The early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were marked by uncertainty, false information, and fear about the cause and transmission of the disease. Patients experienced stigma and neglect in the city’s health care system. In 1985, parents in Queens launched a school boycott to protest the Board of Education’s policy of allowing children with AIDS to attend public school. Despite having roughly half the country’s reported cases, New York City did not mount a systematic response to the emerging epidemic, and the care and housing of AIDS patients was left to volunteer groups such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC).
The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), a direct action group founded in 1987, used stunning visual art, spectacular street theater, and civil disobedience to draw attention to government inaction and the need for effective treatment and prevention to end the AIDS epidemic. ACT UP targeted prominent conservative Catholic leader Cardinal John O’Connor in its “Stop the Church” protests for his outspoken opposition to homosexuality, condom use, sexual education in public schools, and abortion. AIDS activists also sought to draw attention to the archdiocese’s role as a key provider of health and social services, including the city’s first comprehensive-care ward for AIDS patients, which enforced religious directives barring discussion of condoms despite receiving substantial public funding.
AIDS activists succeeded in achieving many of their goals, including lowering the cost of and improving drug treatments for HIV/AIDS, involving patients in decision-making regrading medical research, and changing the definition of HIV/AIDS to incorporate opportunistic infections that effect women and poor people living with the virus. The extremely high death rates from the disease left many feeling desperate by the mid-1990s, however, and led ACT UP to stage political funerals, in which activists carried the bodies of people who died of AIDS through the streets of Manhattan.