*CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS*

ACT UP Beyond New York:
Stories and Strategies from a Movement to
End the AIDS Crisis

Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) started in New York in 1987 as a direct action activist group “united in anger to end the AIDS crisis.” Within a few years, there were over a hundred autonomous chapters in the US and around the world, but beyond the story of the New York City chapter this history has largely disappeared from the public record. ACT UP Beyond New York seeks to change this—part historical corrective, part rallying cry, and part activist handbook, this anthology will include essays, conversations, and documentation from dozens of ACT UP chapters, from the 1980s to the present, in order to bring these crucial stories to public attention.

ACT UP Beyond New York will consist entirely of writing by activists about their experiences in ACT UP, on their own terms. Each ACT UP chapter intervened in a specific cultural, political, and social environment, and I am particularly interested in the specificities of each group. Each chapter had its own methods of fighting for HIV/AIDS treatment and healthcare access, resisting structural homophobia and discrimination against people with AIDS, building community, and shifting consciousness.

What were the focuses of your group? The successes and failures? What specific challenges did you face? What inspired you the most, and what let you down?

I am interested in all the ways people came together (and failed to come together) to fight for universal healthcare, racial justice, women with HIV/AIDS, sex workers, gender transgression, disability justice, bisexual inclusion, prisoners with HIV/AIDS, trans liberation, condom distribution, needle exchange, housing, and a cure for HIV—not to mention all the affinity groups and coalition actions to confront every issue of the day, from anti-war activism to abortion access, police brutality to gentrification.

I’m particularly interested in how ACT UP chapters made connections between government inaction and structural homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny, transphobia, and ableism. And, failed to make these connections.

What are your reflections on ACT UP Network meetings, experiments in consensus process, intergenerational contact across the lines of identity and experience, and strategies for organizing the most impactful protests? What about organizing that centered HIV+ people and those with other immune disorders (PISD caucus), the perils and possibilities of sex and activism, and ACT UP chapters that continue today?

How did race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, religion, ethnicity, indigeneity, and rural/urban experience affect organizing? What about national origin, Global South/Global North perspective, HIV status, and access to treatment and prevention, over time and in shifting contexts?

What were the dynamics within your ACT UP chapter? What forms of collaboration, conflict, jealousy, trauma, and transformation emerged? What surprising relationships became possible, and impossible? What was secret, and what was public? What inspired you to organize, and how did you mourn the loss of so many fellow activists, lovers, and friends? How do you continue to mourn, celebrate, and intervene in the AIDS crisis today?

In our current dystopian moment, what can we learn from how ACT UP organizers faced police repression, resurgent homophobia, right-wing “family values” attacks, and brutal austerity politics? What are your tales of camaraderie and desperation, bravery and commitment, creativity and inspiration, success and failure?

People need to understand their own history in order to grasp what is possible. I’m interested in your most intimate stories, in all their detail and specificity—everything you worry the world refuses to recognize is what I want to spotlight here.

About the editor: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of seven books, most recently Touching the Art, and the editor of six anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. She has written widely about the AIDS crisis, including in her books The Freezer Door and Sketchtasy, and her new novel, Terry Dactyl, which will be out in November. Her time in ACT UP San Francisco changed her life.

About the publisher: Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago whose mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. Haymarket strives to make its books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, and internationalist Left.

Guidelines: Please submit nonfiction personal essays of up to 4000 words, as Word attachments (no PDFs, please), to nobodypasses@gmail.com. Short essays are great, as are conversations in Q&A format, essays centered around a particular action, and pieces that include visual elements (especially flyers, posters, and other documentation). Feel free to contact me with any queries. Contributors will be paid $200 for each essay appearing in the anthology, and every contributor will receive a copy of the book. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2025, but the sooner the better!

ALL THAT SHELTERING EMPTINESS

All That Sheltering Emptiness is a meditation on elevators, hotel lobbies, hundred dollar bills, the bathroom, a cab, chandeliers, cocktails, the receptionist, arousal, and other routines in the life of a New York City callboy. Gorgeously hand-processed in full 16mm glory, this short film is a collaboration between Joey Carducci and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. All That Sheltering Emptiness explodes the typical narratives of desire, escape and intimacy to evoke something more honest.

LOSTMISSING

Lostmissing is a public art project about the friend who will always be there, no matter what, and what happens when you lose that relationship. After losing my closest friendship of 16 years, I wanted to express myself in public space in a way that felt personal and more meaningful than a private expression because I wanted to connect to other people and other lostmissing stories. This project is a public expression of grief in order to feel hopeful again—it’s about that random flyer you see, and you don’t know what it means exactly, but your eyes get bright all the sudden.

Starting in 2009, I distributed these flyers as widely as possible so people could put them up in their own towns and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms and galleries and meeting spaces and community centers and bars and workplaces and on the street and on abandoned buildings in bus shelters and on public transportation at shows of all kinds and in sex venues and restaurants and on bulletin boards and in store windows and in letters and in taxis and on the internet and near dramatic views and tourist attractions and in your own art and fluttering on the street in the wind.

Click an image to view full size:

So far, there have been posters sightings in cities as wide-ranging as Little Rock, AR; Denver, CO; New York, NY; St. Louis, MO; Kolkata, India; Rockville, MD; Seattle, WA; Berlin, Germany; Hartford, CT; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Montréal, Canada; Asheville, NC; Los Angeles, CA; Albuquerque, NM; Brisbane, CA; Houston, TX; Beacon, NY; Istanbul, Turkey; Washington, DC; Corvallis, OR; Baltimore, MD; Santa Fe, NM; Eugene, OR; Leeds, England; and San Francisco, CA. I've done gallery installations in Santa Fe and New York, and posters have also appeared in the Chicago art festival SOMETHING NEW, Berkeley literary zine TRY, San Francisco Art and Politics, UK zine Reassess Your Weapons, and Semiotext(e) journal Animal Shelter. Feel free to print any of the posters if you’d like, and send me photos of posters in public if you are inspired. Together maybe we won’t feel so lostmissing.