Rachel Malstrom

“I have never felt more alive and protected. I do not believe in god, but I witnessed something profoundly spiritual in those years: the power of collective empathy. Each of us is capable of it, possibly instilled by evolution. When members of a support group tap empathy together, wounds can be healed and lives can be saved. When a community taps it while under siege, history itself can be bent toward righteous victories.”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“Insanity triumphed because sane people were silent.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“and loving community. All of our emotions were heightened and intense, frustrating and beautiful at the same time. It was a bubble filled with demonstrations, endless meetings, nights of ecstasy and dancing, nights of wheat-pasting, hospitals and memorials, boyfriends, new friends, breakups, phone zaps, phone trees, shame-free sex, sex between proud sluts, sex that was political, that said fuck-you to the haters, more endless meetings, kiss-ins, kissing hello on the lips, kissing lesbians, selling T-shirts and buttons, covering an entire city in SILENCE = DEATH stickers, heckling presidents, getting arrested with your best friends, chanting,”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism