Acting Out: how to take on an epidemic and the politics that rule the business of curing
A Review by Eva H.D.
“Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices. It isn’t happening to them. They’re walking the streets as though we weren’t living through some sort of nightmare.”
— Vito Russo, “Why We Fight”
“If they had been expected to be clean, to be orderly, to move together like a machine, to be calm, to be appropriate, to be principled at all times; if they had been expected to play fair, to always tell the truth, to be reasonable, to share credit; if they had been expected to behave, I think history confirms that there is no way in hell that they could have won.”
— Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993
December 10, 1989. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Midtown Manhattan. Outside, Stop the Church, a 7,000-strong AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) protest is in progress. Inside, some ACT UPers representing various affinity groups are standing in silent denunciation. Activists begin reading out statements decrying the church’s murderous policies; the pathologically homophobic Cardinal O’Connor tries to drown them out with prayer, determined to carry on with the service. Suddenly, someone jumps up on a pew and starts screaming, “O’Connor, you are killing us!” Flashbulbs and tempers flare. Police boots ring out on the tiles; police dogs are in the aisles; parishioners are throwing punches while prostrate protesters enact a die-in on the church floor. ACT UPer Tom Keane, mistaken for a parishioner, and offered communion, accepts the wafer with the words, Opposing safe-sex education is murder, then promptly crumbles it on the ground. All hell breaks loose.
“There is a sense of a prevailing democratic spirit; that any self-motivated citizen was capable of “moving the bounds of the possible.” ”
The action’s nature—“the opposite of conciliatory, explanatory, or appeasing,” writes Sarah Schulman—to this day occasions a difference of opinion among ACT UPers: as an expression of raw emotion and grassroots power, it made headlines all over the world. But, not oriented to a specific demand aimed at legislators or drug companies, was it simply a gratuitous flex? The answer is complicated: in Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, history is not a spoon-fed conclusion about who was ‘right.’ Rather, in this anarchic, vibrant document, Schulman employs a multiplicity of voices, culled from 17 years of interviews with 188 individuals, to recount the multifaceted story of a movement. This is not, she notes drily, “a game of call-out. Instead, it is an effort to really understand and make clear how the AIDS rebellion succeeded, and to face where it failed, in order to be more conscious and deliberate, and therefore effective, today.” ACT UP was a diverse group with divergent needs: some members felt the ultimate goal was a functional American healthcare system for all; others were simply desperate to get drugs into bodies as quickly as possible. Schulman charts this underlying tension along with the trajectory of ACT UP between 1987 and 1993 in vivid detail—and with evident and justifiable pride: as a member of ACT UP’s formidable Women’s Caucus, she was there.
This necessarily dense volume dispels the myth that ACT UP was an organization for and by gay, white men; its pluralistic membership is evidenced by the diversity of voices testifying within.[1] Burgeoning with astonishing facts and extraordinary anecdotes that contribute to the narrative’s propulsive, infectious energy, this is the story of a group of people whose life-saving advocacy, research, and activism changed the world—because they chose to act. “They were gorgeous, you know, they were sexy, they were angry. It was better than any TV or movie,” recalled one interviewee. Whatever else ACT UP’s members may or may not have had in common, “in case of emergency,” Schulman tells us, “they were not bystanders.”
In a handful of years, ACT UP successfully took on issues as diverse as its membership: pharmaceutical research, women’s health, homophobia, racism, homelessness, social inequality, media bias, and culturally specific education. ACT UPers employed tactics as varied as sit-ins, lawsuits, marches, and drag shows, and professional acumen in disciplines ranging from medicine to graphic design. Not to mention straightforward sex appeal: countless members recalled being initially attracted to the group due its preponderance of “sexy gay white men in little cut-off denim shorts and combat boots.” They organized a massive protest at the FDA—forcing pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies to reorient their research—successfully intercepted programming at several major news stations, dumped their friends’ ashes on the White House lawn, and briefly shut down the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They organized housing for people with AIDS. They won the legalization of needle exchange in New York City. Faced with a massacre, they created a movement. These often unlikely activists—“the most impressive people I ever saw,” said playwright Jim Eigo––had brilliance, passion, wild creativity, and a healthy distrust of authority; they also had, “of course, a lot of great sex.” What they didn’t have, as one activist put it, was time.
