On a chilly October morning in 1988, about 1,500 protesters descended upon a nondescript glass office building in suburban Rockville, Maryland. They were Aids patients, friends and queer activists from all over the country protesting what they saw as the failures of the US Food and Drug Administration to approve medications to fight Aids. The disease had already killed at last 45,000 Americans in less than a decade.
As amused and quizzical government employees watched from the windows, protesters marched in circles in front of kitted-up riot police. The protesters lifted posters in the air, many with the now-iconic image of a bloody handprint and the words: “The government has blood on its hands; one Aids death every half hour.” They chanted: “Fifty-two will die today/ Seize control of the FDA!”
From within the crowd emerged 27-year-old activist and Aids patient Peter Staley, wearing a knapsack containing a rolled-up banner proclaiming Act Up’s slogan, “Silence=Death”, and a roll of tape, headed straight for FDA’s front door.
“I didn’t think I was going to survive five years beyond that moment,” Staley told the Guardian this week. So he did what he could to draw attention to their plight.
With a boost from friends, Staley catapulted on to the concrete awning over the entryway, a makeshift stage in front of the crowd.
“I just quickly leaned over, pulled the banner out, started hanging it up,” Staley recalled. “People started noticing, they started chanting as I was slowly getting the banner fully enrolled. And after I got the last corner up, I turned around and raised my arms in victory. And the place just went nuts.”
Photos of a young Peter Staley triumphantly raising the “Silence=Death” banner at the FDA became the iconic image of this watershed moment in queer protest history. This demonstration, called “Seize Control of the FDA”, on 11 October 1988, was the first major national action of the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act Up.
“This was really the start of the national Aids movement,” historian and activist Sarah Shulman wrote in her seminal history of Act Up, Let the Record Show.
Now, on the 35th anniversary of the event, activists still working on Aids and LGBTQ+ activism look toward “Seize Control of the FDA” as inspiration for the work left to be done.
“Small groups of people, as long as they have a lot of determination and are highly strategic, can create change and create change pretty quickly depending on the issue,” said Staley, who is now 62 years old. “It is worth noting that the FDA caved to almost all of our demands within nine months, within a year after that demonstration.” That included a parallel-track clinical drug trial program by which even patients not in the official trial group could access potentially life-saving medications, and a new FDA rule promising faster development of Aids drugs, a key request from the protesters.
Jeremiah Johnson, executive director of Prep4All, an organization working on access to HIV-prevention medications, believes Act Up still signifies “the importance of being creative with our responses, of punching above our weight and of not giving up even in the darkest moments”.
“Sometimes when I feel myself running up against what are some pretty heavy challenges for our movement right now to keep things going, I think about what it must have been like to be Peter Staley and everyone else at the FDA, not knowing if you were going to live or die … and then still having that strength to get up on a building and show that kind of defiance,” he continued. “[That] is still something that I and so many others draw from, particularly in these challenging times.”
The work continues. An estimated 630,000 people globally died from HIV-related illnesses in 2022 alone, according to the World Health Organization.
“The Aids epidemic is not over until it’s over for everyone,” said Jason Rosenberg, communications director for leading HIV-prevention global nonprofit AVAC. “We cannot see an end to the epidemic unless we have universal access to top-of-the-line, revolutionary treatments and also prevention methods” for patients around the world of all demographic groups, not just often white, gay American cisgender men.
Beyond the specifics of Aids and HIV work, though, Rosenberg says the “Seize Control of the FDA” protest also inspired a new generation of queer activists to be proud and loud as they fight for their rights in all spheres of gay life.
The protest was “a moment of reclaiming our power,” he said.
“It was a group of 1,500 or so advocates that said, ‘We are reclaiming our destiny and future,’” he continued. “Hopefully [that message] continue[s] to resonate in our minds and in our advocacy. We can reclaim that power of shaping how we fight for ourselves and our loved ones.”
