On March 24, 1987, about 250 people gathered at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in lower Manhattan and sat down in the street. Police came. Seventeen people were arrested. The next day, almost nobody noticed.[1]
Within two years, those same people — and thousands who joined them — had shut down the Food and Drug Administration, stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange, put a condom on a United States Senator's house, and begun changing the course of the worst epidemic of the 20th century.
ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — was founded in rage and built on grief. It was also, by almost any measure, one of the most effective activist organizations in American history. The people who built it deserve to be known by name. This page is for them.
March 10, 1987 · New York City "How Many of You Have Lost Someone to AIDS?"
Two days before that first Wall Street action, playwright and activist Larry Kramer stood before a crowd at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in Manhattan on March 10, 1987. He asked the room: how many of you have lost a close friend to AIDS? Nearly every hand went up. How many of you know two people who have died? The hands stayed up. How many of you know five? Ten? More than ten?[2]
Then he asked the question that changed everything: why aren't you all more angry?
By 1987, more than 25,000 Americans had died of AIDS-related illness. Ronald Reagan had given his first major speech on the epidemic — four years and tens of thousands of deaths into the crisis. AZT, the only FDA-approved drug, cost $8,000 to $10,000 a year and was made by a pharmaceutical company openly profiteering from a plague.[3] The FDA's drug approval process could take a decade. People were dying while waiting for drugs that existed.
Two weeks after Kramer's speech, on March 24, 1987, ACT UP held its first demonstration on Wall Street. They targeted Burroughs Wellcome, the maker of AZT. They demanded lower drug prices, faster approvals, expanded access. Seventeen people were arrested. The movement had begun.[1]
What ACT UP stood for — in full: AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Non-partisan. United in anger and committed to nonviolent direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Their founding principle: Silence = Death. Their method: make the invisible impossible to ignore.
1987–1996 The Actions: What They Actually Did
ACT UP is often remembered as angry people with signs. That undersells it by about a mile. At its peak, ACT UP combined street theater, scientific expertise, legal strategy, media savvy, and sheer physical courage in a way that few activist organizations have matched before or since. Here are the moments that changed things.
Seize Control of the FDA
An estimated 1,500 ACT UP protesters descended on FDA headquarters. They blocked doors, walkways, and roads. They launched smoke grenades. They chanted "Hey hey, FDA, how many people have you killed today?" and hoisted a black banner reading "Federal Death Administration." Roughly 176 people were arrested.[4]
It was the largest protest at a federal agency since the Vietnam War. The FDA had been approving AIDS drugs in 5–10 years; Europe could do it in 9 months. People were dying in the gap.[5]
✓ Within about a year, the FDA's "parallel track" was adopted — allowing experimental drugs to reach dying patients before full approval. Drug approval timelines shortened by two years.Chained to the VIP Balcony — Trading Stopped for the First Time in History
By September 1989, more Americans had died of AIDS-related illness than had been killed in the Vietnam War. AZT still cost $8,000–$10,000 per year. Peter Staley and six other ACT UP members infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange, chained themselves to the VIP balcony, and dropped fake $100 bills onto the trading floor while blowing fog horns — disrupting the opening bell for the first time in the Exchange's history.[6]
The action targeted Burroughs Wellcome directly. The message was simple: you are profiteering from a plague.
✓ Four days later, Burroughs Wellcome cut the price of AZT by 20%, claiming they had "planned to do so." Nobody believed them.[7] Peter Staley was arrested. He considers it among the best days of his life.Stop the Church
Cardinal John O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, had publicly condemned condom use, opposed needle exchange programs, fought sex education in public schools, and declared that the Church's position on homosexuality was simply correct. People with AIDS were dying, in part, because the Church's influence was blocking the public health measures that could prevent transmission.
4,500 protesters gathered outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. Some activists entered the Mass and disrupted the service — an action that divided ACT UP internally and generated enormous controversy. 111 people were arrested; 43 of them inside the church. The Church was furious. The mainstream media was horrified.[8]
✓ The action brought unprecedented national attention to the Church's role in the AIDS crisis. It remains one of the most debated — and most effective — protests of the era.The Giant Condom on Jesse Helms' House
Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina had spent years blocking AIDS funding, opposing condom education, and declaring that people with AIDS got what they deserved for their "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." He had passed the "Helms AIDS Amendments" — legislation that blocked federal funding for any AIDS education materials that "promoted or encouraged homosexual activity."