Schulman uses the carousel of perspectives available to her to best advantage, charting the triumphs and creativity of ACT UPers like Karin Timour, and the “tiny Insurance Committee,” whose tireless and efficient advocacy enabled hundreds of thousands of people with HIV to access health insurance. Or David Z. Kirschenbaum, who relentlessly filed Freedom of Information requests to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then, as now, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), until he finally stopped refusing to share information about AIDS-related drug trials. Or Ming-Yuen S. Ma who, with the Asian Pacific Islander (API) Caucus, created little red HIV/AIDS info packets resembling the lucky money envelopes associated with Lunar New Year to hand out at an Asian gay bar. Schulman also chronicles the heartbreak, as in the case of Tom Kalin: on the morning immediately following his best friend’s harrowing death, Kalin opened up the New York Times Magazine to Andrew Sullivan’s now infamous cover story declaring the AIDS epidemic over.[2]
While Let the Record Show functions as an immersive living history, it can also be read as a primer on how to create a protest movement. (Schulman is careful to reframe facts in a contemporary context; for example, that it continues to be “100 percent legal to do a picket without telling the police you’re going to do it.”) Like its protagonists, the book is brimming with a sort of protean energy. There is a sense of a prevailing democratic spirit; that any self-motivated citizen was capable of “moving the bounds of the possible.” Bartender Rebecca Cole, while volunteering at the National AIDS Hotline, took a call from a woman saying she couldn’t get into a clinical trial. Skeptical, Cole contacted the trial and learned that it was not open to women. After phoning the ACLU and NIH, Cole determined that at that time, there had not “been a woman in a clinical trial in thirty years.” She decided to call Dr. Fauci and demand a meeting, which she was granted—after name-dropping ACT UP.
The ignorance of the media regarding AIDS at that time reflected the ignorance and antipathy of politicians and the medical community. (Even today, an ignorant and arrogant media culture[3] continues to insist on distorting the narrative to its own bizarre ends. An egregious example of this mercenary revisionism cited is a 2019 episode of the television series Pose in which fictional Black transgender characters were shown participating in Stop the Church, angering ACT UPers who took to social media to decry the practice of “inserting non-existent people of color while ignoring the people of color who actually were there and did the work.”) Taking lessons from Black and feminist resistance movements of the 1950s and 60s, ACT UPers reoriented the media narrative in new and innovative ways that leveraged the considerable privilege of certain group members:
ACT UP was probably the first movement of deeply oppressed people whose lives were at stake to have included such a large group of designers, advertising professionals, studio artists, marketers, and publicists well versed in the visual language of branding and experienced in the selling of ideas, fresh out of art school and with relationships to institutions of cultural influence. ACT UP not only adapted the aesthetics of advertising but also benefited from activists who were actually the people who created the aesthetics of advertising.
““ACT UPers (...) took to social media to decry the practice of “inserting non-existent people of color while ignoring the people of color who actually were there and did the work.””
Modeling its tactics on the precepts for nonviolence set out by Martin Luther King[4], ACT UP was organized on the principle of direct action stemming from an agenda based on the lived experiences of people with AIDS[5], and its goal was simple: end the AIDS crisis now. Small ‘affinity groups’ would develop expertise in specific areas, educate the rest of the membership, and design a solution to be presented to those in power. The larger group would then perform a direct action oriented to achieving the specific goal initially outlined.[6]
There was a necessary efficiency to the proceedings—people were independent, at liberty to use the ACT UP name to lend legitimacy to their demands in the corridors of power. There was no asking for permission. Although members “were angry and debated their differences,” as far as micromanaging the membership went, there simply wasn’t time to engage in the dubious luxury of disciplining and excluding people. The people of ACT UP, Schulman explains, “had mercy; we needed each other in order to survive and make change.” A person’s only accountability was to the greater goal of fighting the AIDS epidemic in their community. Artist Lola Flash encapsulated the general DIY vibe: “whatever your specialty was, that’s what you were able to do.”
