I hadn’t done anything about the war in Vietnam as a child except for scrounging for change amid the wreckage of the Bank of America building that had been blown up in my hometown. I felt very strongly that the AIDS crisis was my war and I had a moral obligation to do something about it. I joined the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power in Washington, DC. As an AIDS activist, I punctuated my studies and teaching with arrests for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. This did not always make me popular.
The day I attended an ACT UP demonstration at the White House, the air was crisp, and the sky was blue. After chaining myself to the White House fence, I just hung there for hours, watching tourists with their hot dogs, sodas, and ice cream bars, their maps open to historic, downtown Washington, DC. I tried welcoming them to the crack-and-murder capital of the United States, but they had come for the Jacqueline Kennedy furniture, not an ACT UP demonstration.
I didn’t want to ruin the moment. After all, they’d walked past a lot of homeless people to get here. The poor slept on grates near the US Treasury and across the street in the People’s Protest Park. They were everywhere, but if you planned it well and tilted your head acrobatically, you could manage to act like you didn’t see them.
Even though it took all day for the police to cut us down, no one seemed to think AIDS activists hanging in front of the White House was a scenic photo opportunity. We weren’t on the postcards. We were shouting, “Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS! The government has blood on its hands!”
The police cut me down and I went limp, falling to the ground in a heap like I had no bones to hold me up. I was an expert at nonviolent civil disobedience. This was my fifth arrest with ACT UP. My first had been in 1987 at the Supreme Court after the second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. Now I dressed almost exclusively in black: heavy black shoes, black jeans, black ACT UP T-shirt, and my black ACT UP cap. The only alteration to my uniform was when I wore a white ACT UP T-shirt instead. Whatever I did, I looked like I was doing it on black-and-white television.
I made the cops carry me to the police van. I didn’t blame them for getting grumpy, but we each had a job to do. Swinging between two policemen with my chin just high enough to avoid scraping the pavement, I could see the other protesters waving brilliant green-and-pink ACT UP posters. They were pictures of Ronald Reagan’s face with the word “AIDSgate” stamped across his big green forehead and had the rebellious beauty of the first Sex Pistols album. He looked like Herman from the TV show The Munsters. His eyes were neon pink, and the smaller text read, “Genocide of All Non-whites, Non-males, and Non-heterosexuals . . . Silence = Death.” I had one of those posters hanging in my apartment, and it glowed in the dark. I used it as a nightlight.
Alone in my holding cell, I felt my heartbeat slow down. My anxiety took a vacation when I was confined, and I didn’t feel depressed. I felt proud. At the university I had given up trying to explain that it was possible to be a punk, a feminist, and a lesbian all at the same time. I was tired of being treated like I was ideologically deranged.
The cops pushed a woman who was obviously high on something, probably crack, into my cell. She was wearing an unzipped, torn, white leather skirt and a fake fur coat over just a bra. She sat next to me on the metal bed.
“What did you do?” she asked.
I cleared my throat. “I chained myself to the White House fence to protest the government’s policies on AIDS.”
She smiled at me, nodding out.
I wasn’t completely clear on holding-cell etiquette and didn’t know if I should ask her what she’d done when I was pretty sure I knew. But I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t interested. I remembered that the politically correct term for “prostitute” was “sex industry worker.”
“What are you in here for?” I asked, putting on my politest, most ingratiating smile.
She looked at me like I was totally crazy. “Baby, I’m a hooker.”