Peter Staley organized an early morning action with the Treatment Action Guerrillas affinity group. They drove to Helms' house in Arlington on September 5, 1991, unfurled a giant inflatable condom over the building, and lettered it: "A CONDOM TO STOP UNSAFE POLITICS. HELMS IS DEADLIER THAN A VIRUS." They made sure Helms was not home. "The last thing we wanted," Staley later wrote, "was to spend our lives in jail for giving a senator a heart attack."[9]
The action received wall-to-wall media coverage. It was furious and wickedly funny at the same time — exactly the combination ACT UP did best.
✓ Helms never proposed or passed another life-threatening AIDS amendment. He kept complaining about "radical homosexuals" until he died in 2008. The condom outlasted him.The Ashes Actions — Carrying the Dead to Power's Door
Inspired by a passage in David Wojnarowicz's memoir Close to the Knives, ACT UP organized political funerals — processions carrying open caskets through the streets of New York, the bodies and ashes of people who had died of AIDS-related illness made publicly visible because the government had preferred to pretend they didn't exist.[10]
On October 11, 1992 and again in October 1996 — both just before presidential elections — ACT UP activists carried the cremated remains of people who had died of AIDS-related illness and scattered their ashes on the White House lawn.[10] Among the ashes scattered: activist David Wojnarowicz himself, who died on July 22, 1992 at age 37.[11] People who had been told their deaths were acceptable losses.
✓ These actions remain among the most shattering political protests in American history. They said: we will not let you unsee us. We will not let you unmourn us.1935–2020 Larry Kramer: The Necessary Anger
He was impossible, essential, enraging, and irreplaceable.
Larry Kramer was born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was a screenwriter, a novelist, and a playwright. He was gay at a time when that was dangerous, angry at a time when that was considered inappropriate, and right about almost everything at a time when almost nobody wanted to hear it.
In August 1981, as the first reports of the mysterious illness appearing in gay men began circulating, Kramer was already sounding the alarm. On August 11, 1981, he called 80 men into his Greenwich Village apartment to hear from Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien about Kaposi's sarcoma in his gay male patients — a gathering GMHC now marks as its Founders Day. In early 1982, Kramer co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) with Nathan Fain, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White to provide services to people with AIDS when no institution would. About a year later, he was pushed out of GMHC's leadership for being too aggressive, too angry, too much.[12]
He didn't stop. In 1985, his play The Normal Heart brought the early AIDS crisis to Broadway — raw, furious, semi-autobiographical. In 1987, after his speech at the Community Center, he founded ACT UP. He was arrested. He was dismissed. He was called a troublemaker by people who preferred a quieter kind of dying.
He also called Anthony Fauci an "incompetent idiot" — in print, in a 1988 open letter published in the San Francisco Examiner. Fauci, initially stung, eventually engaged. The two became, improbably, genuine allies and friends. Fauci later said that Kramer changed the way the NIH thought about patients as partners in research. That Kramer was right.[13]
Kramer was HIV-positive for most of his adult life. He received a liver transplant in 2001. He fought addiction and illness and the deaths of nearly everyone he had loved. He kept writing, kept organizing, kept being impossible.
He died on May 27, 2020, at age 84. ACT UP still exists. GMHC still exists. The FDA drug approval process he forced open still exists. His plays are still performed. His anger did not go quietly. It went everywhere.
The Core The People Who Built It
Peter Staley
Diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex in 1985 while working as a bond trader at JP Morgan. Joined ACT UP in 1987 after being handed a flyer on his way to work. Co-founded Treatment Action Group (TAG). Organized the NYSE action, the Jesse Helms condom, and the Burroughs Wellcome office occupation. Arrested ten times for civil disobedience. Author of memoir Never Silent. Co-founder and Board Chair of PrEP4All — still fighting, still right.
Still Active · PrEP4All Board ChairMark Harrington
A founding member of ACT UP's Treatment and Data Committee — the "Science Club" — who taught himself clinical pharmacology and FDA regulatory science to fight the system from the inside. Co-founded Treatment Action Group (TAG) when it split from ACT UP in 1992. For decades TAG has remained one of the most rigorous HIV treatment advocacy organizations in the world.
TAG Executive DirectorMaxine Wolfe
Lesbian activist who came to ACT UP through the feminist and anti-war movements and became one of its most brilliant strategists. Co-led the Women's Caucus and drove the four-year campaign to change the CDC's AIDS definition. Helped design the tactics — die-ins, direct actions, the combination of spectacle and science — that made ACT UP so effective.
