In March 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Centre in New York, Larry Kramer asked those gathered: “Do we want to start a new organisation devoted to political action?” He got his answer when two days later almost 300 people turned up for the first ACT UP meeting. ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - held their first direct action weeks later with a protest on Wall Street demanding national action to address the AIDS epidemic. 17 members were arrested.
In those early times, Algerian-born Frenchman, Didier Lestrade, living with HIV, journeyed to New York from France with his then lover who brought him to his first ACT UP meeting. Inspired by the New York activists’ example, Lestrade co-founded ACT UP Paris with journalists Pascal Loubet and Luc Coulavin in 1989. ACT UP had gone international.