As a political movement, ACT UP was social, sexy, and fun to a degree that appears at the present moment strikingly alien. Compared with the sexually-charged atmosphere at the Monday night meetings, “like a bazaar of desires,” the loneliness endemic to contemporary opioid and COVID epidemics is thrown in almost spectral relief. The ebullience of the activists in the book is palpable, and often hilarious, as with Maxine Wolfe’s advice on how to organize lesbians: “you would have to go looking to where lesbians were. You’d have to go to bars—you know what I mean? You couldn’t just pretend that they were going to be at some lefty conference.” Because a central tenet of the ACT UP praxis was fun: one member of the Women’s Caucus recalled sneaking into an NIH reception and sending out into the crowd of suits platters of fortune cookies with NIAID, Form a Women’s Committee written inside. “The looks on the people’s faces when they saw what the fortune was in those cookies, really, there was nothing better.”
**
ACT UP’s Treatment & Data affinity group (T&D) was composed of self-taught citizen scientists, like future MacArthur fellow Mark Harrington, who formed “a kind of mutual aid headquarters for strategizing the creation of new, more effective medications,” to keep themselves and the greater community apprised of cutting-edge HIV/AIDS research. This education was intellectually and emotionally empowering; members achieved such proficiency in analyzing clinical studies, they were occasionally mistaken for medical professionals. T&D was at the forefront of pushing for researchers to invest “more resources to go to opportunistic infections research,” instead of privileging AZT; members studied new drugs and approaches and pressured the FDA to aggressively investigate them. A good cop/bad cop dynamic developed: at the negotiating tables, ACT UP ‘insiders’ would manipulate the executives’ fear of radicals on the ‘outside’. (In 1989, when pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome refused the insiders’ demands to lower the grotesque $10,000 per year price tag on AZT, outsider ACT UPers took over an office at the company’s headquarters, sealing themselves in with screws. Later that year, a small group of ACT UPers infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange, letting off a foghorn and chaining themselves to the banister, from which they had unfurled a mammoth banner reading “SELL WELLCOME .” This resulted in the price of AZT being lowered by twenty percent.)
Could the insiders have been as successful if they hadn’t mirrored their counterparts in government, socially and culturally? Certainly NIAID’s Fauci is characterized as having been more interested in the reflected glory of being the hero of the AIDS crisis than in the particularities of access and the politics of race, gender, and class. On this issue, Schulman is blunt: “The people in power did not know or identify with women with AIDS and therefore could not imagine integrating their needs because they refused to speak with them.”
**
With increased pressure to get drugs efficiently into (white, male) bodies, difficult ethical issues arose that would have far-reaching consequences. No drug in history had been approved more quickly than AZT. When physician activist Dr. Joseph Sonnabend decided to investigate Burroughs Wellcome’s suspiciously rosy conclusions regarding AZT, he discovered people were dying because of, rather than despite the drug, and that the trial results were deeply flawed and misleading. Nonetheless, this failed and destructive treatment was released amid great media fanfare, and proved “a publicity killing” for the NIH.
The FDA bureaucracy that T&D had fought to streamline became so accelerated that many activists were eventually moved to take an opposing stance to the approval—a mere 97 days from the company’s application—of the protease inhibitor saquinavir in 1995, after extreme concerns around the design of the study went ignored.[7] When the needs of pharma and people with AIDS diverged, the safety of those whom the drugs were meant to serve was compromised in favor of profitable expediency.
The issue of prioritizing corporate cupidity over the comfort and health of patients lies at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, an excoriation of the pusillanimous scions of the modern opiate trade—like its 19th century precursor, an exercise in political and economic imperialism. In the 1960s, as head of medical advertising agency William Douglas McAdams, Dr. Arthur Sackler aggressively marketed the pharmaceutical company Roche’s Valium to American doctors—while clandestinely running the rival ad company L.W. Frohlich and advertising his clients’ highly addictive products in the medical journal he (secretly) owned. By his own delighted admission, he pioneered the morally dubious practice of marketing drugs directly to doctors. Sackler’s self-lubricating empire “could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.” In 1995, less than a decade after the disaster of AZT, his nephew Richard’s Purdue Pharma would secure the approval of OxyContin in record time. The drug, about twice as potent as morphine, was touted by doctors handsomely remunerated for their absence of probity as “not addictive.” Did the victories won by ACT UP’s team of autodidacts at T&D, in terms of shortening FDA approval time, in some way help enable the cynical manipulation of the approval process by drug companies historically well-versed in such nefarious tactics? Undoubtedly the process of securing approval for a new drug, which had been “a heavily choreographed years-long bureaucratic gauntlet,” was simplified by the efforts of ACT UPers desperate to promote speed and innovation to save lives.