ActivistBob Rafsky
Journalist and ACT UP member whose confrontation with Bill Clinton at a 1992 campaign event became one of the defining moments of AIDS activism. Rafsky interrupted Clinton's speech, demanding action: "We're dying while you're running for president." Clinton responded — and the exchange, captured on video, forced AIDS onto the campaign agenda. Rafsky died of AIDS-related illness in 1993.
Died 1993Sarah Schulman
Lesbian novelist, playwright, and ACT UP member whose book Let the Record Show is the definitive history of ACT UP — and a direct challenge to every narrative that centered only white gay men. Schulman documented what actually happened, including the central role of women, lesbians, and people of color. Still writing, still publishing, still correcting the record.
Author · ActivistDavid Wojnarowicz
Painter, photographer, writer, and ACT UP member whose rage at the government's indifference to the epidemic produced some of the most powerful art and writing of the 20th century. His memoir Close to the Knives inspired the Ashes Actions. His painting "When I Put My Hands on Your Body" is among the essential works of the era. Died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, aged 37.
Died 1992 · Age 371958–1990 Keith Haring: Art as Weapon
He gave the movement its visual language — and worked until the very end.
Keith Haring grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania and came to New York City in the late 1970s to study at the School of Visual Arts. He found his voice in the subway — chalk outlines of dancing figures, radiant babies, barking dogs on the blank black advertising spaces of the MTA. By the mid-1980s his work was recognized worldwide. He was one of the most famous living artists in America.
He was also gay and deeply embedded in the communities that were being devastated by AIDS. He watched his friends die. He watched the government look away. He tested HIV-positive in 1987 and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, and made an immediate decision: his diagnosis would be public and his art would respond to it.[14]
In 1989 Haring designed the "Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death" poster for ACT UP. The design features three figures in his signature style mimicking the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" proverb — covering their eyes, ears, and mouth. The poster was wheat-pasted across New York City by ACT UP activists, appearing on buildings, buses, subway cars, and billboards.[15] Haring died on February 16, 1990, of AIDS-related complications. He was 31 years old.[14]
Before he died, he founded the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children's programs. He painted a memorial mural in the bathroom of the LGBT Community Center in New York City — a space still known as the Keith Haring Bathroom. Madonna dedicated the final date of her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour as a benefit for his memory.
The Keith Haring Foundation continues today — funding HIV/AIDS organizations, supporting arts programs for children, and keeping his work in circulation. His imagery is still everywhere. That was exactly the point.
See the full story of art, artists, and the epidemic in our companion piece: Art, Artists & AIDS →
1946–1990 Vito Russo: "Why We Fight"
If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from homophobia. If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from racism. If I'm dying from anything, it's from indifference and red tape, because these are the things that are preventing an end to this crisis. If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from the fact that not enough rich, white, heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anybody to give a shit.— Vito Russo, "Why We Fight," 1988. He died of AIDS-related illness on November 7, 1990. He was 44.
Vito Russo was a film historian, writer, and one of the founding voices of ACT UP. His 1981 book The Celluloid Closet — a landmark history of gay and lesbian representation in Hollywood — had already made him one of the most important cultural critics of his generation. When AIDS arrived, he brought the same analytical clarity and moral urgency to the epidemic.
"Why We Fight" — delivered on May 9, 1988 at an ACT UP demonstration in Albany, and again outside the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington that October — is one of the great speeches of the 20th century. It refuses the framing of AIDS as a medical problem with a policy solution. It insists that what is actually killing people is not a virus but a political failure — a failure of will, a failure of compassion, a failure to see the dying as fully human and worthy of the same urgency the government would direct toward a different population.[16]
"Living with AIDS," Russo said, "is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches."
Russo died on November 7, 1990. He was 44 years old. GLAAD — the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which he helped found — gives the Vito Russo Award annually in his honor.
The Ledger What They Actually Won
ACT UP is sometimes described as important but ultimately unsuccessful — a movement that couldn't stop the epidemic. This is wrong. ACT UP changed the institutional landscape of American medicine in ways that persist today.
FDA: Drug approval timelines shortened by two years. The "parallel track" allowing experimental drugs to reach dying patients before full approval — adopted within one year of the 1988 action. Patients included as partners in research design, not just subjects. These changes shaped the FDA's response to every subsequent epidemic, including COVID-19.
