The AIDS activists who regularly stormed the homes, offices and even churches of the powerful beginning in the late 1980’s weren’t the only ones who were scared for their lives.

Frank Young served as FDA Commissioner during the massive “Seize Control of the FDA” protest in 1988, among the first of many raucous, often clever and sometimes frightening actions mounted by the newly formed ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

A few months after the protest, which set the FDA on its heels and announced the arrival of an entirely new kind of activist (and, it has been argued, a new kind of gay man, empowered and unafraid), Commissioner Young was invited to speak at an event by physician David Kessler.

The first thing Young said at the podium, Kessler recalls, was, “For your own safety, stand clear of me.” And then Young put his hand on his chest and thumped his bulletproof vest.

Young may have had nothing to fear — not bodily, at least — but his precautions are instructive for anyone not familiar with the intense drama of that time. We were fighting for our very lives. Our rage felt pressurized. Kessler, who followed Young as FDA Commissioner, shared his story during a fascinating reunion of the major players of the “Seize” protest, when the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted “The 30th Anniversary of ‘Seize Control of the FDA’” on October 11, 2018. The bulletproof vest story produced some laughter, of the nervous sort .

The Johns Hopkins event included AIDS activists Peter Staley, Ann Northrop, Mark Harrington, and Gregg Gonsalves. It was an exciting and even emotional reunion for long-time survivors like me, seeing the rabble-rousers get their due. They have been fittingly acknowledged before, of course; all of them are featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, which uses extensive footage of the FDA protest, and both Harrington and Gonsalves are recipients of MacArthur Foundation Genius awards. Meanwhile, Staley is hard at work on his much-anticipated memoirs. Read more via LGBTQ Nation

October 11, 1988 -- ACT UP, joined by the national ACT.NOW coalition, shuts down the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. This historical demonstration against the FDA condemns the lethargy of this dysfunctional bureaucracy which is responsible for the testing and approval of possible AIDS treatments.