**
A friend of mine was diagnosed some years ago with stage IV cancer. His prognosis was extremely grim: metastatic with a five year overall survival rate south of 30%. Notably, this was in a region that had not yet accepted the idea, now commonplace in oncology, that low volume metastatic disease may be managed. As he put it: “They didn’t have a plan. A nice death was their plan.” Like some of the stars of T&D, this person is a white man, educated at expensive, élite private institutions. Perhaps this is part of the reason why after scouring every journal article and clinical study published on his condition, he felt entitled to disregard the advice of a series of renowned oncologists, eventually finding a group of likeminded physicians involved in ground-breaking research, who were willing to work with him to create a functional solution. And, thus far, they have together been able to manage his disease. He was privileged with the intellectual and economic resources to do the research and access the experts; and perhaps just as importantly, felt comfortable saying ‘I disagree’ to impeccably credentialed medical professionals. This is not the person who declines chemotherapy in favor of a bag of turmeric; the anti-vaxxer; the denialist; the soft target for the misinformation complex’s legion of charlatans. Rather, this is an individual who was able, through a combination of personal privilege and rigorous self-directed education, to create a patient-centered treatment plan.
In an age of misinformation (and what age has not been?) our concurrent unprecedented access to accurate information should be a gift. Schulman gives us an idea of how we might use this gift, for purposes beyond individual self-preservation, to enact radical positive change across all strata of society. ‘Iatrogenic’ issues indicate illness caused by the advice, behavior, or treatment of a doctor: the question of who is empowered to question the advice or behavior of a doctor is integral to the question of equitable treatment in a robust healthcare system. If people are not permitted to respectfully share evidence-based research with their healthcare providers as partners in their own treatment, can we evince such surprise at the popular impulse to distrust the medical establishment?
Dr. Sonnabend noted the high rate of conflict of interest in HIV medicine, and in medicine in general, pointing to marketing departments that “can make you an expert […] or a thought leader … They invent these things.” Whether the issue is medical doctors shilling for Sackler, or pharmaceutical giants charging astronomical sums for AIDS medications because they’ve determined that white, gay men are a cash cow, when it comes to the moral absenteeism of pharmaceutical companies, the politics remain contentious. According to ACT UPer Sean Strub, the AIDS epidemic marked the first time that companies marketed drugs directly to patients; like the aggressive marketing of drugs to physicians, this is now accepted as a standard practice in the United States. In a country where the average doctor—not to mention drug consumer—is much less likely to have the sort of sophisticated pharmacological education ACT UPers gave themselves, this is a prescription for disaster.
* *
ACT UP media expert Ann Northrop observed that, “Gay white men thought they had privilege in this country and were shocked to find out they didn’t, and that people in power were prepared to let them die.” The sense of outrage at lost privilege was a galvanizing force of the movement, and also, perhaps, its Achilles heel: as law professor Kendall Thomas put it, there could be “no effective political mobilization for a progressive AIDS policy that did not have an understanding of itself as an antiracist movement and as a movement committed to gender equality and to economic justice.” In the absence of a coherent healthcare system, medical advances only benefit people with insurance. Due to lack of access to healthcare, people with AIDS in present-day New York are being diagnosed in the emergency room; the percentages of Black or Latinx people dying of AIDS in the United States are disproportionately high, as are COVID mortality rates in those communities, reflecting the racism and inequality on which the healthcare system, and indeed the society as a whole, are predicated.
