ACT UP in Louisiana Was Pragmatic, Bold, Creative. Let’s Learn From It.

Nearly four decades have passed since ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) started in New York in 1987 as a direct action activist group “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

The 1980s were a time of mass death and government inaction, and ACT UP responded with confrontational protests that disrupted business as usual to force change. ACT UP’s tactics have become legendary, but its swift growth into a movement with over 100 autonomous chapters in cities large and small across the U.S., as well as in Canada, Europe, and Australia, has largely disappeared from the public record. There are however several chapters that continue today, including in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, and London, and new chapters that have emerged in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago to respond to draconian cuts in HIV/AIDS services and trans health care under the second Trump administration.

In Small Town Rage: Fighting Back in the Deep South, David W. Hylan shines the light on ACT UP Shreveport, which started in 1990 in a conservative Louisiana town far from the centers of institutional power. Based on dozens of interviews with ACT UP Shreveport participants that he conducted for his 2016 movie of the same name (co-directed with Raydra Hall), the book expands the narrative to show how activists in Shreveport organized in a hostile environment to transform the situation for people with HIV/AIDS.

In our current regressive political climate, which eerily echoes the conservative backlash of the 1980s and ‘90s (don’t forget that it was Ronald Reagan who first used the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”), ACT UP Shreveport’s legacy of resistance in the Bible Belt couldn’t be more relevant. In the interview that follows, Hylan discusses covert and overt organizing strategies, conflicts within the group, coalition actions, and confronting AIDS organizations, religious bigotry, and the KKK.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: When people first started publicizing ACT UP Shreveport meetings, it was done through existing relationships. Deborah Allen, one early member, made cards with the meeting time that people could hand discreetly across the table as an invitation to join. I’m struck both by the need for caution, and the intimacy in this encounter, and I wonder if you could speak to other innovations ACT UP Shreveport made to deal with the intense homophobia of Shreveport at the time.

David W. Hylan: The cards Deborah made really capture what organizing in Shreveport required at the time. You have to remember that visibility carried consequences. People could lose jobs, relationships with their families, their churches, even their housing. So they couldn’t necessarily organize the way ACT UP could in New York, where you could put up a poster announcing a meeting and expect people to show up.

A lot of ACT UP Shreveport’s early organizing depended on trust. One person knew another person who might be angry enough, frightened enough, or simply fed up enough to get involved. Those cards could be passed quietly from one person to another without forcing someone to publicly identify themselves. But what is interesting is that this caution existed alongside some very public activism.

Once ACT UP Shreveport decided to act, its members could be extraordinarily visible. They papered The Shreveport Times, protested public officials, challenged the medical establishment, confronted the Klan, blocked the Red River bridge, and used sidewalk chalk and flyers to put AIDS and gay people into spaces where Shreveport would have preferred not to see them.

So there was almost a dual strategy: protect people when they needed protection, but refuse to allow that fear to make the movement invisible. They learned how to operate within the culture they were confronting rather than simply importing an ACT UP model from somewhere else.

You write that in Shreveport, “Church wasn’t optional, it was cultural law.” And, “Religion was not just belief; it was enforcement.” So the judgment and condemnation from the pulpit was embedded in every interaction. How did ACT UP challenge this?

Religion in Shreveport was complicated because ACT UP wasn’t simply challenging individual religious beliefs. They were confronting the enormous cultural authority that churches and religious leaders held over how people understood homosexuality and AIDS. When a minister condemned gay people from the pulpit on Sunday, that message didn’t stay in the church. It went into families, schools, workplaces, hospitals, politics, and public policy.

ACT UP challenged that by refusing to accept the moral framework that said people with AIDS somehow deserved what was happening to them. They insisted that AIDS was a public health crisis and that people with HIV deserved medical care, dignity, compassion, and equal treatment. They also challenged hypocrisy when they saw it.

But I think something else happened too. ACT UP forced people to encounter actual gay men and lesbians rather than the abstraction they had been taught to fear. Once ACT UP members were standing in front of them, speaking publicly, appearing in newspapers and on television, caring for sick friends, and demanding accountability, it became harder to pretend gay people were simply a sermon topic. They were neighbors.

From the beginning, ACT UP Shreveport confronted not just the bigotry of the straight public, but also resistance from other queers. You mention that this was a topic at every meeting, and I’m curious to hear more about these conversations, and how this affected the group.

This is one of the most important parts of the story because ACT UP Shreveport was not universally welcomed by the gay community. Far from it. There were gay people who thought ACT UP was making things worse. They had spent years learning how to survive in Shreveport by keeping their heads down, being discreet, and not drawing attention to themselves. Then ACT UP came along saying, essentially, we are going to draw attention.

