The Struggle of Many Lifetimes
By Mark Harrington
When I came of age in 1981 as a gay man in college two forces emerged which would kill and injure millions of people around the world — the right-wing presidency of Ronald Reagan which began that year, and which led to 12 years of massive cuts to US and global health; and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which emerged as a pandemic and quickly became a chronic disease of the poor, drug users, and gay and bisexual men.
Fighting the Reagan administration and its racist, misogynistic, and homophobic approach to public health, and defending people against the new pandemic caused by HIV became the joint task of a generation of young lesbian and gay activists who spent much of the 1980s taking care of dying friends.
The political nature of this work became clear as we mobilized our communities to demand research, health care, prevention, housing, and support services for people with AIDS from local, state, and federal governments.
Starting in 1988 when I joined the Treatment + Data Committee of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)/New York—and from 1992 with Treatment Action Group — I began working with a like-minded group of activists to accelerate treatment research and regulation, targeting the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and pharmaceutical companies. It took 15 years of arduous research and accelerating mass death before the discovery of effective combination treatment for HIV in 1996. Now we could stop HIV in its tracks, but 95% of the world's people living with the virus dwelt in developing countries.
Together with groups such as Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, and later with Partners in Health among others, we struggled for the next three decades to generate government support in rich and poor countries alike to provide mass treatment and prevention for HIV and for its two most common co-infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C. Through this work, which is the struggle of many lifetimes, I have been abled to save my own life (I was infected with HIV in 1985 and survived long enough to begin combination HIV treatment in 1996) and to participate in having saved millions of others.
Paul Farmer, a dear friend and colleague, was born just two weeks before me. Our life's work brought each other together. He leaves a huge legacy and will be missed forever. Rest in peace, beautiful man.
Mark Harrington was born in San Francisco. He studied history and film at Harvard, and joined ACT UP/New York in 1985. He co-founded Treatment Action Group in 1992, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and became TAG's Executive Director in 2002. He lives in New York City.