RECENTLY an Advocate.com commentary returned to an explosive issue of the last decade—the resurgence of unsafe sex among gay men. Theater producer and AIDS activist Jordan Roth urged: “We must Act Up again! We … need to scream bloody murder, point the finger of shame, and demand action. But this time we’re not going to scream at the White House or shame the Vatican. … This time we’re going to scream at ourselves, shame ourselves, demand action from ourselves.” Roth said he was “staggered” by a New York Health Department statistic: 55 percent of the men questioned said they didn’t use a condom the last time they had sex.
It was in the mid-1990’s that Michelangelo Signorile, Gabriel Rotello, Larry Kramer, and others first railed against barebacking. Sex Panic railed back that gay men must be free to do what they want sexually. It was probably the first time in GLBT history that both sides in a debate called the other “murderous.” Today, Jordan Roth’s call for act-up tactics raises some frightening questions, especially against the backdrop of the past decade, which has seen ominous changes in American views on dissent. In turn, these changes alter the way in which GLBT activists with differing views are interacting with each other.
Criminalizing Protest
In 1987, when act-up first hit the news, our activists were shouting at outside powers, not at other gay people. Using confrontational but nonviolent “direct action” of the kind that U.S. activists had relied on since the 1960’s, act-up marched, hung banners, threw fake blood and empty pill bottles, did phone zaps, occupied corporate offices, closed down Grand Central Station and the Golden Gate Bridge, even halted trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the group won some impressive victories for people with AIDS. In those days, the U.S. justice system was till relatively lenient on civil disobedience—an arrest for peaceful protest meant a minor misdemeanor charge, a small fine, maybe a few days in jail. Activists were proud of their long arrest records.
Since then, federal and state government has quietly stiffened the laws affecting protest, progressively criminalizing the kind of legal dissent that convulsed America in the 1960’s and 70’s. This trend even preceded the wholesale crackdown on civil liberties after 9/11, when President Bush and the Justice Department rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress without hearings. Growing use of felony charges on protesters started as long ago as 1990. Today your career as an activist can end on the first arrest, which can incur a long prison sentence. In many states even a misdemeanor conviction can get you a year behind bars and a huge fine. Even if you luck into probation, the judge’s restrictions on your behavior can be so severe as to muzzle any further dissent.
Even before 9/11, this trend had civil libertarians worried. On the criminal justice front, one major change was in the broadened use of federal law, rather than state or local law, against protesters. The 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) was originally intended to help agencies prosecute organized crime. In the 1980’s, when the Feds stretched RICO to target violent anti-abortionists, they were cheered by liberals and feminists. Today these same liberals and feminists are shocked to see racketeering charges routinely deployed against all kinds of peaceful American protesters. With wartime America consumed by security issues, even state governments are going overboard to slap limits on political dissent. As I write this, the Oregon legislature is weighing a bill to ban all peaceful protest for 25 years. On the civil front, there is growing use of the “slapp,” or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. This is a type of lawsuit that both institutions and individuals use to frighten critics or drive them into bankruptcy from legal costs. Some states bar slapp suits, but the victim must still go to court to have the case dismissed.
Silencing Our Own
On a parallel track, the GLBT world, which has traditionally been conscious of individual rights, is clamping down on dissent within its own ranks. For example, gay people seldom picketed each other in the past. We used more mundane tactics—heckling speakers, censoring each other, writing editorials that border on libel. ACT-UP seldom targeted GLBT organizations; when they did, it was usually because they had a beef with an outside speaker. But lately many of us apparently share with mainstream conservatives a grim conviction that “dissenters give aid and comfort to the enemy.” The AIDS controversy involves such deep personal issues, and gets some of us so angry and emotional, that any kind of dissent is viewed as criminal—whether it’s disagreement about AIDS science, or disagreement about financial accountability of AIDS nonprofits, or disagreement about safer sex. Unlike John Ashcroft, we gay people have no lavender-jacketed FBI agents of our own to call in. Yet some of us don’t hesitate to use that mainstream criminal-justice system, or those SLAPP suits, to try silencing any perceived “criminals” in our own ranks.
One instance of this was a controversy that erupted around the AIDS Ride. Launched in 1994 by Dan Pallotta’s TeamWorks, the Ride was spectacularly successful in raising funds with bicycle marathons between major U.S. cities. But soon people were asking where all the money was going. Some riders and observers noted that as little as six to twelve percent of the take was reaching charities. act-up/dc called PTW the “worst AIDS profiteers since Burroughs-Wellcome.” The Ride’s defenders countered that open criticism was hurting people with AIDS. Dan Pallotta threatened to use slapp suits to silence his critics. In 1996, when Pennsylvania’s attorney general forced PTW to cough up an extra $110,000 to charities, Pallotta threatened the Philadelphia Gay News for running the story (the paper stood its ground).