That conflict came up repeatedly within the group. Were the demonstrations helping people with AIDS, or were they provoking a backlash? Was ACT UP making gay people more visible at a time when many gay people desperately did not want to be visible? What became clear to me in researching this history is that both responses grew out of the same environment. ACT UP members were angry and afraid, while many of their critics were cautious and afraid. The difference was in what they believed survival required. Eventually, ACT UP helped change that calculation. Visibility itself became a source of power. People began seeing that speaking out did not necessarily destroy you. Sometimes it changed the community around you.

I’m struck by the creativity and range of local actions, from challenging local AIDS organizations to take political action to confronting the KKK at the courthouse to memorializing gay men who were murdered in Shreveport, and I wonder if you could describe a few of the actions that feel especially memorable.

There are so many, but some of the actions that stand out most vividly to me aren’t necessarily the largest ones. Confronting the KKK at the courthouse certainly stands out because it demonstrated just how bold this relatively small group had become. Here were gay and lesbian activists in northwest Louisiana publicly standing against an organization built around intimidation and hatred. There was nothing abstract about the risk they were taking.

The Red River bridge action was another. Blocking traffic is impossible to ignore. It took AIDS out of meeting rooms and newspaper columns and physically interrupted everyday life. That was central to the philosophy behind so much ACT UP activism: If society could ignore people dying from AIDS, sometimes activists had to make ignoring AIDS inconvenient.

And the memorial actions for gay men who had been murdered in Shreveport are particularly meaningful to me. Protest isn’t only about anger. Sometimes it is about insisting that someone mattered. In a culture where a murdered gay man could become a newspaper story and then quickly be forgotten, publicly remembering him was itself an act of resistance.

Those actions show the extraordinary range of ACT UP Shreveport. The group could be confrontational, theatrical, political, mournful, funny, angry, and strategic. There wasn’t one ACT UP tactic. The question was always: What will make people pay attention to this?

ACT UP Shreveport also participated in coalition actions with other ACT UP chapters in New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. — how did this help to sustain the momentum of the group?

Those connections reminded ACT UP Shreveport’s members that they weren’t alone.

That mattered enormously because activism in Shreveport could be isolating. This was a few dozen people operating in a deeply conservative part of the country, often confronting institutions that were much larger and more powerful than they were.

When members participated in actions with other ACT UP chapters, suddenly they were part of something national. They could see tactics other groups were using, learn from them, bring ideas home, and understand that what was happening in Shreveport was connected to a much larger struggle.

I think the psychological effect was just as important. Imagine going from a meeting of 20 or 30 people in northwest Louisiana to standing among hundreds or thousands of people demanding the same things you were demanding back home. Then you returned to Shreveport knowing that the movement was much larger than the room where your next meeting would take place. Those connections helped sustain the group and gave its members a sense that their local fight was part of something much bigger.

Many people in the book speak to the legacy of ACT UP Shreveport not just as a turning point in AIDS activism, but also a key factor in creating the possibility for queer visibility.

ACT UP Shreveport changed what people believed was possible. Before ACT UP, there were gay people in Shreveport doing important work, but public confrontation and unapologetic queer visibility were extraordinarily difficult. ACT UP created a space where people discovered that they had political power precisely because they were willing to use their voices together.

Numbers aren’t the only measure of power. And the effects multiplied. People carried what they learned into AIDS organizations, social-service agencies, politics, journalism, medicine, education, and later LGBTQ organizations. The Philadelphia Center [Shreveport’s HIV/AIDS services organization, founded by ACT UP Shreveport members] is an important part of that legacy. So are changes that are much harder to put on a timeline: people becoming willing to say who they were, challenge discrimination, demand treatment, or simply refuse to be ashamed. A few dozen people didn’t transform Shreveport overnight. What they did was change the trajectory. And once that trajectory changed, other people carried it forward.

In our current moment of devastating cuts to AIDS funding, and resurgent homophobia and transphobia, what might organizers learn from ACT UP Shreveport in confronting this bigotry at the local level?

The first lesson is that you do not have to wait for national organizations to rescue you.

ACT UP Shreveport looked at what was happening locally and asked: Who has the power to change this? Sometimes the answer was a hospital administrator. Sometimes it was a newspaper. Sometimes it was an AIDS organization, a politician, a school system, or a religious leader. Then the group figured out how to put pressure exactly where the decision was being made.

The second lesson is that you organize within the community you actually have, not the community you wish you had. Shreveport was conservative. Homophobia was pervasive. Religion was enormously influential. Many gay people were afraid to be visible. None of that meant organizing was impossible. It meant the organizing had to be adapted to those realities.

And perhaps the most important lesson is that small groups can matter enormously.

When we look at cuts to HIV programs, attacks on transgender people, or renewed attempts to make LGBTQ people invisible today, it is easy to look at the scale of the opposition and conclude that local action is insignificant. ACT UP Shreveport demonstrates the opposite.

You don’t necessarily begin by changing Washington. You begin by changing what happens at the hospital, the newspaper, the city council, the AIDS organization, the school, the church, or the courthouse in your own community. That’s where ACT UP Shreveport fought. And decades later, we’re still talking about what those few dozen people accomplished.