Talks: Social Movements / 2020

Primary Source

Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. One recurrent theme has brought together activists and the interested to discuss contemporary and past Social Movements. Here are the Talks we held at the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics in 2020.

January 29, 2020

Money for AIDS, Not For War!
Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group

The Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group emerged in 1983 during direct action protests against nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. About a year later they were the very first group to publicly engage in nonviolent direct action to dramatize the AIDS crisis.

The "Money for AIDS, Not for War" ritual/protest was held on September 23, 1984, by Enola Gay, a self proclaimed faggot affinity group, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 50 miles east of San Francisco.

Veterans of that moment return to discuss direct action in the depths of the Reagan counter-revolution, the connections between war spending and social crises, the long resistance from below to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the vibrant queer left tradition of resistance still alive in San Francisco, with Jack Davis, Robert Glück, and Richard Bell.

Video here