Finally, in 1999, Bay Area Reporter published an exposé by Jim Provenzano titled “Wheels of Fortune.” All hell broke loose. BAR’s editor at the time, the late Mike Salinas, said the paper was threatened with several lawsuits by angry Ride fans. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, longtime beneficiaries of the California AIDS Ride, withdrew because of the financial issues and launched their own event, LifeCycle. Pallotta sued them, but the judge dismissed this suit. In 2002, PTW finally closed its doors. But the lawsuits rumbled on, with a riders’ class action against Pallotta’s company and a flurry of slapp and anti-slapp motions.
“Terrorists” in San Francisco
Even more ominous is the emergence of “domestic terrorist” charges as a weapon against U.S. dissent. Historically, the hallmark of terrorism has been the torturing, maiming, and killing of civilians to intimidate an entire population and bring about drastic political change in a country. In modern times, countless terrorist movements have sprung up around the globe, from the Mau-Mau of Kenya to the ETA of Spain. In the U.S., KKK members were bona fide terrorists who routinely tortured, mutilated, burned, and hanged black people.
Before the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, the FBI reportedly had only 100 files on domestic terrorists. After that, the Feds went into anti-terrorist overdrive, and after 9/11 they went ballistic. People began to use the word “terrorism” as a convenient smear with which to tar their enemies. White conservatives saw Nation of Islam and Cesar Chavez’s farm-workers’ union as “terrorists.” Religious Right types thundered that gay activism itself is a form of “terrorism” against churches and religion. After 9/11, even some liberals and progressives found reason to use this canard, as when Arianna Huffington claimed that SUV ownership was tantamount to supporting al Qaeda.
Today, having rushed the USA Patriot Act into law, the government defines “terrorism” so broadly that terrorist charges can conveniently target all kinds of peaceful dissent, whether it’s anti-war protest or any other kind of dissent. The federal anti-terrorist “no fly” list evidently includes names of peaceful dissidents with no criminal records. States are passing their own broad anti-terrorist legislation as well.
As an eerie side-effect of this national frenzy, some GLBT liberals and Democrats now want to use terrorist charges against dissenters in our own community. The ominous trend started in a 2001 trial that shook the gay world. GayToday.com reported it in this way:
AIDS activists Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli were jailed for over two months, with bail set at $500,000 and $600,000 respectively, on a litany of felony and misdemeanor charges, allegedly for harassing telephone calls made to officials in protest of what they call repressive public health measures and inaccurate information being used to frighten the public. After more than two months in custody, a second judge reduced the bail in the face of public protest, and the two were recently released to await trial. In a display of what Greens call bipartisanship at its worst, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) requested investigation of Petrelis and Pasquarelli—her own constituents—under the “USA Patriot” Anti-terrorism Act, which allows the suspension of due process and other constitutional guarantees.
As the case moved toward trial, civil libertarians voiced concern. Lesbian activist Starlene Rankin, who was media coordinator of the Illinois Green Party and organizer of the Lavender Green Caucus, asked (in GayToday.com): “Do the allegations merit investigation and possible prosecution? Yes. But do they constitute a terrorist threat to national security, justification for excessive bail, arbitrary upgrading of charges from misdemeanors to serious felonies, and abrogation of due process? No. … The implications are frightening for anyone who engages in political protest and civil disobedience.” Two hundred gay and non-gay activists, including myself, signed an open letter asking for fair treatment and leniency on bail for the two men. Independent media watched the case closely. One African-American website had it listed under “resurgent McCarthyism.”
Yet hundreds of liberal gay people supported Pelosi’s gambit with editorials, letters to the editor, and press releases. And why? Because Pasquarelli and associates in act-up/s.f. already had a history of conflict with the AIDS establishment in San Francisco. Not only had act-up/s.f. disagreed on some AIDS science, they had asked tough but legitimate questions about a variety of things, including accountability on AIDS spending, and the possibility that the San Francisco Department of Health might support an AIDS quarantine. Many in the establishment were outraged. Some called Pasquarelli et al. “murderers” because they didn’t go along with some current scientific thinking on HIV. Indeed, there had already been attempts by the district attorney’s office to prosecute them for felony violence—but the felony charges never stood up in court.
Now, for the two men facing current charges, the opposition’s charge escalated from “murder” to “terrorism.” But the FBI declined to prosecute under the Patriot Act. Once again the DA’s office couldn’t make felony charges stick. Pasquarelli and Petrelis—both HIV-positive and suffering health setbacks after 72 days in jail—finally plead no contest to five misdemeanor counts of making threatening or annoying phone calls. The sentence: three years’ probation. The terms were fairly restrictive, including restraining orders that bar them from contact with the alleged victims. The good news from this trial is that some American judges can still distinguish between trumped-up terrorist charges and real terrorism. The bad news is that some gay people—and a Democratic politician looking for their vote—were willing to use federal terrorist charges when misdemeanor harassment was the real legal issue.
