Collection of newsletters, pamphlets, stickers, handbills, and ephemera from ACT UP San Francisco and its offshoot, ACT UP Golden Gate. In 1990, Act Up Golden Gate split off into a separate chapter reflecting differences in focus: AUGG planned to concentrate on treatment and treatment access, while AUSF would focus on broader social issues. The two chapters were initially cooperative, but by 1994 ceased working together. ACT UP/Golden Gate would later rename itself Survive AIDS in order to fully disassociate itself from its former partner, as AUSF moved away from the mainstream medical consensus on HIV treatment throughout the 90s.

This difference in messaging between the two activist communities is evident in the included materials: handbills from ’88 and ’89 protest FDA delays in drug approvals and demand greater access to experimental treatments, and AUGG materials continue to do so throughout the span of the collection. AUSF publications from 1990 onward, however, increasingly oppose the medical and pharmaceutical establishment much more broadly: one card warns: “DON’T TAKE THE HIV TEST!” Project Inform’s Martin Delaney is a promoted community speaker on a 1988 flyer issued by the unified ACT UP chapter, pre-rupture; but a few years later, an AUSF handbill crudely collages hypodermic needles over his face (“MARTY SEZ: TAKE YOUR PILLS!”) and declares on the verso that “Project Inform, as paid drug company representatives, has shown incredible contempt for the health and well-being of people with AIDS.”

Post-split, AUSF’s positions came to encompass strong support for legalizing marijuana, opposition to animal research; opposition to use of the Western blot test for HIV; opposition to the promotion of certain forms of treatment and pharmaceutical companies; and, ultimately, denial of HIV as a cause of AIDS. A pamphlet for the ACT UP medical marijuana dispensary describes this position as their “challenge to the HIV hypothesis;” this item is undated but cites a 1997 study.

Other dated material spans the years from 1988 to 1995, with a few undated pamphlets from later in the ’90s. Notable items include a satirical “ACT UP ENQUIRER,” issued by the Golden Gate chapter, a National Enquirer-style parody newspaper mixing joke headlines with semi-serious, angry articles: e.g., “Government reports show WOMEN DON’T EXIST!!”, a piece attacking the CDC and NIH for excluding women from drug trials. References to the Bush Sr. administration date this publication between 1990 and 1993. Also included are five issues of AUSF’s newsletter issued in 1989-90. Contents include calls to direct action and organizing, local and national reporting, and memorials to the deceased.

As the ’90s proceed, AUGG documents its actions and accomplishments with pride, defining its “serious work” against the ACT-UP “stereotype” of “loud and destructive” arrest-prone troublemakers: “Gone are the days when ACT UP was the fringe. We’re now the mainstream in AIDS work.” But even so: “And yes, when the situation merits it, we get loud and we get arrested.” A valuable primary-source snapshot of activist evolution and response to changing circumstances and obstacles from the height of the AIDS crisis.

$650