ACTIVISM
ACT UP Returns to St. Patrick’s Cathedral 30 Years Later
Demonstration commemorates historic 1989 Stop the Church protest
BY MATT TRACY
Some of the AIDS activists
who shook the city’s political
and religious landscape
with their massive
demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
three decades ago returned
to the same place on December
8 and delivered the same kind of
message to the Catholic Church:
Stay out of public health affairs.
“Thirty years ago, I was here
with ACT UP New York to stop the
Church,” said Michael Petrelis,
who was one of the 111 activists
arrested on December 10, 1989
when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT UP) and Women’s
Health Action Mobilization
(WHAM!) organized against the
Catholic Church’s policies toward
LGBTQ people, abortion, and HIV/
AIDS.
That 1989 demonstration included
ACT UP’s Michael Petrelis speaks during a December 8 demonstration commemorating the 30th anniversary
of the Stop the Church protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
a whopping 4,500 protestors,
many of whom chained themselves
to pews or fell to the ground
during Mass in an effort to highlight
MATT TRACY
the dire sense of urgency facing
the community at a time when
the Catholic Church — led by Cardinal
John O’Connor — ignored
reality and public health offi cials
dragged their feet in their response
to the epidemic.
Little has changed since then in
the Catholic Church.
“We’re back here 30 years later
because the Church still hates
gays, the Church is still against
abortion, and we’re here to tell the
Church to stay out of public health
matters,” Petrelis added.
The 30th anniversary demonstration,
featuring roughly a dozen
activists holding signs that read
“CONDOMS SAVE LIVES” and
“STOP THE CHURCH,” protested
outside of the cathedral as the
building’s grand, towering doors
opened. Many churchgoers departing
Sunday morning Mass stared
as they exited, and one man walking
past the protestors decided to
interrupt them.
➤ ACT UP RETURNS, continued on p.17
When the Church Stopped Calling the Shots
BY NATHAN RILEY
When somebody mentioned
“The Church”
in the New York City
of yesteryear, that
said it all. The Church was the
Catholic Church and the cardinal
spoke for it. The Church commanded
awesome power in the city
and in Albany, and yet the maturing
of the gay rights movement and
the emergence of AIDS grassroots
direct action — both coming during
the 1980s — would prove that
it was no longer invincible.
For many decades, the Legion
of Decency had told Catholics if
a movie was good for them, but it
was so anti-sex that ridicule over
time made its ratings lose their
sting. The pill made sex safer for
heterosexuals and their sexual
revolution preceded the blossoming
of gay rights visibility. In the
early 1970s, the Church failed to
stop Albany from repealing the
ban on abortion.
Years that the Church spent
blocking a New York City gay rights
bill collapsed in 1986 when City
Council Majority Leader Thomas
Cuite retired, and his successor,
Peter Vallone, allowed a vote to
take place. In a 21 to 14 vote on
March 20 of that year, the measure
passed after a decade and a
half of organizing.
The climate, however, had not
shifted unambiguously for the better.
Two days before the Council
approved the gay rights measure,
The New York Times published an
op-ed by William F. Buckley, a conservative
giant — and a Catholic —
arguing, “Everyone detected with
AIDS should be tattooed in the upper
forearm, to protect commonneedle
users, and on the buttocks,
to prevent the victimization of
other homosexuals.” Others spoke
darkly of quarantining those with
HIV, or homosexuals generally.
And in June 1986, just three
months after the Council victory,
the US Supreme Court, in a vitriolic
majority opinion, upheld state
sodomy laws, giving renewed life to
the notion that homosexuality is a
crime. Hatred and damnation had
received a wink and a nod from the
nation’s highest court.
Even before ACT UP was founded,
activist Michael Petrelis was
using his booming voice to shout,
“You’re killing us.” This past Sunday,
Petrelis was back in New York
from his home in San Francisco to
lead the of 30th anniversary remembrance
of the December 10,
1989, Stop the Church demonstration
at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
where thousands of ACT UP and
Women’s Health Action and Mobilization
(WHAM!) members protested
the Church’s intransigence
on gay and AIDS issues, with some
entering the Sunday Mass to cuff
themselves to the pews or lie on
the ground.
Even before that controversial
demo, Petrelis had already for
years been committing an even
more courageous action — living
as an openly HIV-positive person,
working with the Lavender Hill
Mob, a precursor to ACT UP. For
him and many others, fi ghting
shame and ostracism, demanding
health care, and slamming high
drug prices were urgent issues facing
all gay men.
In their book “Out for Good,”
Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney
point to a May 13, 1986
cover story in The Advocate, the
community’s slick newsmagazine,
titled “The AIDS Slur: Why Gays
Should Stop Taking the Blame
and Start Fighting Back,” which
argued, “We’ll survive only if we
stop apologizing — for AIDS, for
our loves, our lives. We’ll survive if
we let loose our rage.” The article
Clendinen and Nagourney noted,
“bristled” with a rage that “would
soon become familiar to the entire
world.”
A year later, in a March 10, 1987
speech at the LGBT Community
➤ CATHOLIC CHURCH POWER, continued on p.17
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