still angry after all these years.

ACT UP is down to a handful of chapters and members, but its old fire still smolders

The mere mention of its name struck terror into the hearts of pharmaceutical executives, government health officials, and politicians. But more than a decade after its heyday, the once-proud band of renegades known as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power has dwindled to a ragged crew of die-hard activists laboring on the fringes of American politics.

In many ways ACT UP is a victim of its own success. "I'm afraid ACT UP has become a toothless tiger," says John-Manuel Andriote, author of Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America. "It has accomplished a lot of what it set out to achieve, primarily in fulfilling its slogan, `Drugs into bodies.' People with AIDS are now getting good medical treatment and living more-normal lives."

But the cofounder of an ACT UP progeny, Queer Watch, says ACT UP's obituary may be premature. "As the epidemic continues to evolve, there is as much need for street activism as ever," says Bill Dobbs. "The difference now is because it's smaller and less confrontational, it's much harder for the media to see what the group is doing." The group burst back into the news June 17 for heckling Vice President Gore during a campaign stop.

Indeed, the handful of remaining chapters, based in major metropolitan areas like New York City, San Francis co, and Washington, D.C., have flourished, albeit with creative new alliances--ranging from consumer advocate Ralph Nader to the radical environmental group Rainforest Action Network--and a more pronounced left-wing political agenda. Though it has relocated to a smaller space, ACT UP's original New York City chapter still draws dozens of men and women to its weekly meeting. The Philadelphia chapter has reached out to people of color with AIDS. And the Washington, D.C., chapter is the force behind a local ballot measure to legalize medicinal marijuana.

Perhaps the highest-profile group is the San Francisco chapter, whose members are currently promoting a ballot initiative to repeal the city's ban on bathhouses (the city does allow sex clubs, which, unlike bathhouses, do not have private rooms where sex acts cannot be monitored). The controversy has pitted the activists against many of the city's leading AIDS prevention experts. During one public meeting of the city's HIV Prevention Planning Council, ACT UP's Todd Swindell blasted city health director Mitchell Katz, who's gay. "Mitch Katz, I don't care if you are gay, you're a homophobe," Swindell said. "This department's policy is homophobic."

ACT UP was founded in New York City in 1987 by novelist and playwright Larry Kramer. By the early '90s the fledgling group had so many people showing up for its meetings that it had overgrown its meeting place in New York City's Gay and Lesbian Community Center. The fervor soon spread, as activists across the nation started local chapters. At its peak the group was represented in dozens of smaller and midsize cities as well as all the major metropolises. Through the adroit use of public pressure, colorful street theater, and cutting-edge graphics, ACT UP boasted a long line of accomplishments. Among them was forcing Burroughs Wellcome, the maker of the antiviral drug AZT, to reduce the drug's price and pressuring the National Institutes of Health to increase spending on basic HIV research, which ultimately led to medical breakthroughs. The group reached its apex during 1991's so-called Day of Desperation, a series of disturbances that stopped traffic across Manhattan and interrupted national TV news broadcasts.

Somewhere along the way, though, ACT UP lost its political and sexual edge. "People have long wondered how we were able to cross the au courant downtown life with uptown politics," says Dobbs, a longtime ACT UP member. "It combined sex, politics, and brains in an electric way. It drew the boys out of the bars and onto the streets."

The group's decline also owes to a more pervasive trend in the illness that spawned it. In addition to the success of new drug therapies, the federal Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act poured billions into urban areas especially hard hit by AIDS, lessening the need for the group's attention-grabbing theatrics. And as the rate of new HIV infections declined among gay men, the core of ACT UP's membership--white gay men--drifted away from the group and back to their own everyday concerns.

Then, of course, there was the 1992 presidential election. Bill Clinton quickly replaced the hostility of the Bush and Reagan years with sympathy and compassion, even if he never became the knight in shining armor that activists had hoped for. "Clinton made sure a lot of what ACT UP was pushing for came true," says Andriote. "It's hard to be angry and militant about a president who says, `I feel your pain,' and who speaks the language of AIDS activists."

ACT UP has struggled to adapt to the new political reality. In Philadelphia, what was once a predominantly white organization reacted to the changing demographics of the disease by embracing people of color. Today, white members are the minority. "When we organize demonstrations we go to the African-American community for support," says Julie Davids, a member of the Philadelphia chapter. "We fought for health care and against welfare reform. It was a long process, but gradually it worked."

ACT UP has also formed an unlikely alliance with Nader's Public Citizen and the Rainforest Action Network to press for the Hope for Africa Act, federal legislation that would provide access to AIDS therapies for Africans with AIDS. Says Erick Brownstein, campaign director for RAN: "When we go looking for allies, we look for people who are not afraid of action, who don't just sit around and talk." The groups also share a leftist ideology. "Basically, we both see the endless search for corporate profits as undermining people and the environment they live in," he says.

ACT UP was in the news in mid June when its members heckled Vice President Al Gore on the second day of his presidential announcement tour. At one point four activists managed to get within two feet of the vice president during an appearance in Manchester, N.H., shouting, "Gore's greed kills."

The group has found other creative ways of attracting the news media, which had wearied of its confrontational tactics. Steve Michael, founder of the Washington, D.C., chapter, undertook the ultimate media stunt: He ran for president in 1992 and 1996. And in 1998 Michael's partner, Wayne Turner, collected 32,000 signatures to get a measure on the D.C. ballot to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. (The vote was never tallied because U.S. representative Bob Barr [R-Ga.] used federal jurisdiction over the city to block it.)

When Michael succumbed to AIDS complications last year, Turner led a funeral cortege of about 100 ACT UP members up Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, bearing Michael's open casket. For Turner, the past had become prologue. "Everyone was saying the epidemic was over, but here my lover had died of AIDS," he says. "I looked around me and saw all these angry activists. And I thought to myself, We still have a lot of work to do, an awful lot of work."

Find more on the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power as well as links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com