Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York
Review by Rachel Pitkin
In six parts, Ron Goldberg’s Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP guides readers through what can often seem like a dizzying terrain of AIDS-related political networks, medical jargon, and direct-action campaigns. The tour is intimate and strikingly honest. Goldberg, a self-described unsuspecting activist, charts his growth from an aspiring theater actor to core ACT UP member and finally—with the publication of The Boy with the Bullhorn—to a “witness.”
Kazan’s efforts, combined with the power of the city’s labor movement and astute political alliance making, led to the building of 40,000 homes for working class New Yorkers. At a time when The Housing Question has rarely been more pressing than since Frederick Engels first raised it in 1872, recognising Kazan’s legacy is important. He successfully developed a model that worked: an alternative to the brutality of the housing market that, despite many challenges, has endured.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
Reviewed By Ivan Bujan
In a recent conversation with my students in my undergraduate course that explores the politics of pleasure, the class reaffirmed my belief that the current US sex education still gives little practical information about sex and sexuality, largely reinforcing the Victorian myths about abstinence, monogamy, and reproduction. One student had not heard about HIV/AIDS or its history before coming to college. Only a few had heard about Gran Fury and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and their importance in the history of contemporary politics of sexuality.
Crisis, Disease, Shortage, and Strike: Shipbuilding on Staten Island in World War I
By Faith D’Alessandro
On April 6th 1917 the United States officially joined the First World War. The casus belli was the sinking of three US ships by German U-boats on March 18th. However, the U-boat issue and its devastating consequences had been under way for far longer, and would fuel a shipping crisis throughout the remainder of the war. In February 1917 U-boats had sunk almost 540,000 gross tons of shipping, and in March another 600,000, creating an enormous need to increase merchant ship construction. The urgency of mobilization and defense affected ship manufacturing centers across the country, including the huge shipbuilding industry in New York Harbor, which was centered around three major areas: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the Camden-Bayonne area of New Jersey; and the North Shore of Staten Island.
Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present
Vivian Truong Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence.
New York’s water problem has been on my mind because in the evening after I arrived in the city on September 1, 2021 to start a fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, Hurricane Ida barreled through the region. The water was devastating. Dozens died in basement apartments or when they unwittingly drove their cars into flooded streets and got swept away by the rushing water. Media filled with video of torrents of water pouring into the subway and dramatic water rescues in New Jersey.
“Loose Hogs, Fancy Dogs, and Mounds of Manure in the Streets of Manhattan”: An Interview with Catherine McNeur
Interviewed by Amanda Martin-Hardin, Maddy Aubey, and Prem Thakker of the Everyday Environmentalism Podcast
Today on the blog, CatherineMcNeur discusses how during the early 19th century, working class New Yorkers living in Manhattan raised livestock and even practiced a form of recycling by reusing urban waste. Battles over urbanizing and beautifying New York City ensued, involving fights over sanitation and animals in the streets; and how to manage recurring epidemics and diseases like cholera that ravaged the city. McNeur explains how these tensions exacerbated early forms of gentrification in the 19th century, and contemplates how we can learn from the past to create more equitable urban green spaces and shared environmental resources in the future.
The AIDS crisis peaked in New York City from 1987 to 1993. In those six years, thousands of HIV-positive men and women died of opportunistic infections from weakened immune systems. While the disease has become linked to gay white men in the public imagination, women, people of color, and intravenous drug users made up the majority of people with AIDS (“PWAs”) in New York City. Anger over the slow response by government and drug companies, as well as lack of the public’s disinterest, prompted many advocates to form groups that sought to raise awareness and promote research into effective treatments for HIV-related conditions.
In the twelve months before January 2021, 2,225 people were buried on Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground. At a time when the Island’s operations are undergoing the most significant organizational changes in its modern history, that’s the highest number of such burials recorded since the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
