Intersectional Crises in an Anti-AIDS Organization: Inequalities, Community Boundaries, and Conflict within ACT UP/LA

This Paper explores demobilization dynamics within ACT UP/LA, a direct-action, militant anti-AIDS organization fighting for more AIDS care and research resources in the 1980s and 1990s. By exploring the group’s “intersectional crises” – when inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity and class affected group members’ decisions about the proper course of politics, especially community boundaries – I argue that although participants in ACT UP/LA were aware of the challenges of inequalities for creating unity, members could not forestall sometimes explicit and sometimes unspoken discord with gendered/racialized/ethnicized components. After clarifying what I mean by intersectionality – given the concept’s expansion since the 1980s – I examine three quite different intersectional crises within ACT UP/LA: 1) the late 1991 influx of participants as a result of California governor Pete Wilson’s veto of a lesbian and gay rights bill, which challenged ACT UP/LA to accept new members not versed in the gender and racial/ethnic stances of the group; 2) disputes beginning in early to mid- 1992 about resources used for the needle exchange project, and about efforts to move the Monday night General Body meetings to different sites around LA in order to reach more people of color; and 3) local, negative reverberations about “competing” gendered national protest actions during the 1993 “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights and Liberation.” The first two crises were primarily about tensions that erupted as ACT UP/LA was perceived as a successful militant anti-AIDS group; the last crisis was the most explicitly seen as a gendered division at the time of the Washington DC march. Conflict over gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality inequalities —were enervating for ACT UP/LA activists. Scholars need to think concretely about how activist spaces are continuously crosscut by large-scale, longstanding relationships of inequalities, making solidarity a similarly continuous challenge.