Rachel Malstrom

“We don’t know why some lived, and may never know, so we call it luck. There were no magic strategies or circumstances that consistently saved any of us.”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“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

“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