Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York

by Ron Goldberg

Overview

Winner, "Gold" Independent Publishing Award (IPPY) for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction
Winner, The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, 34th Annual Triangle Awards
2023 Lammy Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography

A coming-of-age memoir of life on the front lines of the AIDS crisis with ACT UP New York.

From the moment Ron Goldberg stumbled into his first ACT UP meeting in June 1987, the AIDS activist organization became his life. For the next eight years, he chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated their Monday night meetings. He cruised and celebrated at ACT UP parties, attended far too many AIDS memorials, and participated in more than a hundred zaps and demonstrations, becoming the group’s unofficial “Chant Queen,” writing and leading chants for many of their major actions. Boy with the Bullhorn is both a memoir and an immersive history of the original New York chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, from 1987 to 1995, told with great humor, heart, and insight.

Using the author’s own story, “the activist education of a well-intentioned, if somewhat naïve nice gay Jewish theater queen,” Boy with the Bullhorn intertwines Goldberg’s experiences with the larger chronological history of ACT UP, the grassroots AIDS activist organization that confronted politicians, scientists, drug companies, religious leaders, the media, and an often uncaring public to successfully change the course of the AIDS epidemic.

Diligently sourced and researched, Boy with the Bullhorn provides both an intimate look into how activist strategies are developed and deployed and a snapshot of life in New York City during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. On the occasions where Goldberg writes outside his personal experience, he relies on his extensive archive of original ACT UP documents, news articles, and other published material, as well as activist videos and oral histories, to help flesh out actions, events, and the background stories of key activists. Writing with great candor, Goldberg examines the group’s triumphs and failures, as well as the pressures and bad behaviors that eventually tore ACT UP apart.

A story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, from engaging in outrageous, media-savvy demonstrations, to navigating the intricacies of drug research and the byzantine bureaucracies of the FDA, NIH, and CDC, Boy with the Bullhorn captures the passion, smarts, and evanescent spirit of ACT UP—the anger, grief, and desperation, but also the joy, camaraderie, and sexy, campy playfulness—and the exhilarating adrenaline rush of activism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781531508074
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ron Goldberg is a writer and activist. His articles have appeared in OutWeek and POZ magazines, Central Park, and The Visual AIDS Blog. He served as a research associate for filmmaker and journalist David France on his award-winning book How to Survive a Plague and enjoys speaking at high schools and colleges about the history of AIDS and the lessons and legacy of ACT UP.

Table of Contents

Preface | ix

Part I: Becoming an Activist
1 Awakening | 3
2 First Steps | 22
3 Welcome to ACT UP | 38
4 We Are Family | 52

Part II: Expanding the Agenda
5 ACT NOW and the Nine Days of Rain | 67
6 Taking Actions | 83
7 Summer Awakening | 97
8 Seize Control of the FDA | 117

Part III: Crashing Through
9 Targeting City Hall | 141
10 Storming the Ivory Tower | 163
11 Remember Stonewall Was a Riot | 179
12 Parallel Tracks | 192
13 Heading Inside | 211
14 Stop the Church | 222

Part IV: The Gorgeous Mosaic
15 The Myers Mess | 235
16 Time’s Up, Mario! | 248
17 Storm the NIH | 256
18 Inside or Out | 266
19 Can the Center Hold? | 280
20 Bombs Are Dropping | 301

Part V: Days of Desperation
21 Desperate Measures | 317
22 Splitting Differences | 333
23 Target Bush | 351
24 Strategies and Consequences | 370

Part VI: AIDS Campaign ’92
25 ACT UP / Petrelis | 383
26 The In-Your-Face Primary | 394
27 Unconventional Behavior | 402
28 Vote as If Your Life Depended on It | 417

Afterword | 437
Acknowledgments | 443
Notes | 449
Index | 483
Photographs follow page 214

Editorial Reviews

By building a bridge for both academic and public audiences, Boy with the Bullhorn accomplishes a difficult feat. Ultimately, the work reads as part memoir and part community history, but perhaps most significantly: a complete labor of love. Goldberg provides a gift of preservation, not only in the form of his and of ACT UP’s history, but in the form of a direct-action roadmap. . . [A]s he is sure to remind us, ACT UP provided light, laughter, and joy amidst pain and loss—a powerful message he hopes resonates with younger readers.

Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

This fine amalgam of memoir and queer history is constructive, emboldening, and necessary reading, and quite likely to inspire young queer readers to engage and participate in the enduring fight for LGBTQ equality and freedom.