NIH: Clinical trials reformed to include women and people of color. The Treatment Action Group (TAG), founded by ACT UP members, transformed how HIV science is done — insisting on community involvement in research priorities and trial design.
CDC: AIDS definition expanded on January 1, 1993 to include cervical cancer, recurrent bacterial pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, and a CD4 count below 200 — finally counting the infections affecting women, injection drug users, and people of color, and making hundreds of thousands of people newly eligible for benefits and care they had been denied.[17]
Pharmaceutical industry: AZT price forced down. The principle that companies cannot simply profiteer from publicly-funded research during a health crisis — established through ACT UP's pressure — became a cornerstone of subsequent drug access advocacy globally.
Culture: The language of patient rights, of community-led research, of "nothing about us without us" — this is ACT UP's legacy. It reshaped how the world thinks about who gets to have authority over a medical crisis.
Now Still Fighting: The Work Continues
ACT UP New York still meets. Still protests. When the Trump administration went silent on World AIDS Day 2025, Peter Staley called it "very reminiscent of the Reagan administration." The people who survived the first crisis recognized the pattern immediately — the silence, the indifference, the preference for not naming what is killing people.
PrEP4All — co-founded by Peter Staley — is fighting for a national PrEP program and universal access to HIV prevention. In December 2025, Jeremiah Johnson, PrEP4All's Executive Director, rang the Nasdaq opening bell as part of the Save HIV Funding campaign. ACT UP tactics, ACT UP energy, new generation.
Treatment Action Group continues to do the scientific and policy work that Mark Harrington and his colleagues pioneered in the late 1980s. GMHC continues to serve New Yorkers living with HIV. The organizations ACT UP built or inspired are still in operation, still fighting the same battles with the same insistence that people with HIV deserve to live.
Larry Kramer is gone. Vito Russo is gone. David Wojnarowicz is gone. Bob Rafsky is gone. Keith Haring is gone. Most of the people who built this movement died in it. What they built did not die with them. That was the whole point.
Read next in this series: This piece is part of a four-part historical suite. When Nobody Else Would: Lesbians and the AIDS Crisis → covers the women who were there from the beginning. Shame, Stigma & HIV → covers the internal experience that activism fought against. And coming soon: Art, Artists & AIDS — Keith Haring's full story, Visual AIDS, the Red Ribbon, the Names Quilt, and the artists the epidemic took.
"We will not die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward."
That line is from Tony Kushner's Angels in America — written in the same years ACT UP was at its peak, drawing from the same community, the same grief, the same refusal. It captures something true about what ACT UP was doing: insisting that the dying be witnessed, that the deaths be named, that the government's preferred silence be shattered.
The people in this piece were not saints. ACT UP had fierce internal conflicts — about race, gender, strategy, whether to work within institutions or burn them down. The movement splintered. People burned out. Some died before they could see what they'd built.
What they left: a changed FDA. A changed CDC. Lower drug prices. Women counted in trials. A generation of HIV-positive people who learned — partly from watching ACT UP — that they did not have to accept the terms offered to them. That anger, in the right hands, is a form of love.
Larry Kramer asked in 1987: why aren't you more angry? The answer ACT UP gave, over and over, for years: we are. Watch what we do with it.
RiseUpToHIV.com — Built by a person living with HIV. Independent. Community-led. Florida-focused.
