Fight for Workers’ Rights (1911), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), the Democratic Convention (1968), Earth Day (1970), the March Against Nuclear Weapons (1982), the Women’s March (2017), and the Dakota Access Uprising (2016-17).
These are all thoughtful short histories that just might inspire the next generation of activists.
