Boy with the Bullhorn by Ron Goldberg

Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York
By Ron Goldberg
Empire State Editions 2022

Activist Ron Goldberg has written his memoir-history of New York’s AIDS era at long last, and Boy with the Bullhorn goes into luxurious detail in order to bring that long-vanished era alive again. For readers interested in the political and public world of that era, Goldberg’s account will make endlessly fascinating reading. For readers who lived through it all (including those readers who never imagined they would), the book is indispensable. 

Goldberg opens with his own story, growing up on Long Island and moving to New York City in 1980 to pursue an acting career, earning points toward his “Gay Card” by “attending campy double features at the Regency, and occasionally, with the help of the requisite medications, danced the night and early morning away at the Flamingo or Twelve West, or, when someone managed to snag a membership card, the Saint.” 

But like so many others, he found it impossible to ignore the growing catastrophe around the margins of these pleasures that seem so innocent now:

All of us – my friends and I, anyone who was gay and living in New York – were living under a pervasive cloud of dread. It wasn’t necessarily a front-of-your-mind kind of thing; we still showed up at work, watched TV, and went to the movies. We shopped and ate and hung out with our friends. But there was a low threatening hum in the background of everything we did. Was that a bruise or a lesion? A chest cold or pneumonia? You could be fine one day and gasping for breath the next, your life suddenly measured in months, if not weeks.

As that catastrophe grew into what Governor Michael Dukakis accurately referred to as “the single most important public health emergency we’ve had in our lifetime,” Goldberg got more and more involved in the politics of gay men and their friends fighting against societal prejudice, governmental indifference, and even medical inertia. It’s startling to be reminded, while reading these pages, that the victims of this rampaging new virus had to take to the streets and fight for every small incremental bit of progress or relief. Any book about ACT UP will necessarily be about public activism; Goldberg’s book is also about a desperate, clawing fight for survival. 

He’s every bit as good at the parts he had to research as he is at the parts that are burned into his own memory (“Everyone rushed to the sound,” goes one such moment among many. “Locking arms, my fellow marshals and I inserted ourselves between the police and the protesters”), and since he resists easy dichotomies, he pulls no punches even when writing about some of the gay men of the time – as when he writes about ACT UP’s reception in the gay enclave of Provincetown:

Tensions had surfaced almost immediately between the local ACT UP and members of the town’s “gay establishment,” the merchants of the Provincetown Business Guild. When the activists proposed transforming the annual Pride commemoration from a solemn candlelight procession into a more lively and prideful political march, the Guild members didn’t understand why this change was necessary and were suspicious of the activists’ motives. As one member put it, “Very selfishly, I don’t want you punks ruining this for the rest of us.”

Doesn’t this just scream relaxing vacation?

Goldberg seems distrustful of sentimentality, and readers will be grateful for that. But even so, Boy with the Bullhorn has many little land-mines of powerful emotion, moments in the text and the photos that will halt readers of a certain age right in their tracks. The caption of a photo of two beautiful boys embracing reads: “I gasped when this photo of David Serko and Howie Pope unexpectedly popped up on my phone during the February 28, 2020, New York Times ACT UP photo shoot, twenty-five-plus years after they had both died. (June 29, 1991).” A great many survivors of that AIDS crisis have had moments just like this one. We’ll never know exactly how many of those survivors are still here in part because of the bravery of Goldberg and his allies, but in Boy with the Bullhorn we have an invaluable addition to the literature of those front lines.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.