Anthony Petro, an assistant professor of modern Christianity at Boston University, spoke Thursday at Winston Hall about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an organization started in the ‘80s that helped lead the pro-GLBT revolution.
The movement was not meant to promote gay rights, but to raise awareness and end the AIDS epidemic through legislation, medical research and treatment of AIDS, Pedro said. Because the disease was primarily linked to the GLBT community at the time, Petro said ACT UP made a name for itself and the group became largely identified with the GLBT community.
Petro said that while it is more widely known now that people of the GLBT community aren’t the only people who can contract AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases, back in the 80s, the general public thought that being gay instantly made you contract a rare form of cancer and a rare form of pneumonia, what we now know to be AIDS.
A testament to the extremeness of this belief, Petro said, was that originally this disease was called gay-related immune deficiency.
It wasn’t until heterosexual celebrities and married women with cheating husbands came forward about having AIDS or HIV in the late ‘80s that the general public started to accept that AIDS was not something procured by being homosexual, Petro said.
Petro said the largest group ACT UP openly opposed was the Catholic Church.
Members of ACT UP were appalled at the Catholic Church’s decision to not condemn the GLBT community, but to go against education of safe-sex and condom usage in New York City Public Schools, Pedro said.
Later in the ‘80s when knowledge about AIDS was more widely available, the Catholic Church released to the public that the best way to not contract AIDS was for homosexuals to be monogamous or to practice abstinence, Petro said. In response, ACT UP created numerous ads directing negative attention toward Pope John Paul and Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor.
Petro said the Reagan administration was even targeted because ACT UP thought the administration did not give AIDS official government and public attention causing the deaths of many people due to lack of attention and research on the disease.
Petro said this inadvertently led the pro-gay revolution and become one of the first large movements of modern times to bring attention to the issue of “reasonable religion,” referring to how involved religion should be in the decisions of politics and everyday life aspects such as sex.
Petro said he is currently writing a book titled “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion,” about the history of American religious participation in the AIDS epidemic and its role in the promotion of a national-moral discourse on sex.
