Stephen Barker: I found my angry motivation in the total neglect of the IV drug using population, entirely written off by state and local governments when established models of harm reduction were available to avoid the spread of the virus. What made you focus on helping IV drug users? ”We would gather in Rod Sorge’s apartment on the Lower East Side to prepare bags of bleach kits, condoms, and referral lists to distribute when we went on our ‘stroll’through hard-hit neighbourhoods to exchange sterile needles for fistfuls of bloody, blunt needles” – Stephen Barker It could feel like love – and a place for endlessly arguing strategy. “The floor” was where you could come up with an idea and then open it up: "Let's see what the floor thinks." There was a tremendous amount of support, whether feedback or congratulations or folks waiting at the station for others to be released from jail. It was a multi-headed thing that had its own life. It was a place for sharing information and civil disobedience training. Stephen Barker: Energising, inspiring, fractious, frustrating, galvanising, and ultimately life-saving. I’ve always been inspired by ACT UP and the way they put the power in the hands of the people. To find a big roomful of people who were not only distressed but also making plans to target that distress, with the strength of “We” – that was a first, crucial step. Stephen Barker: Fear, anger, and several friends. I couldn't just sit around despairing, with a solitary sense of helplessness. I still get chills thinking about what it was like coming-of-age in a city where the Aids virus was spreading so rapidly and destroying a generation, while the government ignored what was going on. Below, he speaks with us about the lessons he learned in the fight for life and the war against death.
#PICTURES OF EAZY E WITH AIDS SERIES#
He also participated in the first “Funeral March,” one of the most powerful public protests against the regime, wherein Mark Fisher’s body was carried in an open coffin from Judson Memorial Church to the steps of the Republican National Committee on the eve of the 1992 presidential election.īarker's photographs made during these actions, along with a selection from the “Nightswimming” series made in places where men regularly went for trysts, will be on view in the exhibition Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994, at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York (September 14 – October 28, 2017). Photographer Stephen Barker worked as part of ACT UP’s Needle Exchange Program on New York’s Lower East Side. They raged until their actions turned the tide.ĪCT UP took on every aspect of the crisis, coming up with grassroots solutions to clearly defined problems.
Their slogan, “Silence = Death,” became the rallying cry for activists, who, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, refused to go gently into the night. Organised as a leaderless network of committees working with affinity groups, members of ACT UP took it upon themselves to battle the disease and the government firsthand. In 1987, ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in response. The battle lines were drawn: it was the people vs. In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms amended a federal bill to prohibit Aids education, saying such efforts “encourage or promote homosexual activity.” Envision the fear spread by misinformation and ignorance, in the wake of a government that turned its back on the victims of the virus.ĭuring the first four years of the crisis, President Ronald Reagan never said a word about the disease, which had infected nearly 60,000 people – 28,000 of whom had died. Imagine a funeral for friends and family every week. It is difficult to express the scale and scope of the agony of illness and the pain of death that happened day after day, year after year, for decades. Where it was once an all-consuming force decimating lives, survivors of the terror and trauma rarely revisit those horrific times. More than 675,000 people have died of Aids-related illnesses since the epidemic first hit in 1981, devastating a generation coming-of-age in the wake of the gay, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.
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