How do ordinary people change the world? These New York City AIDS activists left a record

Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard both knew personally the devastation that the AIDS crisis had on New York City. As early members of the activist group ACT UP New York, they also saw firsthand the success of social justice movements launched in its wake; successes they did not want forgotten.

By 2001, the disease had killed more than 82,500 New Yorkers, and millions globally. Schulman, a writer and journalist, and Hubbard, a documentary filmmaker, began interviewing surviving activists from ACT UP New York. Soon, the ACT UP Oral History Project was born.

“What we wanted to do was to give as many people as possible the opportunity to tell their story in their own words,” Hubbard told The Advocate. Now, “what we want is for the history of ACT UP and the history of AIDS to be in mainstream U.S. history, right where it belongs.”

ACT UP New York, one of the world’s most prominent HIV activism groups, was launched in 1987 to demand the development of HIV treatments and better government support for people living with HIV.

Twenty-five years later, the digital archive of their work is vast. Schulman and Hubbard archived interviews with 188 AIDS activists, including audio, video, and written transcripts. With help from filmmaker James Wentzy, the group also collected more than 2,000 hours of archival footage, Schulman said.

As of 2026, the project’s public website has had more than 14 million visits, and its content has been downloaded more than 600,000 times, according to Schulman. “Two people can do a lot,” she said.

Buttons adorn an activist's vest at the New York City AIDS Memorial. Jack Walker/The Advocate

The website boasts hours of interviews with activists and indexes them by topic, from discussions around specific campaigns, like Target City Hall, to broader discussions of race and gender within the group. One goal of the archive was to capture the diversity among its activists, Hubbard said.

AIDS activists were “usually portrayed as cute, white men, young men,” Hubbard said. “We wanted to give women and people of color the opportunity to participate.”

The project was equally interested in showcasing the diversity of thought that powered AIDS activism, ensuring that such political nuance is not lost to time.

“Direct action to end the AIDS crisis. If you were in ACT UP, that’s what you had to be doing. But that is widely interpretable,” Schulman said. ACT UP had a “radical democracy structure” where “so many different strategies were going on at the same time.”

ACT UP’s strategic flexibility — organizing around the needs and demands of its members — was a lesson for other activist groups down the line, Schulman said; meeting people where they are can earn a campaign more support.

Schulman and Hubbard stopped regularly collecting interviews in 2015, but the work of maintaining the archive online has continued.

Technology has changed since the archive was launched. Initially, Hubbard said the team could post only a few minutes of video content at a time, which was difficult given the more than 350 hours of interview video they had in total.

Over time, Hubbard said the team transitioned from storing interviews on digital tape to using memory cards and, later, hard drives, allowing them to post full videos online with help from a technology lab at City University of New York. The original tapes are now stored at the Harvard University Library, Hubbard said.

A protester at the die-in shields their face with an American flag where the stars have been replaced with skulls. Jack Walker/The Advocate

The project has helped inform future work around preserving the history of HIV and AIDS from Schulman and Hubbard. In 2012, Hubbard released the documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, and in 2021 Schulman released a book titled Let the Record Show, which cataloged the history of the activist group.

Schulman and Hubbard both said the culture around HIV and AIDS has changed drastically since the crisis began. Despite the successes of the AIDS movement, conversations around HIV are far less pronounced today, they said.

When antiretroviral HIV treatments were developed in 1995, Hubbard said attention around the virus began to wane.

“It was shocking how quickly it happened. People forgot what it took to get to that point where AIDS was a treatable disease,” he said. That made documenting the work of ACT UP activists, and their broader mission of expanded health care access, feel urgent.

“For those of us who lived through it, it was incredibly important to show what people had done to make that happen,” Hubbard said. “People were doing it at the end of their lives. The activists were people who were sick and in wheelchairs in demonstrations. They dedicated their lives to changing the world, and they did.”

The oral history project was funded through MIX NYC, a non-for-profit organization founded by Schulman and Hubbard that focuses on queer, experimental film. The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice served as a major donor, and a variety of other contributors supported the project.

Schulman also sees the project, and the activist movement it documented, as part of a wider effort to challenge systems of wealth and power. She said the archive has reminded her of the importance of “strategic alliances” between social justice groups that advance the common good.

“These are regular people who changed the world,” Schulman said. “And nobody was asking them about what they did.”