Americans had already succumbed to the AIDS virus

By the start of the 1990s, 200,000 Americans had already succumbed to the AIDS virus, and at least one million more are probably infected today. Unless a spectacular breakthrough comes soon, most of these people will be dead before the new millennium. This is the setting for the continuing battle against AIDS, a battle which has been going on for at least ten years now. Gay activist organizations, which had been little more than parade planning committees and social groups in the 1970s, became voices of rage and civil disobedience in the 1980s and 1990s. Less radical AIDS organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGTLF) continued to work behind the scenes. Fund raising groups in the private sector, such as the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) and AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), were sponsored heavily by celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor. Initially, however, there were two AIDS activist organizations responding to the crisis.

New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) were formed by gays as a reaction to an indifferent society. These AIDS organizations, their ideologies, differing views, finances, and leadership, will be examined. We will also assess their political impact on policy making from a current perspective.

For the first six years of the AIDS epidemic, the gay community had been a surprisingly passive population on the political fr

marily a law firm, but instrumental in numerous court battles against AIDS-based discrimination, the organization had been staggering since 1989, when it was rocked by intense media criticism of executive director Jean O'Leary, and by bitter high-level infighting that lead to O'Leary's and three others' resignations. The San Francisco chapter of direct-action gay rights group Queer Nation suspended operations in March of 1992 after steep drops in membership and infighting over gender and racial issues. The 18-month-old group enacted the suspension when members failed to reach a consensus on a proposal that would have banned "racist, sexist, biphobic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic" comments at its weekly meetings. In a previous case of internal dissention in September of 1990, the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP had split into two groups after an internal debate over issues similar to those that Queer Nation encountered. One of the ACT UP groups now confines itself primarily to AIDS issues, while the other also engages in direct action on broader social issues, such as racism and sexism. Issues of personal powerlessness and working conditions threatened to close down GMHC in September of 1993