People with AIDS didn’t die at die-ins.
Many popular posts on Tumblr claim that AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s regularly deliberately died in the streets as part of “die-in” protests. But this just isn’t true.
Here’s the definition of “die-in” from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) New York’s direct action manual, “Time to Become an AIDS Activist,” c. 1991:
A die-in is when protesters lie down on the ground to represent the thousands who have died or are being killed by the policies and neglect of the government or your target. Often people chant (“How many more have to die,” “We die, they do nothing,” etc.). Sometimes protesters carry cardboard tombstones with names or slogans, creating an instant AIDS cemetery, and others times the “dead” bodies are outlined in chalk with massages written in.
I’ve read several books and countless articles and interviews about AIDS activism, talked to ACT UP alumni, and participated in ACT UP die-ins. ACT UP is known for its boldness in bringing death from AIDS into the public sphere — from David Wojnarowicz’s jacket proclaiming “IF I DIE OF AIDS – FORGET BURIAL – JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA” to the political funerals in which members marched their friends’ bodies through the streets. But I’ve never heard of anyone dying at a die-in.
Die-ins didn’t originate with AIDS activism — they were used at least as far back as the 1970s and are still used today, by activists fighting anti-black police brutality, gun violence, and more. But the concept is the same. Protesters lie down to represent dead bodies. But they don’t die.
It should be obvious after just a moment’s thought that people with AIDS did not (and do not) know exactly when they were going to die and therefore could not (and cannot) synchronize their deaths en masse. These posts never use the word “suicide,” but that is what it would have to be — not a mass death from disease, but a mass suicide. This just doesn’t make sense in a movement marked by fierce struggle for life.
So many of us don’t give it that moment’s thought because even after all these years, we lack the empathy to truly think of people with AIDS not as romantic political symbols, but as full complex human beings. Human beings fighting for life, being cared for by loved ones until the end, human beings whose deaths were (and are) personal as well as political.
Imagining their deaths as a planned political statement allows us to pass the buck on some level, to act as though it was OK. And it encourages us to relegate AIDS and AIDS activism to the past, like a flashback in a movie that doesn’t have to conform to the rules of reality.
But AIDS is not history. There is still no cure, no vaccine, and treatment is inaccessible for millions of people with HIV. A million people died from AIDS globally in 2016. Major HIV news goes unpublicized, and crucial prevention methods are price-gouged for pharmaceutical profit. Rampant HIV stigma adds fuel to the epidemic.
AIDS activism isn’t history either. ACT UP NY still meets every Monday. You can fight AIDS just by getting informed and starting a conversation about HIV in your community.
Let this be an opportunity to rethink your assumptions about HIV and AIDS and seek out real information. The more people do that, the closer we can get to ending AIDS for good.
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