Bay Area Reporter

In this long-awaited, searing memoir, Ron Goldberg, a central figure in early AIDS activism, takes us to the crackling inner-sanctum of ACT UP, the direct-action protest group that demanded–and won–steep increases in government spending and scientific action against the disease. Written as to an old friend, with warmth and dark humor, he recalls the chaotic strategizing sessions and bruising internal battles that put ACT UP in headlines for nearly a decade, and the band of street protesters he rallied onward with his bullhorn. This is political history at its most raw. But it is also Goldberg’s own unthinkable coming-of-age story, set in the darkest of eras. In his story, students of this groundbreaking organization finally have the definitive, 3-D account: every demonstration, drug trial, victory, and setback; plus the men and women who gave Goldberg the courage to survive and the reason to love. Buckle your seatbelts, readers. It’s a wild ride.—David France, author of How to Survive a Plague

In Boy with the Bullhorn, Ron Goldberg offers a stirring perspective on one of the most important social movements of the 20th Century as he recounts his coming of age in—and through–the tumult and triumphs of ACT UP. Whether describing the productive contentiousness of Monday-night floor meetings, the thrill of civil disobedience actions, the impact of a queer Passover seder with fellow activists, the relentless sorrow of too many funerals and memorial services or his birth as ACT UP’s rousing 'chant queen,' Goldberg details how grief, fury, rigorous labor, and deep love fueled his own, and the group’s, actions. Told with insight, humor, a huge heart, and abundant dramatic flair, this is a story about the pleasures, power, and necessity of activism.—Alisa Solomon, author and journalist

Ron Goldberg's Boy with the Bullhorn is an essential coming-of-age memoir, as a nice Jewish boy finds his way in the world as an impassioned gay man, and as a movement coalesces in the face of the defining plague of the late twentieth century. Goldberg tells his own story with great passion and healthy doses of humor, and he presents the sprawling history of ACT UP activism with the thoughtful rigor of a historian. Deeply personal, refreshingly modest, and as hopeful and optimistic as it is, as warranted, moving and elegiac, this is a marvelous work of living history, and I'm sure that readers who lived through the Age of AIDS and those for whom it feels like someone else's history will find it hugely rewarding.—Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer's English

Ron Goldberg’s Boy with the Bullhorn is something special. It’s not just the story of ACT UP and his coming of age with the organization but a bearing witness to a tragedy that took the lives of so many of his, our, friends, way, way before their time. In deep detail, Ron tells the story of how a nation abandoned a generation of young men and women, left them to die, ignored and how they fought back to survive. But even with footnotes galore, beyond the history what comes shining through this narrative is the beating heart of ACT UP, the sorrow, the anger, the joy and yes, humor of those moments, because Ron personified so much of who we were in those days long ago. And this is a more than a testament, a valedictory, it is a challenge to a new generation to take up the struggle. In showing how a small group of committed individuals changed the world, most of them terribly young, Ron provides hope that the challenges we face now from COVID19 to climate change, are not just fate, things which we must just surrender to, but we can and must act up and fight back. I can hear Ron’s voice in these pages, full of passion, full of hope, sassy and funny, cajoling us, urging us on once again. Pick up that bullhorn. Let’s go.—Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health

What a lively, richly textured history of ACT UP New York, a coalition of people who, united in anger, fought to the death to save our lives, and the lives of our comrades, lovers and friends. Moving with ease between the personal and the political, Ron Goldberg captures the sights and sounds of the early years of the AIDS crisis, and of the activist response to it. In this book, The Boy with the Bullhorn shows himself a gifted and generous movement griot.—Kendall Thomas

In Boy With The Bullhorn, Ron Goldberg offers extraordinary insight into the collective draw of ACT UP, how AIDS activism opened our hearts to care for the most vulnerable among us, and how a mix of queer activists, undaunted by the stigma of AIDS challenged the multiple structural violences of the US healthcare and welfare systems. Combining a coming-of-age narrative with a meticulously documented social history of his years in ACT UP New York from 1987 to 1995, Goldberg uses his caustic, campy “chant queen” voice to serve up a theatrical recounting of ACT UP’s creative expressions of civil disobedience. The real fierceness of Goldberg’s narrative lies in his insistent position as historical witness to the sexist, racist, and anti-gay government response to the AIDS crisis, exploding the reader’s perception of who we were as activists, the political changes we accomplished, and how through ACT UP we became the fullest and best expression of ourselves.—Debra Levine, Director of Studies in Theater, Dance & Media, Harvard University

A highly readable, brisk and factually based account of one of America's most seminal political movements of the past 50 years, told with great down-to-earth heart and a much-needed touch of campy, nice-gay-Jewish-boy humor from someone who was there and who was a part of it all. Goldberg's account of ACT UP sets itself apart from other titles on the movement with its sense of balance, fair-mindedness and above all focus on the sustaining role of love, friendship and even good old fun at a time of immense fear, sorrow and stress for many in NYC's 1980s-1990s queer and HIV/AIDS communities.—Tim Murphy, author, Christodora and Correspondents