In the opinion of Charles King, a founder of Housing Works—which secures housing for New York’s homeless people with AIDS and HIV—whereas many in ACT UP were solely concerned with homophobia, the fight “was all about social and economic factors, sexual orientation just being another one of those factors,” along with “discrimination, marginalization, and what that does to people.” On the other hand, Maxine Wolfe recalled the organization as overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Women’s Caucus’ fight to change the official definition of AIDS: “that is something that nobody ever says about ACT UP. They always talk about gay white men, gay white men, selfish gay white men. We got tremendous support in ACT UP for that work.”
Like Wolfe, many of the women in ACT UP came from the women’s movement, where they had fought for reproductive rights; they joined the fight against AIDS at a time when the American government (as well as, bizarrely, Cosmopolitan magazine) claimed that women could not get AIDS. The Women’s Caucus fought to change the CDC’s definition of AIDS to include women-only symptoms and illnesses, as the exclusion of women, poor people, and intravenous drug users prevented them from accessing benefits, support, and housing. Medical workers were diagnosing in complete ignorance of symptoms unique to, or more common in women and intravenous drug-users—unaware, for example, that “sexually transmitted AIDS could manifest as Kaposi sarcoma, whereas AIDS transmitted by needles did not.”
The work done by the Women’s Caucus raised fraught ethical questions: were women indeed merely so-called “vectors of infection,” only relevant in the context of the health outcomes for their unborn children? Or were they people with AIDS, as deserving of treatment as anyone else? Furthermore, as Rebecca Cole discovered, in the late 1980s, women of “child-bearing potential” —that is, any premenopausal female—were excluded from clinical drug trials. (Even today, lawsuit-averse drug companies continue to be cagey about allowing women into clinical trials.) The resultant conversations around the meaning of consent, drug testing on poor women of color, and distrust of the medical establishment on the part of community members familiar with the history of medical experimentation on people of color in the United States remain urgent.
clinical trials are still composed of a preponderance of gay men, while women of color continue to be viewed by pharma with homicidal insouciance as a waste of money.
Even though women’s and men’s immune systems respond differently to HIV infection, clinical trials are still composed of a preponderance of gay men, while women of color continue to be viewed by pharma with homicidal insouciance as a waste of money. UNAIDS reports that as of 2020, 53% of all people living with HIV were women and girls; globally, AIDS remains the leading cause of death of women of reproductive age.[8] Meanwhile, women account for just 19% of participants in retroviral trials. Perhaps this is unsurprising when the intentional—and deadly—mystification of women’s health is de rigueur: as journalist Sarah Barmak writes in Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality (Exploded Views), “six years after we'd mapped the entire human genome, a couple of French gynecologists finally got around to mapping out the clitoris in 3-D with a sonogram—in 2009.” At the same time, continuing structural racism within academia ensures the exclusion and erasure of health researchers of color.[9] Compounded by these issues, converging epidemics of COVID, HIV, and poverty rage on in vulnerable communities, and underlying causes remain unaddressed.[10]
One of the most compelling sections of the book honors the extraordinary work of HIV-positive activist Katrina Haslip, who died in 1992 of a disease her government refused to acknowledge she could legally have. Shortly before she died, the CDC added one women-only symptom (cervical cancer) to the official AIDS definition. Haslip’s response was, “I’m not going to smile. This is only happening because of us, and you let us die.” By mid-1993, at which time the CDC had finally agreed to include other gynecological conditions, such as pelvic inflammatory disease to the list, Schulman soberly informs us, “there weren’t widespread celebrations by ACT UP members—a lot of the women who had been at the demonstration were now dead.”
**
Recently, I encountered a billboard advertising HIV prophylaxis that proclaimed “PrEP means loving who you want.” This conflation of love with sex is part of a disturbing trend towards what Schulman calls the “assimilationist agenda of the gay rights movement, which uplifts pro-natalism, nuclear family, monogamy, and marriage.” She contests that it was the Stop the Church action, ironically, that made the “controllable, integrationist concept of gay marriage suddenly seem[ed] reasonable and, in fact, desirable.” Or, as Gregg Bordowitz has written, “We went from being an ostracized group to a marketing demographic.” Because, of course, what PrEP means, insofar as a drug can be understood to mean anything, is: freedom to consensually fuck whomever you want. In relative safety. If you can afford it.
