ACTUP, OWS team up to mark AIDS anniversary

About 500 ACTUP and Occupy Wall Street demonstrators joined forces to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the AIDS movement in lower Manhattan Wednesday and demand better health care.

Demonstrators young and old held up signs with a photograph of the iconic Wall Street bull that read: "Act Up & Occupy" and "Tax Wall Street: End AIDS." Some wore Robin Hood costumes.

Police kept peaceful demonstrators, who chanted "We are the 99 percent," on the sidewalk. They walked from City Hall to South Street Seaport and back up to Broadway, where they held a rally at Trinity Church.

"Today, we have reinvigorated AIDS activism, building this new coalition with Occupy Wall Street," said Eric Sawyer, co-founder of ACTUP, which stands for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. He said the OWS movement "has been a breath of fresh air for standing up for social justice. Something ACTUP has always done."

The newly allied groups advocated a Wall Street transaction tax that would be levied on stock, bond and derivative transactions. The revenue would fund universal health insurance. A similar proposal is being advocated in Europe, Sawyer said after the rally.

"I believe this will happen," he said, reminiscing about when ACTUP triumphed and helped create a global fund for AIDS health care, which now also targets tuberculosis and malaria. He said a Wall Street tax would generate $400 billion annually.

Celebrating ACTUP's 25th anniversary and returning to Wall Street is a natural evolution, organizers said.

In 1987, activists were pushing to make AIDS drugs generic and affordable, said Andrew Velez of Manhattan. "Our first action was Wall Street and protesting high prices for AZT. . . That was the beginning for me," Velez said. In 1989, ACTUP protesters chained themselves to a balcony in the New York Stock Exchange. Wednesday morning, organizers said that 19 people were arrested after they chained themselves together and onto a lamppost -- blocking traffic near the Stock Exchange. No one was arrested during the march, which started at City Hall.

"At that time, people were dying and they were being shunned and made to feel ashamed. It was a terrible way to die -- all alone," said Velez, who wore his original protest AIDS GATE T-shirt, which depicted former President Ronald Reagan with hot pink eyes. Reagan was criticized for not publicly recognizing the AIDS epidemic.

Back then, ACTUP activists also routinely demonstrated inside and outside St. Patrick's Cathedral during Sunday Mass to protest the Catholic Church's opposition to condom distribution, AIDS education and abortion. And, in 1996, demonstrators spread the cremated ashes of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. The movement also succeeded in getting government funding for housing and support services for AIDS patients.