Having spent the better part of a decade in the trenches with Act Up, I'm often astonished when people tell me shaming is an ineffective tactic for social-justice activists.

Shaming was the central thrust of our tactics in Act Up, and shaming was very effective.

Obviously, that's not all we did. I spent many weekends doing street theater about safer sex, educating people in an entertaining way while distributing condoms and life-saving information.

For my day job, I worked in an agency, staffed and founded largely by Act Up people, that provided job training and placement for men and women living with HIV and AIDS.

We didn't just shame government officials, which is what people remember well from Act Up hay day in the late 1980s, and which you address very well. In the mid 90s, we took the shaming tactics to the homes and front lawns of pharmaceutical executives —after effective treatment came out that was producing a "Lazarus Effect," but only for people who could afford extortionate drug prices.

When pharmaceuticals refused to negotiate to lower their prices or to make life-saving drugs broadly available in other ways, we protested at the homes of their executives, because we wanted their neighbors to know what they were doing. We wanted their families and neighbors to be ashamed of them, to understand they were bad people.

Maybe "bad people" sounds simplistic, but when you're dying of AIDS because you can't afford a drug a pharmaceutical company spends pennies making, the descriptor sounds pretty apt.

That's an easy message to get across. And our shaming tactics worked very well. Nobody wanted us on their front lawn telling their neighbors but they were killing us by their greed.

It didn't take long for the pharmaceuticals to come to the table and start negotiating for real.

I like to point that out when people say shaming tactics are wrong or don't work.

Of course they work.