Never Silent

ACT UP and My Life in Activism

Peter Staley, Anderson Cooper

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781641601450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

" Never Silent is a gorgeous book... Peter Staley has written an electrifying primer for anyone who's thinking/worrying/wondering about how to change/save the world." —Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Angels in America 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject in David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuing activism In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—ACT UP—in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. ACT UP would change the course of AIDS, pressuring the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and three administrations to finally respond with research that ultimately saved millions of lives. Staley, a shrewd strategist with nerves of steel, organized some of the group's most spectacular actions, from shutting down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to putting a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms. Never Silent is the inside story of what brought Staley to ACT UP and the explosive and sometimes painful years to follow—years filled with triumph, humiliation, joy, loss, and persistence. Never Silent is guaranteed to inspire the activist within all of us.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Praise for Never Silent
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Anderson Cooper
• 1 Wall Street Catharsis
• 2 Troublemaker
• 3 Seven Nights, Eight Men
• 4 Innocence Lost
• 5 Searching for ACT UP
• 6 Fundraising and Fucking
• 7 Unleashed
• 8 AZT
• 9 “You Can All Now Consider Yourselves Members of ACT UP”
• 10 A Feel-Good Condom
• 11 TAG
• 12 Surviving Survivor’s Guilt
• 13 Fighting Tina
• 14 Dallas Buyers Club
• 15 Dinner with Tony
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments