ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

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The 2011 Freedom to Love celebration called Pink Dot, which is held annually at Speaker's Corner in Singapore.

Singapore, a “sunny island set in the sea,” is known for many things: economic prosperity, air-conditioning, malls and underground malls linking to more malls. What it is not known for, though, is a stellar human rights record or an active citizenry willing to take to the streets.

In October 2011, a Facebook page for Occupy Singapore sprung up, asking Singaporeans to gather at Raffles Place in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District on October 15 as part of the Global Day of Action. The movement called for more accountability and transparency in the running of government-linked corporations, particularly the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and Temasek Holdings. In recent years, these two corporations had made huge losses on bad investments made with public money.

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The "Raging Bull" in New York's Financial District being barricaded on the first day of Occupy Wall Street. By David Shankbone, via Flickr.

On March 24, after yet another wave of violence against the Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street and allies staged a march through Lower Manhattan, targeting both New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly specifically and the police in general. We demanded the resignation of Ray Kelly because of his involvement with a sustained campaign of violence against Occupy, surveillance of Muslim communities and widespread corruption. But it is our belief that any coherent analysis of poverty in this country must also critique the institution of the police as a whole. Regardless of your position on police officers as individuals, the existence of an armed paramilitary organization at the disposal of the state — and therefore the corporations and wealthy elites the state is beholden to — should be incompatible with any work related to economic or social justice. The often-stated idea that “the police are the 99 percent too” is an erasure of the open war that the state has waged against the poor and people of color in this country for hundreds of years.

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One hundred years after the birth of human rights icon Bayard Rustin, his complicated legacy pushes us to analyze our own complicated times. Vilified in the 1950s for his open homosexuality and again in the 1960s for “selling out” the radical black liberation movement, Rustin’s own history has been recently rescued by the books and movie correctly extolling his incredible gifts as a grassroots organizer, a charismatic orator and a visionary thinker. As preparations proceed for the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (of which Rustin was the chief architect), and the dreams and nightmares of a new generation are being forged against a backdrop of pepper spray and tear gas, it is time to take a deeper look at the relationship between the movements for peace and for justice — movements which are no more “integrated” now than they were 50 years ago.

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University of Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff supportive of full inclusion for the LGBTQ community have demanded action from the university’s administration in a newly-released video, “It Needs to Get Better.”

The 4 to 5 Movement, the coalition that produced the video, was launched in October 2011 to demand changes to institutional policies that foster the marginalization of the LGBTQ community.  The name of the movement stems from the fact that 4 out of 5 college students or college-educated individuals support full civil rights for gays and lesbians.  The 4 to 5 Movement seeks to raise awareness that supporting LGBTQ rights places you squarely in the majority, despite the position of the university or the Catholic Church.

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Photo from Occupy Auckland, New Zealand, by Simon Oosterman.

If you ask most people who’ve been watching from the sidelines what the Occupy movement has accomplished, they’ll probably say something about “changing the national conversation.” But if you ask someone who has been more closely involved, having spent weeks or months in tents and meetings, they’re more likely to talk about a conversation that changed them—a case in which a painful disagreement, perhaps, was forced by the proximity of the occupation to turn into a useful dialogue.

In the days before Chris Hedges’ polemic against “The Cancer in Occupy” created a firestorm in the movement by stoking fears of “Black Bloc anarchists” hijacking it from the outside, we lit a bit of kindling here on this site with a post of mine about rising tensions around the diversity-of-tactics framework. My report spread through Occupy Wall Street email lists, resulting in an extended exchange in the comments that included several of the people I’d written about. Like most exchanges in online comments, it wasn’t especially constructive.

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• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

One of the most extraordinary nonviolent, transnational movements of the modern age was the women’s suffrage movement of the first two decades of the 20th century. New Zealand first extended the franchise in the late 19th century—after two decades of organizing efforts. As the new century began, women’s suffrage movements gained strength in China, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Vietnam. Another 20 years and women were enfranchised in countries around the world, from Uruguay to Austria, the Netherlands to Turkey, and Germany to the United States. Few if any of those leading the campaigns for the ballot for women would have identified their approach as one of nonviolent action, nor would they have known its philosophical underpinnings or strategic wisdom. Like most who have turned to civil resistance, they did so because it was a direct method not reliant on representatives or agencies and a practical way to oppose an intolerable situation.

What exactly is the link between the rights of women, gender, nonviolent action, and building peace?

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• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

• Thousands of residents of the Northeastern Chinese port city Dalian took to the streets on Sunday to demand the relocation of a petrochemical plant that threatened to spill toxins into the city last week when a typhoon breached a nearby dike. Chinese authorities have complied and ordered the closure of the plant.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis poured into the streets of major cities and towns across the country on Friday, keeping the pressure on the nation’s embattled president to step down.

• About 100 people participated in a two-mile march in Santa Cruz, California on Sunday to demand a halt to construction of 32 homes on what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Native American burial site.

• More than 1,000 people led by the poet turned activist Javier Sicilia have joined a march in Mexico City to protest the government’s strategy in the fight against drug gangs.

• Tunisian security forces used tear gas and truncheons Monday to disperse several hundred protesters in the capital demanding that the government step down for failing to prosecute supporters of the ousted president.

• Thousands of people turned out at rallies across Australia on Sunday to call on federal MPs to support a ban on live animal exports.

• Thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin yesterday to demand civil marriage equality.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered across Israel on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support.