With the HIV prevention battle heating up again, a Seattle group—the msm hiv/std Prevention Task Force—recently issued a Manifesto that amounts to a declaration of war on “barebackers.” While many states make it a felony to knowingly transmit HIV, and while convictions under these laws are rising, some rank-and-file Manifesto supporters want to go farther than that—they are clamoring for barebackers to be prosecuted as “terrorists.” One cheerleader’s home page proclaimed: “The greatest terrorist threat to the American homeland security are people who bareback and pass on the AIDS virus to others. The sooner president Bush realizes this and does something. The better off our homeland will be.”
In fact, President Clinton had already declared AIDS a national security threat before he left office! So it wouldn’t be a big legal stretch for the government to charge a few circuit boys or “gifters” with committing terrorism. Personally, I think barebacking should be condemned, but I don’t think that trumped-up terrorist accusations should fuel that condemnation. What’s more, it’s ridiculous for the federal government to use terrorist charges against those who knowingly transmit HIV, since most state laws already punish this crime severely. Recently South Dakota sent a college student to prison for four years on charges related to HIV transmission.
Response to Criticism
These new battles raise a question: how do gay organizations and leaders generally respond to legitimate criticism from their own kind? Perhaps because most of us spent part of our lives caged in the closet, feeling ourselves the object of cruel judgment by heterosexual society, we often overreact to any form of criticism, however justified it might be.
In the AIDS arena, a new kind of activist has gay defenders of the establishment nervously reaching for their big guns. Across the country, so-called “accountability activists” are demanding that nonprofits, service organizations, corporations, and government agencies demonstrate greater transparency and answerability to people with AIDS and to the public on many fronts.. On the East Coast, one noted accountability activist, act-up/dc member Wayne Turner, was recently profiled by the Washington Blade, noting: “Through protest demonstrations, article-writing, and press releases, Turner has targeted what he calls ‘bloated’ AIDS organizations, inefficient government AIDS agencies, and unaccounted for spending of millions of dollars in federal and local AIDS funds. To the dismay of some AIDS groups, Turner has supported federal audits of these groups.” Another eastern activist, Kevin Nuttall, questions the accuracy of CDC infection statistics and, by extension, the effectiveness of any prevention policy based on these statistics. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Patrick Monette-Shaw is alleging ineffectiveness of local prevention programs, violations of sunshine ordinances by local AIDS politicos, and other issues (detailed at thelastwatch.com).
More act-up chapters are breaking ranks with the AIDS establishment to shout about these internal problems. One huge issue is boiling up around federal AIDS spending, since in the past the recipient agencies and organizations were required to do little or no accounting on how they actually spent millions of dollars in Ryan White funds. Several years ago, launch of government investigation was sparked by some ugly scandals, starting with Ryan White funds embezzled from the San Juan AIDS Institute in Puerto Rico. Another big issue festers around drug pricing, with activists demanding that pharmaceutical corporations be held accountable for how they research and price their products.
Unfortunately, some gay organizations and individuals are hostile to allegations that the big AIDS machine often doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. This hostility creates situations in which whistleblowers shiver with concern about reprisals. PWA’s hesitate to rock the boat because they fear denial of service by their AIDS service organization—something that has actually happened to several HIV+ accountability activists. With a few exceptions, most GLBT media bend over backwards to avoid discussing these issues. As the accountability movement gains ground, some powerful gay people may stop at nothing in their legal efforts to quash any questioning that threatens their funding, their lucrative job, their high-profile political position.
Finally, we must count the human cost of these bloody in-house battles. Not only does the diversity of our GLBT political scene suffer, but money goes to legal costs at a time when we need every pink dime to sustain our community’s businesses, nonprofits and personal needs. These battles also destroy jobs and vital services. The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center move to capture the AIDS Ride’s fundraising market cost the Center over $600,000 in legal fees. Result: frantic cost-cutting that terminated sixty staff jobs and some of the Center’s primary services.
The GLBT world is faced with ominous changes, and some of its biggest challenges to date. My biggest concern is not how we deal with homophobia from outside our ranks, but how we deal with each other from within. Can we settle fierce debates without resorting to these new and deadly legal weapons? To do so, I hope that we can build a model of internal activism that will heal, not harm, our essential bonds with each other.
— Los Angeles, October 2003
Patricia Nell Warren, author of The Front Runner and other novels, writes a column on AIDS politics for A&U magazine. She helped found Just Dissent (justdissent.com), a task force on peaceful protesters’ rights. Her commentaries are archived at patricianellwarren.com.