Ron Goldberg came from a suburban background where middle-class Jewish boys were not supposed to rebel. Yet, his inner sense of justice, and his joy in performing and being socially connected to others led him to become a rank and file member of ACT UP, NY, thereby making a contribution essential for the intensely inter-dynamic movement to succeed in all the ways it did. His memoir of what he did and how he felt, in the face of a painful and complex emergency, contributes specificity of detail from inside his experience and will contribute to further filling-in of the larger, broader history. Another valuable chapter in what will hopefully be an unfolding series of varied and contrasting eyewitness contributions.—Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993

Goldberg is a brilliant chronicler of one of the most important social and political movements of the last century. His first-hand accounts, his insights, his dedication to accuracy, and his erudition make this book a vital contribution to our understanding of that period.—Moisés Kaufman, Artistic Director, Tectonic Theater Project

ACT UP New York, the mothership of queer history’s greatest movement, has long deserved a definitive narrative history. Boy with the Bullhorn delivers one beautifully. Who knew our “Chant Queen,” Ron Goldberg, was taking such careful and insightful notes, documenting every twist and turn the movement took? The sheer volume of activism we pulled off will astound those new to this history. Ron contextualizes every demo, defining the myriad issues, targets, and the resulting victories or fallout—warts and all. But even as he shares the excitement of being a part of this hyperactive AIDS movement, he doesn’t forget the epidemic’s devastating toll. Each chapter of the book is interrupted by their names in bold: David, Michael, Mark, and the others Ron lost. You’ll fall in love with each of them, and then watch them slip away. You’ll want to grab a bullhorn and scream.—Peter Staley, author of Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

Ron Goldberg’s passion ignites every page of this powerful, fiery memoir. ‘Inspiring’ might seem too trite a word to describe such a rich offering, but that’s exactly what this memoir is. It inspires in the deepest sense of that adjective, giving breath and life to history that continues to ripple out into our continuing organizing work. Those who need a good mix of rage, humor, and hope to keep them acting up will find plenty here to push, provoke, and empower.—Micah Bucey, author of The Book of Tiny Prayer

As the first fifteen years, 1981 to 1996, of the global AIDS crisis drift further from memory and evermore into the past, there has been an urgent need for survivors of that period to tell their stories, document the losses, share the strategies that helped activists overcome government and medical neglect of the pandemic, and convey the complex array of emotions – not always of grief, often of joy in community and personal agency – that characterized the era for people who lived through it and with it and in spite of it. I can hardly imagine a better narrator of that story than Ron Goldberg. Anyone who went to an ACT UP meeting or demonstration between 1987 and 1995 knew him as an organizer, street activist, and composer of ingenious chants. His audacity, theatricality, political acuity, and profound commitment to the AIDS and LGBTQ communities typified the best qualities of ACT UP New York, and are everywhere in evidence in Boy with the Bullhorn, a book that shows us not just how to survive a crisis, but how to become ourselves in the midst of it.—John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and What I Did Wrong

Goldberg [is] a thoughtful and capacious writer. . . A fine blend of history and memoir and a useful guidebook for activists.—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2022-08-23
A firsthand account from a frontline fighter against an establishment indifferent to those suffering from AIDS.

“Here we were, a brave new Queer Army ready to fight like hell for the living,” writes Goldberg about an early demonstration on the part of ACT UP, the activist group that, beginning in 1987, politicized the struggle to push medical research for AIDS into the forefront and to secure rights, medical and otherwise, for the ill and their loved ones. Drawing on lessons from the anti-war era, from sit-ins to guerrilla street theater, ACT UP was “bold, angry, and—unlike the other AIDS groups—dedicated to confrontation, not care giving.” Indeed, by the end of Goldberg’s years with the organization, the group had gone from marches to more provocative actions: “We’d held hundreds of die-ins, hoisted cardboard tombstones at the FDA, and carted empty coffins through the streets…we’d hurled ashes at the White House and carried a dead body through midtown Manhattan.” Spurred to turn a long-kept chronology of the movement into a book by playwright Larry Kramer, Goldberg, a thoughtful and capacious writer, allows that ACT UP may have caused divisiveness: “Strategic concerns aside, I don’t think it’s a good idea to shout people down, particularly when you’re a group always demanding to be heard.” Still, there was plenty of blather to shout down on the parts of Rudy Giuliani, Jesse Helms, and Ronald Reagan; even better-intentioned figures such as Bill Clinton and Anthony Fauci were not as helpful as they could have been. Whether sympathetic, indifferent, or hostile, the world stood by as millions died, just cause for anger. AIDS is still with us, but more manageably so, Goldberg closes in noting—a fact that owes at least something to ACT UP’s militance and refusal to go away, honoring its still-memorable slogan: “Silence = Death.”

A fine blend of history and memoir and a useful guidebook for activists.

Kirkus Reviews