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Nearly four decades have passed since ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) started in New York in 1987 as a direct action activist group “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

The 1980s were a time of mass death and government inaction, and ACT UP responded with confrontational protests that disrupted business as usual to force change. ACT UP’s tactics have become legendary, but its swift growth into a movement with over 100 autonomous chapters in cities large and small across the U.S., as well as in Canada, Europe, and Australia, has largely disappeared from the public record. There are however several chapters that continue today, including in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, and London, and new chapters that have emerged in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago to respond to draconian cuts in HIV/AIDS services and trans health care under the second Trump administration.

In Small Town Rage: Fighting Back in the Deep South, David W. Hylan shines the light on ACT UP Shreveport, which started in 1990 in a conservative Louisiana town far from the centers of institutional power. Based on dozens of interviews with ACT UP Shreveport participants that he conducted for his 2016 movie of the same name (co-directed with Raydra Hall), the book expands the narrative to show how activists in Shreveport organized in a hostile environment to transform the situation for people with HIV/AIDS.

In our current regressive political climate, which eerily echoes the conservative backlash of the 1980s and ‘90s (don’t forget that it was Ronald Reagan who first used the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”), ACT UP Shreveport’s legacy of resistance in the Bible Belt couldn’t be more relevant. In the interview that follows, Hylan discusses covert and overt organizing strategies, conflicts within the group, coalition actions, and confronting AIDS organizations, religious bigotry, and the KKK.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: When people first started publicizing ACT UP Shreveport meetings, it was done through existing relationships. Deborah Allen, one early member, made cards with the meeting time that people could hand discreetly across the table as an invitation to join. I’m struck both by the need for caution, and the intimacy in this encounter, and I wonder if you could speak to other innovations ACT UP Shreveport made to deal with the intense homophobia of Shreveport at the time.

In New AIDS Activist Memoir, Keiko Lane Aims to Articulate the Inexpressible

David W. Hylan: The cards Deborah made really capture what organizing in Shreveport required at the time. You have to remember that visibility carried consequences. People could lose jobs, relationships with their families, their churches, even their housing. So they couldn’t necessarily organize the way ACT UP could in New York, where you could put up a poster announcing a meeting and expect people to show up.

A lot of ACT UP Shreveport’s early organizing depended on trust. One person knew another person who might be angry enough, frightened enough, or simply fed up enough to get involved. Those cards could be passed quietly from one person to another without forcing someone to publicly identify themselves. But what is interesting is that this caution existed alongside some very public activism.

Once ACT UP Shreveport decided to act, its members could be extraordinarily visible. They papered The Shreveport Times, protested public officials, challenged the medical establishment, confronted the Klan, blocked the Red River bridge, and used sidewalk chalk and flyers to put AIDS and gay people into spaces where Shreveport would have preferred not to see them.

So there was almost a dual strategy: protect people........

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