| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ann Silversides, AIDS Activist, Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community (Toronto: Between the Lines 2003)

I FIND IT DIFFICULT to review a book about someone whom I used to know and work with politically who is now dead. But, as Michael Lynch once wrote, "to write history is to write against death" and in this book Anne Silversides has done an important work of historical recovery. Memories flood into my mind as I read the book and I relive the joy of knowing Michael as well as the grief and loss of his death. So many things left unsaid, so many things left undone. Such was my experience of reading AIDS Activist. I knew Michael Lynch as a gay liberation activist in Toronto in the later 1970s and 1980s, when I worked for the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) in the early 1980s and later when I was involved in AIDS ACTION NOW! (AAN!) in the late 1980s.

This book profoundly moved me and captured vital aspects of Michael Lynch as a person and as a gay and AIDS activist. It presents a remarkable entry point into the life of AIDS organizing through the experiences of one often central activist. Silversides' own interviews with those who knew Michael and her research are magnified in this book by her access to Michael's diaries. Powerful and moving excerpts from his diaries help to bring back Michael's life in the pages of this book. This is an important documentation of AIDS activism, especially of Michael's early engagement with and writings about AIDS in The Body Politic; his involvement in setting up the first community-based AIDS group in Toronto, the ACT; and his involvement in the initiation and actions of AAN!, an AIDS activist group influenced by the emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) across the US. Also covered is his intense commitment to remembering those who died of AIDS in his writings and poetry and his involvement in the AIDS Memorial project.

Michael Lynch was a remarkably complex, insightful, diverse, and prolific writer, activist, and intellectual. In the later 1970s and early 1980s he wrote major articles for Canada's leading gay liberation magazine, The Body Politic, on gay fathers, the contributions and the limitations of human rights strategies, and, along with his close friend and one-time lover Bill Lewis, some of the earliest critical Canadian articles on AIDS. I remember reading these articles on the politics and social context of AIDS and they had a major impact on me and many others. They were deeply informative and visionary and at the same time very controversial. Michael provided powerful arguments for us against panic and hysteria and for the continuation of gay and sexual liberation politics in our social and political resistance to AIDS. Michael helped to found groups like Gay Fathers of Toronto. He was involved in the Committee to Defend John Damien (Damien was fired from his job with the Ontario Racing Commission because he was gay), the Gay Academic Union in Toronto, the previously mentioned ACT and AAN!, and later the Toronto Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies. His strength and passion was in starting groups that were badly needed rather than staying around for the work of sustaining them over the years. He was also a gifted poet and university professor, who had a profound interest in the US pre-homosexual Walt Whitman and his New York City with its world of male-male relationships (the "Age of Adhesiveness") and its influence on the emergence of later homosexual cultures.

As Silversides documents, Michael's initial response to the AIDS panic was rooted in his political formation as a gay liberationist which led him to be extremely critical of both the medical profession, which had previously been very involved in labelling queers as sick, and also of the mainstream media framing of gay men. His early involvement in AIDS community organizing and the formation of the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) built on earlier gay community organizing and organizing among gays and lesbians on health questions inspired by the feminist health movement. Michael was very inspired by the emergence of the people living with AIDS movement and their profound affirmation that they were not victims or patients but people living with AIDS. This was based on notions of self-organization and self-empowerment.

Michael's important US connections (he was a transplanted American) led him to be more aware of treatments there that were having an impact in prolonging people's lives and about the development of the new direction of AIDS activism of ACT-UP with the theme of "Silence=Death." In Canada the contradiction between the knowledge that there were treatments that could extend people's lives at the same time as the Canadian state and the drug companies denied access to these led to the explosion of a new treatment-based activism epitomized by AAN! in Toronto. This was an exciting time of die-ins, sit-ins, disruptions, putting our bodies on the line, and the burning of an effigy of the Health Minister in the streets of Toronto. And Michael was in the thick of much of this with his energy, compassion, and insight. Through these direct actions we won more access to treatments that could and did extend people's lives.

But Michael was never just about a politics of militancy. He combined this in the face of AIDS and its "waves of dying friends" that hit many of us so hard in gay circles in the 1980s and early 1990s with a profound politics of mourning. He understood the political use of anger but also at the same time the importance of remembering. He addressed in his own life and in his politics a way of remembering as he put it in his poem, "Cry." "We ... will not endure these waves of dying friends, without a cry." (106) And for Michael, like so many others, this was tied up with his own personal fears and engagement with dying and death.

At the same time this remarkable recovery of the history and politics of AIDS activism is only partial precisely because of this rather individual entry point. For, despite all the insights of focusing on an individual, history is collective in character and never simply individual. This leads to events and tensions being glossed over or not fully developed or addressed. For instance this is clear when it comes to the history and development of AAN! since Michael was not always centrally involved. Much more work of historical documentation and recovery remains to be done.

The sub-title of the book mentions the "politics of community." Unfortunately the politics of community that are engaged with are largely classless in character in both Silversides' writing and in Michael's world. A middle-class vantage point constructed "community" during these years as somehow removed from class tensions and class struggles. While Michael struggled to deal with differences of race and gender at times in his life, he less often centrally addressed the divisions of class. Unfortunately this was not his limitation alone. This was very common in gay and even AIDS activist circles as well both then and at present. It was later that some AIDS activists would directly confront questions of class and poverty and their impact on AIDS. This ideological notion of a classless community obscured class tensions and separated queer struggles from class struggles, helping to marginalize the concerns of working-class queers and queers living in poverty. It is a bit ironic that someone so fascinated with Walt Whitman and his love for working-class men could not always see the relevance of this to his own life and politics.

While there are limitations to Silversides' account of gay liberation and AIDS activism, she has done an invaluable work of historical recovery. We now need to build on this to make a more profound social history of AIDS in Canada and of AIDS organizing. This is a wonderful example of writing history against death.


Gary Kinsman Laurentian University

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