United in Anger: A History of ACT UP Study Guide

INTRODUCTORY LETTER

Dear Educator,

Thank you for your interest in the film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP.  And thank you for your help in preserving the legacy and the lessons of one of the most important and successful activist organizations of the past 50 years.  ACT UP sprang to life at the nexus of powerful social dangers: homophobia, racism, sexism, an anti-healthcare culture, corporate greed, institutional elitism within the medical and scientific communities, a newly identified virus, and a government that, rather than intervening in order to save the lives of its citizens, chose to remain committed to deadly inaction.  Until ACT UP forced it to change.

The scope of these intersecting problems is so vast as to make deep understanding of ACT UP and the HIV/AIDS crisis difficult.  As a documentary film that uses archival footage and oral histories of surviving ACT UP members as its primary narrative elements, United in Anger offers an immediacy of experience that encourages subjective response as it educates.  The United in Anger Study Guide is meant to accompany that individual viewing experience, extending it to classroom discussions and activist contexts.  Indeed, the film captures the complex nature of ACT UP’s brand of social engagement so as to make it an infinitely teachable activist phenomenon across a variety of scholarly disciplines and among activists of many stripes.

In the classroom, ACT UP will be a vital addition to American history curricula, history of science classes, sociology courses that examine social protest movements and activist traditions, and LGBTQ studies courses that seek to understand queer politics and sociality.  United in Anger can help political science professors to reframe debates about power relations among individuals, subculture, and dominant culture, while art history and graphic design classes will encounter important examples of twentieth-century activist art and the questions of representation they raise.  The film will enable media culture classrooms not only to analyze the documentary film genre as a medium but to examine the birth of video activism.  To students planning on entering the medical fields, United in Anger will initiate discussions about professional ethics, the politics of medicine, and the state of healthcare in the U.S.  For teachers of composition and rhetoric, the film offers a rich target text for understanding how meaning is shaped within culture.  I believe it will resonate with and draw upon the disciplinary expertise of teachers and scholars across these many fields.

Likewise, I believe the film holds meaning for activists and social justice workers.  ACT UP can become model, palimpsest, or provocation for other activism.  At its core, United in Anger attests to one fact: change is possible through individual responsibility and committed group advocacy, and in this way its creators hope the film is fundamentally enabling to its activist viewers.

Yet a “complete” understanding of ACT UP, which would require a broadly interdisciplinary grounding, a high degree of individual investment, or first-hand activist experience may still seem elusive.  For that reason, this Study Guide has been designed as a pedagogical experiment in interactivity among viewer, film, and filmmakers.  The majority of the discussion questions in this Guide contain links to clips from the film, and this is meant both to contextualize the questions and to allow for the specificity of response that the questions push toward.  But further, many questions also link to video responses by director/producer Jim Hubbard and producer Sarah Schulman.  As former ACT UP members and creators of the ACT UP Oral History Project, Hubbard and Schulman hope to offer detailed, nuanced, and deeply informed commentary that will help viewers grapple with the complexities that defined ACT UP.

Again, thank you for your decision to make United in Anger a part of your pedagogy, your activism, and your experience with HIV/AIDS.

Matt Brim

Author, United in Anger Study Guide
Professor of Queer Studies
College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center
City University of New York