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MAKE AN ANGRY SPECTACLE

An epidemic of anger, fueled by hyperpolarization, is seen as one of the greatest disasters afflicting US democracy. As one author recently put it, “Anger causes Americans to adopt attitudes that run contrary to the democratic ideals of the nation. . . . It makes Americans see supporters of the opposing political party as less intelligent than themselves. Arguably more harmful for democracy, anger also makes people see supporters of the opposing political party as a threat to the country’s well-being.”¹ A nation this divided, we’re constantly told, needs cooler heads to prevail. Delete the nasty tweets and emotionally charged viral videos. Turn down the temperature of your rhetoric.

But a politics without spectacle can’t be a contentious politics, which is what’s necessary to get those in power to listen. When disaster strikes, raw emotion gets noticed. Your concerns are taken more seriously, rather than swept under the rug. An angry public spectacle stages your grievances and demands, especially when they’re dismissed as unserious. And yet, just because you’re angry doesn’t mean you’re violent. All successful nonviolent civil disobedience movements are, in fact, marked by righteous indignation. Orchestrating an emotionally charged performance is good theater and good politics. It draws in onlookers. This is something that methodical, measured persuasion within boardrooms or classrooms can’t do. Here’s how anger can be provocative in the best possible sense. It can activate a community’s moral compass and make citizens act.

In the 1980s, anger was a lifeline for the gay liberation movement. Its goal? To combat homophobic public policies. A mixture of silence and disgust defined the US government’s position toward the AIDS epidemic decimating gay men. As the disease was killing tens of thousands across the country, and the virus that caused it was infecting hundreds of thousands, Republican president Ronald Reagan’s administration said nothing. The administration only began to quietly fund AIDS research in 1983, two years after the disease was becoming impossible to ignore. And throughout the decade, Reagan continued to cut the negligible amount he did allocate, even as the crisis accelerated. Reagan himself, eager to court the support of the increasingly powerful antigay Christian Right, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, which formed his core electoral base, said nothing publicly about AIDS until an April 2, 1987, speech on the matter. By then, almost fifty thousand Americans had died. As late as 1984, Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, would have a good laugh with reporters, joking at a press conference that Reagan had not “expressed concern” about what some were calling the “gay plague.”²

Not everyone thought AIDS was funny. Certainly not a new organization, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which held its first meeting in New York City at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Greenwich Village in March 1987. Soon, it would have chapters in Chicago and San Francisco. If you attended an ACT UP meeting, you would see a diverse group—men, women, old, young, gay, Black, white—strategizing how best to make the nation awaken to the disaster. Tired of the bland rhetoric of inclusivity and milquetoast appeals to sameness, activists at the first New York meeting spoke about changing their focus from “Gay Pride” to “Gay Rage.” Make no mistake, ACT UP were partisans of love. Many of the queer men and women who went to meetings multiple times a week would hug, kiss, joke, sit on each other’s laps, flirt with one another. Indeed, ACT UP meetings were a way of forging solidarity and validating desires denigrated in public.

But if love is indispensable in making you feel like you’re worth fighting for, anger is what ups the ante about the utter seriousness of your convictions. Anger draws a line in the sand for your enemies, telling them you won’t be mistreated. On the weekend of October 11, 1988, equipped with posters featuring a pink triangle and below it the text “Silence = Death,” over one thousand ACT UP activists went to Washington, DC, and surrounded FDA (Food and Drug Administration) headquarters, which they called the “Federal Death Administration.” They protested the slow pace at which FDA was approving experimental anti-HIV drugs for general use. Their rally was a response to an event being held the same weekend in DC: the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfurled on the National Mall, to celebrate and mourn the lives lost to the epidemic. ACT UP stood in solidarity with the Names Project’s unabashed championing of LGBTQ rights, though they disagreed with their tactic of being as palatable as possible for straight people. As ACT UP put it in leaflets they circulated around DC: “SHOW YOUR ANGER TO THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED MAKE THE QUILT POSSIBLE: OUR GOVERNMENT . . . Before this Quilt grows any larger, turn your grief into anger. Turn anger into action. TURN THE POWER OF THE QUILT INTO ACTION.”³

Several years later, on October 11, 1992, at 1:00 p.m., at the tail end of the administration of Reagan’s successor, Republican George H. W. Bush, ACT UP went further. They brought the AIDS Quilt to life in a shocking way through a political funeral. Bush, unlike Reagan, acknowledged AIDS, but he still cut AIDS research funding and safe sex education in public schools. In response, ACT UP marched in a solemn procession toward the White House, with activists holding the ashes of dead lovers, friends, and family, people with whom they had real connections and memories, and who were now gone because of government neglect. There were no loudspeakers from which to amplify bold talking points. No podiums from which to give celebrities a platform. Instead, activists hurled their anonymous bodies and pitched their screams toward the White House fence. Some of them scaled the fence, others heaved the ashes of the dead over it and onto the lawn, darkening the pristine green with the gray of indignation.

Two weeks later, just before the 1992 presidential election, the body of ACT UP/NY member Mark Fisher was carried in an open casket for onlookers to bear witness. The funeral march was set to the pulse of a single drum reverberating among the skyscrapers, beginning from Jackson Memorial Church and ending at George H. W. Bush’s Manhattan reelection headquarters. As one of the funeral’s organizers, Eric Sawyer, put it, the march was about ushering forth “the death of the Bush presidency. We knew his evil neglect of people with AIDS, and his hatred of LGBTQ+ people would bring about the death of his term.”⁴

Wasn’t Reagan’s and Bush’s homophobic neglect of gay citizens afflicted by AIDS a form of anger? Those who denounce anger in politics are its most skilled practitioners, whose anger is apocalyptic in intensity and indiscriminate in its object. The louder their criticisms, the greater their responsibility. How else to explain the Republican Party officials’ antipathy in the 1980s toward gay people they never met and who they let die without any remorse? At least ACT UP was selectively focused upon elected officials and agencies that were complicit. And they were honest about what was happening. Expressing anger concretely is better than being consumed by it. Let it out.