Originally written and published at LGBTQ Nation | June 5, 2025
You may have missed it: a protest unlike the others. It happened one day before the massive Easter weekend protests grabbed the headlines, when thousands of people in big cities and small towns turned out to decry tyranny just as colonial American revolutionaries had done.
It happened before May Day protests, Mike Waltz’s reassignment, threats of empty shelves, tariff negotiations, and the “No Kings” nationwide rallies on June 14. In one respect, however, the protest you might have missed those few months ago is the most pressing and critical one of them all: people standing together against the needless deaths of children.
I came upon the images from that lesser-known April 17 protest while clicking through channels one evening after Easter. First, I saw the coffins — some of them baby-sized — stacked before the State Department by people sporting the familiar pink triangle on hoodies and t-shirts. Then I saw longtime AIDS activist Peter Staley standing beside his fellow protesters, his face a reflection of my own at that moment, awash in outrage and disgust.
How, I raged, is it possible that Staley, who spent the 80s and 90s surrounded by hordes of unrelenting AIDS crusaders, found himself back on the street in 2025, fighting the same fight? After years of toil and sweat, the history-making power of ACT UP had, by sheer force of will, coerced a hostile, negligent government to deliver the medication that turned certain death into hope. Now, despite having saved an estimated 26 million lives so far, funding for PEPFAR – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – hangs in the balance, threatening to eliminate access to medications that could save millions more.
Some may consider baby coffins on the lawn to be grandstanding of the first order, on a par with ACT UP scattering the ashes of dead men on the White House lawn and a protest inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yet desperate times call for dramatic action, especially where blatant disregard for human life is concerned, and especially when one considers the scale of loss. Case in point: the New York Times projected that 1,650,000 would die of AIDS-related causes within a year without American aid. If their coffins were laid end-to-end, they would extend from DC to beyond the southernmost edge of Florida.
Staley was one of many whose ACT UP contributions ultimately led to medical breakthroughs. While he was engaged with fellow protesters in various acts of civil disobedience — storming the Food & Drug Administration, shutting down Wall Street, and seizing control of Burrows Wellcome offices— other ACT UP-ers did much of the heavy lifting. The brilliant chemist Iris Long pursued aggressive drug testing, Jim Eigo investigated the drug approval process, while David Kirschenbaum worked with the ACLU to gather information on drug trials. Mark Harrington spoke with such authority on the intricacies of treatment and research that he was sometimes mistaken for a doctor.
At the same time, Maxine Wolfe worked tirelessly to win treatment for women, finally getting the CDC to adjust the definition of AIDS to include its associated ailments. And Larry Kramer, whose playwriting captured the devastation AIDS wrought, shook people from their denial, shouting, “Plague! 40 million infected people is a plague! Until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead.”
Beyond the more outspoken, well-known ACT UP champions were others whose names we will never know. Thousands of them. They made copies, painted posters, sold buttons, and lay their bodies across the pavement. Many of them, sick and dying, persisted even knowing they could not save themselves, but hoping their efforts might save someone else. They showed up, aware that by exposing their images in public, they could be fired from jobs, evicted from apartments, or ostracized by family. And when they weren’t planning, preparing and protesting, they went to one funeral after another, donning the one suit they’d bought for a long-ago wedding only to find it now sagging over withered shoulders and hanging loosely from shrunken torsos.
Those of us who survived that time remember the reality of illness all too clearly. Men slumped in chairs lining the walls of St.Vincent’s ER waiting room, hoping to score a bed on the seventh floor. The hum and beep of monitors and infusion pumps echoing across hospital hallways, the creak of carts over cracked floors, the wails and cries of patients, the insistent buzz of a code blue. And the bodies, covered in lesions, reduced to bones beneath covers, the vacant stares of dementia and blindness.
It was to save others from an agonizing death that a stigmatized and beleaguered community fought so valiantly. They thought they had won. And yet now, in 2025, when for a mere 0.24 percent of our gross national income, we could supply the medications to save millions. Instead, innocent children infected in utero are being denied the antiretroviral drugs that would spare them.
And they are already dying. Children like Peter Donde, his medicine cut off when the administration more or less shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. Peter died of pneumonia in February. He was ten years old.
Jennifer Boulanger is an educator and freelance journalist. Her book, A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic, will be released on June 1, 2025.
