What’s an interesting perspective! I started wearing “Silence Equals Death" t-shirts and buttons in 1990 as a member of Act Up fighting AIDS. We really didn’t see that Act Up slogan as being about gay liberation, though I’m sure lots of well-meaning people like you did.
The slogan and the Nazi-era pink triangle were designed to remind people that unconscionable numbers of us were dying of AIDS and that silence had largely been society’s answer to a devastating public health crisis.
We knew if cis/straight people started dying in the same kinds of numbers we were, a massive public health response would ensue. We both grieved and experienced outrage that no such response took place in reaction to our deaths. Thus, the deliberately provocative pink triangles comparing the US government to the World War II era German Nazi government. (Gay men wore pink triangles in the death camps.)
It’s also really interesting to me that you look back on the 1990s as an era of focused gay liberation activism. I can see how you would think that, because lots of progress got made with hearts and minds, but in reality, activism in the 90s was far less about gay liberation and far more about AIDS issues. We didn’t have a lot of time to push for equality legislation, because we were too busy with existential concerns.
Same-sex marriage emerged into public consciousness by the late 90s, but our big push didn’t really start until the next decade. Gays in the military became a thing in the '90s as well, but we lost. Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" was obviously well intended, but in a cautionary tale about unintended consequences, the military leveraged it to discharge far more gay service members than in the past.
I did a podcast just the other night with a group of queer young people, mostly students. One of them asked an insightful question: “Did the AIDS era advance queer equality, and if so, how?”
I told the kids that I think so, and lots of people think so. Because so many of us gay people and transgender women were suffering from HIV and AIDS, we became necessarily visible. We came out to our families, because we had. Many of us who had fled to inner cities with accepting queer communities went back home to the heartland to die.
Red ribbons were everywhere, and so were pink triangles. Good people like you wore them, because it was obvious that no one should have to die because of their sexual orientation.
Good people like you even conflated our AIDS symbology with a push for more general acceptance. Public tolerance and acceptance increased dramatically, though that had never been our intent. We were just trying to stay alive.
A few loud public figures like Jesse Helms tried to keep teaching hate, but most people didn’t want to hear it. Teaching people to hate folks facing a health crisis that’s decimating them is a tough sell. In the '90s, love won, and your story is just one example of how.
The question is, how do we translate that phenomenon to today?
