I did the slow boring work of activism for a lot of years. I went to work everyday to manage the computer network of a social services agency where all my colleagues were social workers. We did job placement and training for people living with HIV and AIDS. Our clients were mostly former heroin users. Often, a client we had come to love would fall off the wagon, and their case manager would have to kick them out of the program. (Mandatory as per the state contract we were fulfilling.)

And we just keep going, doing the best we could. We had more successes than we had failures, but the failures weighed on us. None of us earned a lot of money, but we were all right. We made enough to live and pay the bills.

Evenings and weekends were for Act Up, and what I remember most about those years are not street protests and theater, but endless general meetings and sweaty, stressful committee meetings. Endless organizing. Endless trying to keep everything going and mostly but not perfectly succeeding. And of course all that was volunteer work. Didn’t pay a penny.

Then came effective treatment for HIV, the Lazarus Effect and all that, and I felt free to accept a job offer with an entrepreneurial IT firm.

What we did was … not very important. At all.

But oh my God, we made a lot of money. We entertained clients in some of New York City’s most expensive restaurants. We jetted around the country. We hob-nobbed with seriously wealthy people. And my partners encouraged me to keep my mouth shut about having once worked at a grungy non-profit with a bunch of social workers. (Can you just hear the sneering drip as the word social worker got pronounced?)

It took me a while to realize what was going on. My partners were pretty nice people, but I was surrounded by people who sincerely believed that they were more important and better than most because they made a lot of money. And only because they made a lot of money.

I have a hard time imagining any of them working 12-hour days to help a former heroin addict with HIV (and an indeterminate but short life span) get a job so she could spend quality time with her granddaughter and set a good example for her.

But I sure can imagine them selling get-rich narratives.