References & Sources
- NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, “ACT UP Demonstrations on Wall Street” — documents the March 24, 1987 first-ever ACT UP demonstration at Wall Street and Broadway near Trinity Church; 250 protestors targeted Burroughs Wellcome and the FDA; 17 arrests. New York Public Library, ACT UP New York Records finding aid, and ACT UP New York’s own capsule history (actupny.org) confirm the same details. nyclgbtsites.org — ACT UP Demonstrations on Wall Street · actupny.org — 1987 Capsule History · NYPL — ACT UP New York Records ↩
- NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. “ACT UP Demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange.” nyclgbtsites.org/site/act-up-demonstration-at-the-new-york-stock-exchange. Documents Kramer’s March 10, 1987 speech at the LGBT Community Center and the founding of ACT UP. ↩
- TIME. “AZT and the AIDS Crisis: The Deadly History of a Life-Saving Drug.” time.com/6260005/aids-azt-history. Background on AZT’s $8,000–$10,000 annual cost and Burroughs Wellcome’s pricing under public pressure. ↩
- ACT UP Oral History Project. “Seize Control of the FDA, October 11, 1988.” actuporalhistory.org/actions/seize-control-of-the-fda. Estimates 1,500 protesters and 176 arrests at FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. ↩
- The Guardian. “‘They didn’t want us to exist’: how a 1988 protest changed Aids history.” theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/11/act-up-hiv-aids-1988-fda-protest. On the “parallel track” policy adopted following the FDA action. ↩
- NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, “ACT UP Demonstrations on Wall Street” — on September 14, 1989, ACT UP members Peter Staley, Lee Arsensault, Greg Bordowitz, Scott Robbe, and James McGrath, joined by Robert Hilferty and Richard Elovitch as photographers, chained themselves to the VIP balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, dropped fake $100 bills, and disrupted the opening bell for the first time in history. Burroughs Wellcome lowered the price of AZT four days later. PBS FRONTLINE, “The Age of AIDS” Larry Kramer interview corroborates. nyclgbtsites.org — NYSE demonstration · PBS FRONTLINE — Larry Kramer interview ↩
- NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. “ACT UP Demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange.” nyclgbtsites.org/site/act-up-demonstration-at-the-new-york-stock-exchange. Burroughs Wellcome cut AZT’s price by 20% four days after the action. ↩
- The New York Times, “111 Held in St. Patrick’s AIDS Protest,” December 11, 1989 — contemporaneous coverage confirms about 4,500 protestors gathered outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral on December 10, 1989, that a smaller group disrupted the 10:15 AM Mass, and that 111 people were arrested total — 43 of them inside the church. ACT UP Oral History Project, “Stop the Church,” co-sponsored with WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization). nytimes.com — 111 Held in St. Patrick’s AIDS Protest · actuporalhistory.org — Stop the Church ↩
- HISTORY. “AIDS activists unfurl giant condom over Senator Jesse Helms’ home, September 5, 1991.” history.com/this-day-in-history/aids-activists-unfurl-giant-condom-senator-jesse-helms-home-act-up. Details Peter Staley and the Treatment Action Guerrillas’ action at Helms’ Arlington home. ↩
- ACT UP Oral History Project. “Political Funerals & Ashes Actions.” actuporalhistory.org/actions/political-funerals. Documents the October 11, 1992 Ashes Action on the White House lawn and its inspiration in David Wojnarowicz’s writing. ↩
- David Wojnarowicz Foundation. “1992 — Political Funeral.” wojfound.org/scholarship/timeline/1992-political-funeral. Wojnarowicz died July 22, 1992 at age 37; his political funeral was held five days later. ↩
- Gay Men’s Health Crisis, “History” and “GMHC Founders Day” — documents the initial gathering of 80 men in Larry Kramer’s Manhattan apartment on August 11, 1981 that led to the formal establishment of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in early 1982 by Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White. The New York Times, “Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84,” May 27, 2020 — confirms Kramer was “effectively ousted” by fellow board members roughly a year later for his confrontational style. gmhc.org — GMHC history · gmhc.org — Founders Day · nytimes.com — Larry Kramer obituary ↩
- Democracy Now! “Larry Kramer on the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP.” democracynow.org/2007/3/29/larry_kramer_on_the_20th_anniversary. Interview references Kramer’s 1988 open letter calling Anthony Fauci an “incompetent idiot,” and their eventual friendship. ↩
- Keith Haring Foundation, “Bio” — documents Haring’s AIDS diagnosis in 1988 and death from AIDS-related complications at age 31 on February 16, 1990. PBS American Masters, “Facing death from AIDS, Keith Haring kept creating” — documents his HIV diagnosis in 1987 after noticing a purple splotch on his leg. Washington Post obituary, February 17, 1990, confirms the death date. haring.com — Keith Haring biography · PBS American Masters — Haring diagnosis · washingtonpost.com — Keith Haring obituary ↩
- Whitney Museum of American Art. “Keith Haring, Ignorance = Fear, 1989.” whitney.org/collection/works/46387. Museum record for the ACT UP poster, produced in 1989. ↩
- Vito Russo. “Why We Fight,” speech delivered May 9, 1988, ACT UP demonstration, Albany, NY. Full text at actupny.org/documents/whfight.html. ↩
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “1993 Revised Classification System for HIV Infection and Expanded Surveillance Case Definition for AIDS Among Adolescents and Adults.” MMWR, December 18, 1992. cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00018871.htm. The revised definition took effect January 1, 1993 and added cervical cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, recurrent bacterial pneumonia, and a CD4+ count below 200. ↩