Northrop joined ACT UP shortly before their second protest on Wall Street a year later, which got considerable mainstream media coverage. Ann Northrop at ACT UP’s demonstration at the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, October 11, 1988. Their first demonstration, a protest against the pharmaceutical industry’s profiteering from the AIDS crisis, took place on Wall Street that same month. Shapiro was also a founding member of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, which was formed on Ma, at New York City’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center).
Northrop was introduced to Hunter by Vivian Shapiro, a prominent activist in the lesbian community and a friend of Northrop’s. Learn even more about HMI in our episode featuring cofounder Damien Martin and the accompanying episode notes here. Learn more about Hunter in this MGH episode on that same webpage, you’ll find additional information about HMI and the Harvey Milk High School, which was established by the institute in 1985. Īt the suggestion of Joyce Hunter at the Harvey Milk High School, Northrop became an AIDS education advocate at the Hetrick-Martin Institute (now known as HMI and originally known as the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth). In real life, lesbian gym teachers may find their livelihood threatened because of their sexual orientation, a predicament explored in depth in this 1990 dissertation. The butch gym teacher type has found its way into fiction and song, most memorably in lesbian singer Meg Christian’s “ Ode to a Gym Teacher ” (which is also included in MGH ’s Meg Christian episode ). Northrop’s story was featured in the original edition of the Making Gay History book in a chapter titled “The Radical Debutante.”Īfter abandoning her career in network television news, Northrop fantasized about becoming a gym teacher-a beloved lesbian stereotype that’s been parodied by lesbian comedians like Rosie O’Donnell and Jane Lynch and satirized for its ubiquity.
To learn more about Ann Northrop, read this bio and watch her oral history recorded in 2003 as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project. In this episode, she discusses her most dramatic ACT UP arrest, her work as an AIDS education advocate, her blue-blooded upbringing, and the lure of Angie Dickinson. Fierce and unflappable, veteran journalist Ann Northrop is a natural activist.