WORLD AIDS DAY
Peter Staley’s Memoir Leaves Much to Be Desired
Longtime AIDS activist recalls memories from ACT UP
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
Peter Staley’s memoir, “Never Silent:
ACT UP and My Life in Activism,”
opens with him arriving at his job
at Morgan Guaranty where he was a
government bond trader. A “young gay stud in
501 Levi’s and a black leather jacket” handed
him a fl yer announcing an ACT UP demonstration
that was happening just a block away on
that March morning in 1987. In a chapter titled
“Wall Street Catharsis,” Staley writes that he
attended his fi rst ACT UP meeting a week later
and then a year later “I would leave my job on
disability and devote what time I had left to the
activism I had watched on TV that night.”
At this time, Staley had known for just under
two years that he had HIV, the virus that led to
what was then called an AIDS diagnosis and
the very real prospect of dying. He left Morgan
and began working for another Wall Street fi rm
where he was less successful. Then AIDS activism
became his full-time job. In 1988, he joined
a protest that briefl y stalled the opening of the
New York Stock Exchange.
This transition from Wall Street bond trader
to AIDS activist should be an interesting perhaps
even a compelling story. The catharsis
should be apparent and emotion that compelled
it should be evident. They are not. Using
effi cient prose, Staley discusses this part
of his life, his childhood, and how he arrived
at Wall Street and left that industry for ACT
UP in the fi rst roughly 70 pages of this book.
We get the facts, but we are not drawn in. This
is the problem with this memoir. It’s dull; it
shouldn’t be.
The story of how an HIV-positive gay man
abandoned what would likely have been a lucrative
career in fi nance for AIDS activism should
be interesting at a minimum. When you consider
that this man believed he might be dead
soon, that story goes from interesting to riveting.
Or it should.
There are a few moments in this memoir that
are exciting, such as Staley’s description of the
stock exchange protest or another held at the
North Carolina headquarters of Burroughs
Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company that was
selling AZT, an anti-HIV drug, for an excessive
price. There are obvious stakes in those stories.
Traders on the stock exchange fl oor wanted to
attack Staley and his co-conspirators. They
were protected by stock exchange security. At
Burroughs Wellcome, the protestors sealed the
doors to the offi ce they seized. Police entered by
breaking through the fl imsy offi ce walls. Staley
made these moments gripping, so I could not
understand why he was unable to do that in the
Peter Staley’s memoir, “Never Silent: ACT UP and My life in Activism” was published in October.
rest of his memoir.
There are too many instances where Staley
gives short shrift to topics that are interesting
and deserve lengthier discussions, such as ACT
UP’s protest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989
or how the organization lost some of its most
talented members, including Staley, in a dispute
in the early ’90s over continued engagement
with the federal bureaucracies that regulate
drugs and HIV research dollars. In fairness
to Staley, these topics are worth a book of their
own, but they required more in this memoir.
The story about Burroughs Wellcome received
the attention it deserved and it included a bit
of information that I was not previously aware
of. In 1989, Staley and Mark Harrington, an
ACT UP member who would eventually found
the Treatment Action Group, along with Staley
and others, fl ew to North Carolina to meet with
Dr. David Barry, the company’s lead scientist in
virology. Barry told the activists then that the
“fi nal real management of this disease is going
to depend on multiple drug therapies, period.”
That was true and the approval of drugs that
used double or triple therapy began in the early
’90s. Those drug regimens have been highly effective
against HIV.
Part of the problem with this book is that Staley
chose to largely present his story in chronological
order, so we are treated to 20 pages on his
childhood in a chapter titled “Troublemaker.” If
what we are to understand from this chapter is
that throwing parties in your home when the
parents are out of town or wrecking the family
DONNA ACETO
car can predict a life in activism, then American
streets would be overfl owing with activists
protesting one cause or another. Staley’s childhood
and his time at Oberlin were ordinary for
any white, middle class American kid and they
are more likely to predict an ordinary middle
class life after college. That they did not produce
that result in Staley’s life should be a story
that engages us.
The 12th chapter, titled “Surviving Survivor’s
Guilt,” seems like the end of this book, but then
Staley offers another three chapters and an epilogue
that read like an obligatory exercise in life
after AIDS activism.
The fundamental error in this book is revealed
in the Acknowledgments. Staley writes
that it took him three years to complete what he
called “my f**king memoir“ on social media.
“My problem was that I hate writing — like
a serious lifetime loathing of it,” Staley writes.
“I’ve selected jobs and careers that don’t require
writing, such as bond trading or running a
website (where I paid other people to do it).”
The solution to this problem is not to write
your own memoir. The solution is to hire someone
who enjoys writing to tell your story. That
would produce an engaging book on a life and
death topic that is inherently compelling, but
Staley brags that he “never caved by using a
ghostwriter.” He should have caved. This book
reads like a long-form grocery list.
NEVER SILENT: ACT UP AND MY LIFE IN
ACTIVISM | By Peter Staley | Chicago Review
Press | $26; 288 pages
NOVEMBER 25 - DECEMBER 1, 2 16 021 | GayCityNews.com
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