Yes! Tuesday night general meetings at Cooper Union were like family reunions — or church in the most positive sense of church as supportive community.

At my very first Act Up meeting, which I had attended in 1990 just a few months after arriving in New York City, I was cruised by a young man who soon became my best friend and occasional lover.

I've written about that meeting in a piece of memoir honoring his life, and I felt a little weird writing about being cruised. But Act Up really was very much like a family. The young man who cruised me was at the center of a tight group of friends who soon became my closest friends.

We'd lean against the back wall every Tuesday night and listen carefully, most carefully if an action or zap was coming up. We had to learn what the message was going to be, and we had to learn to stay on message in the street.

(This is something about Act Up that is probably harder for student protesters to emulate. Act Up up was small, tiny compared to student protest organizations. So even though general meetings were something like herding cats, media experts like Ann Northrup were still —usually—able to keep us fairly well message-corralled.)

After Tuesday meetings, Cooper Union would empty out and nearby diners and bars would fill up with the closest of friends — reconnecting, re-energizing, and processing what just happened.

Act Up had no hierarchy, on purpose. Committees and affinity groups had a lot of freedom of action, sometimes acting unilaterally. Nevertheless, leaders like Ann, Peter Staley, and Bill Dobbs were able to command respect because of their expertise and willingness to do the work. (Ann left her lucrative corporate media job to devote her life to Act Up, And Peter Staley left a lucrative Wall Street job.)

Thanks to people like that, we often did stay on message, in focus, and effective.

As you point out, art was a big part of that. I was sometimes more involved with art about safer sex education, particularly performance art, which is another big part of the story that I'm not sure has been well told, even to this day.

But I think you're very right that student protest leaders today could learn from some of Act Up's success with art as protest.

Thanks for writing this!