★★★★☆
Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism by Peter Staley
Published on October 12, 2021
by Chicago Review Press
Genres: Memoir, non-fiction, gay, queer, LGBTQ, politics, social justice
“The stakes were enormous, because our fucking survival as a people was on the line. By now it was obvious that no one else would save us. We realized that our only chance to stop the slaughter was in this room.”
Synopsis
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.
My Thoughts
I’d been aware of ACT UP and their activism during the worst of the AIDS crisis, how they’d fought and advocated for governments to give a damn that entire populations of people were dying from a disease with no cure or effective treatment. But until I read Never Silent, I wasn’t aware that Peter Staley was the instigator behind many of the AIDS protests I’ve read about in my pursuit of queer history in years past.
I can’t recommend Never Silent enough to anyone wanting to learn more not only about the AIDS crisis, but a firsthand account of what it was like on the frontlines of the battle for justice. I found it fascinating to read Staley’s coming-of-age story as a gay man and queer person, in a decade when a vastly misunderstood disease was starting to wipe out an entire generation of gay men. I might be aging myself when I say this, but Staley is only two months older than my own father. I’ve always known AIDS wiped out a whole generation of queer men, but imagining it from the perspective of men my father’s age, men I grew up around, being wiped out by a virus that the government did nothing to stop, was quite profound.
My only complaint about Never Silent would be that it’s not necessarily a book to read if you have no prior knowledge of AIDS or the activism launched in support of government response for treatment. There were some chapters with a lot of talk of politics I didn’t necessarily understand because I didn’t know anything about them before I started reading. But that’s because this is a memoir, not an oral history, so it’s up to me to seek out more books on the history of AIDS activism should I want to learn more.
Highly recommend Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism during a year where it should be obvious more than ever that Pride is a protest.
“We were determined to cram as much life into whatever time we had left, with a burning need to find joy and comradery as respite from the grief and pain. Our very sanity depended on it. Our activism depended on it.”
If we aren’t already, let’s be friends on Goodreads!
When you shop through affiliate links on this page, I may earn a commission.
Jeffrey Reads 