That competing and uncomfortable truths can and must coexist in any movement is one of many worthwhile lessons in Let the Record Show; as Professor Thomas emphasized, despite political differences with others at the Monday meetings, the “sex-positive, gay-affirmative, politically empowering force that was in that room […] I do feel it saved my life.” In the words of ACT UPer César Carrasco, which could be read as a prescription for today’s activists: “I don’t need to marry you […] What you are doing doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of what I believe the political activism should cover. But if what you are doing is somewhat effective, and you’re doing good work—if you are doing good work, I’ll do my part.”
LET THE RECORD SHOW
A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
By Sarah Schulman
702 pp.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$40
References:
[1] Readers are invited to further explore any individual’s history by consulting the online interview archive: see ACT UP Oral History Project http://www.actuporalhistory.org/
[2] 680 000 [480 000–1.0 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2020. Source: UNAIDS
[3] “The media,” Schulman writes, “also appoints mainstream people to explain points of view that they actually do not understand. By the time a ‘feminist’ or gay person or person of color or trans person—and all the overlaps therein—finally makes it into mainstream media, that chosen person’s perspective is often years behind the movements they claim to speak for. The history and range of ideas that produced these movements is never acknowledged or referenced. Direct action disrupts this systemic falsification. It forces a direct confrontation between the people with power and the people whose lives are demeaned or damaged by the ignorance and indifference of the person with power.”
[4] See 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
1. Experience-Based Agenda: Identify your issues based on lived experiences of people with AIDS.
2. Education: Become the expert on your subject.
3. Design the Solution: Instead of acting in an infantilized relationship to those in power, begging them to solve problems, ACT UP used their acquired and innate expertise to design reasonable, doable, and winnable solutions.
4. Present This Solution to the Powers That Be: And when they refuse to listen…
5. ACT UP’s process of “self-purification” was a combination of nonviolent civil disobedience training, emotional and political bonding through the creation of affinity groups, and the putting in place of highly organized support systems of marshal and volunteer lawyers to ensure that no one would get lost in the system. Teach-ins created a highly informed rank and file, all of whom were encouraged to be spokespeople because “people with AIDS are the experts.” Sophisticated media workers combined grassroots video activism and high-level media contacts to present ACT UP’s demands.
6. Then ACT UP would perform nonviolent direct action to, as facilitator Ann Northrop would say, “Speak through the media, not to the media.”
7. “This tactical mode of organization is highly efficient and can be applied to any movement. A small group of people commit to becoming the experts. They do the work to design a solution. They present the solution to the powers that be. When the powers refuse the change, this vanguard/committee/affinity group holds teach-ins at which the facts are presented in a clear, succinct manner to the larger community, preparing them to act. They then organize a specific action for the larger group to do, an action designed to force the solution they have already created.”
[6] For contemporary examples of this practice in non-activist/radical movements, consider the work of organizations like MASS LBP, and the citizens assemblies that have been effective applications of direct democracy worldwide: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/339306da-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/339306da-en.
[7] New York Times, Dec. 9, 1995: “The approval of saquinavir came under a special F.D.A. category called "accelerated approval," under which the agency acts after data demonstrating a drug's safety are completed but before all the evidence on the drug's effectiveness or dosage has been established. […] Hoffmann-La Roche said it was immediately establishing a program to offer financial aid to those who cannot afford the drug. The program will make the drug available to patients waiting to be approved for coverage or reimbursement and to others who are uninsured. The number for patients and doctors who want information is (800) 526-6363."
The following day, the New York Times issued this correction:
An article yesterday about the Food and Drug Administration's approval of a new drug, Invirase, made by Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. to attack the AIDS virus, misstated the telephone number for doctors and patients seeking information. The number is (800) 526-6367.
[8] https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet
[9] see: ‘Health equity tourists’: How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities.’
[10] see: Converging Epidemics: COVID-19, HIV & Inequality https://www.fcaaids.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Converging-Epidemics-Executive-Summary.-April-2021.pdf
Eva H.D. is the author of Rotten Perfect Mouth, "38 Michigans," and "Bonedog" (from the Netflix original film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things). She works in your favourite bar.