Proxy Podcast Take Over!

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dream – “Proxy Podcast Take Over!”

Host: Little Everywhere/The Dream | Guest Host: Yowei Shaw (“Proxy” podcast)
Episode Date: January 29, 2026

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Overview

This unique crossover episode of “The Dream” features Yowei Shaw, host of the podcast “Proxy,” taking over to deliver a deep-dive episode about the role of emotion—especially anger and grief—in activism. The show focuses on a case study of Nicole, a labor organizer struggling with “aggro mode” (channeling anger into work), and features a rich interview with political theorist and ACT UP veteran Deborah “Debbie” Gold. Together, they unpack how activists survive and sustain in the face of unending battles, burnout, and a culture that often suppresses collective grief.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Proxy’s Emotional Investigations

• Yowei Shaw introduces herself as an “emotional investigative journalist” (01:02) and describes “Proxy” as a show where personal problems are addressed through proxy conversations with strangers who’ve faced similar issues:

  "We take on personal problems that make people feel confused and isolated... and we scour the world for a proxy for them to talk to." (01:13)

• The episode selected: “Nicole Can’t Stop Being Aggro,” centers on how Nicole’s anger, effective in her organizing work, can contaminate her personal relationships.

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2. Nicole’s “Aggro Mode”: The Double-Edged Sword of Anger

• Nicole is a labor organizer with a gift for channeling anger into action for social justice—domestic worker rights, trans healthcare, Gaza protests (06:47–09:15).
• Downside: Anger (“aggro mode”) sometimes spills over, negatively impacting friends and loved ones:

  "I stand on business that I will scare your boyfriend and your husband, and then I will be happy about that." – Nicole (08:46)

• She’s aware of its cost:

  "You're like hanging out... and then everyone's like, oh, fuck... I'm not acting as kindly to other people as I want or to myself." – Nicole (10:48)

• Underlying Grief: Nicole speculates her relentless organizing helps her avoid confronting overwhelming sadness about the state of the world:

  "If I'm stuck in my sadness, am I gonna be unable to put one foot in front of the other and make a plan?" – Nicole (13:21)

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3. Grief, Restorative Justice, and Historical Parallels

• Yowei connects Nicole’s experience to psychotherapeutic ideas—restorative justice and psychodrama—where proxy conversations help process trauma when direct closure isn’t available (04:22–05:09).
• Nicole finds moments to process grief watching raw footage from ACT UP, the HIV/AIDS activist group, especially videos of collective mourning and action:

  "She'll open up her laptop and pull up these videos from a queer activist group known as ACT UP... Nicole watches these videos and cries." (14:03)

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4. Enter the Proxy: Interview with Deborah “Debbie” Gold (21:17–56:02)

Parallels Between Nicole and Debbie

• Both are queer, Jewish, anti-Zionist, passionate union organizers.
• Debbie was a core ACT UP member during the AIDS crisis, now a political theorist at UC Santa Cruz.

ACT UP: Anger as Survival, Not Shame

• ACT UP’s foundational energy was outrage:

  "As a movement, to be a proper AIDS activist, you had to be outraged. And in that culture of feelings, there was very little space, if any, for... despair or grief." – Deborah Gold (27:58)

• Mourning was suppressed in favor of action:

  “People are dying. We don’t have time to grieve these deaths.” – Deborah Gold (38:11)

The Cost of Suppressed Grief

• Debbie only truly felt grief after returning to research, post-movement:

  “I would just burst into tears... that grief was really jarring to me because I had really mostly felt anger.” – Deborah Gold (25:56)

• Not facing collective grief led to burnout and silent departures:

  "Because there was no space for it in the movement, a lot of people just kind of exited, quietly exited the movement." (49:45)

Anger, Joy, Erotic Energy: Ingredients for Movement

• ACT UP thrived on more than anger—there was intense camaraderie, humor, public displays of affection, and erotic energy that sustained members:

  "There was already an ACT UP uniform by that point... Just really good looking people, you know, Very queer, Very, very queer." – Deborah Gold (41:37) "We were living at such a high pitch... I found the rest of the world utterly boring at that point." – Deborah Gold (43:46)

• Humor and joy were crucial, even when “the issues we tackle are so serious and the injustices are so enormous and frequently deadly.” (47:30)

The Changing “Emotional Culture” of Activism

• Nicole and Debbie reflect on how modern organizing spaces sometimes err in the opposite direction—giving over too much space to processing emotions at the cost of action:

  “Someone can hold a group hostage by their particular strong feeling about something or turn an activist scene into a therapy session. And that’s... not appropriate.” – Deborah Gold (35:29)

• Debbie advises a “both/and” approach:

  “Navigating some of those feelings doesn’t mean letting them take you over or losing track of what we’re really here for.” (36:45)

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5. Advice on Sustainability, Grief, and Leadership

• Debbie cautions against movements relying on a handful “angry engines”:

  “A movement can’t sustain itself. If people feel like I'm the only one who can do this... Everybody needs to be able to take a break.” (54:01)

• Nicole finds comfort in the possibility that feeling grief will not break her nor take her out of the fight:

  "Crying as leadership development is what I'm hearing." – Nicole (54:43)

• Debbie closes with optimism about change and the impossibility of going backwards:

  “The harms are beyond belief. But they can't put the stuff they want to put back into the bottle. They can't put it back into the bottle because we carry it forward.” (56:02)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (Timestamps)

• "We take on personal problems that make people feel confused and isolated... and we scour the world for a proxy for them to talk to." – Yowei Shaw (01:13)
• "I stand on business that I will scare your boyfriend and your husband, and then I will be happy about that." – Nicole (08:46)
• “Anger is easy for me to feel... More people need to get mad. If you’re not mad, we’re not chill.” – Nicole (09:51)
• "If I'm stuck in my sadness, am I gonna be unable to put one foot in front of the other and make a plan...?" – Nicole (13:21)
• “ACT UP was an antidote to despair... As a movement, to be a proper AIDS activist, you had to be outraged. And in that culture of feelings, there was very little space, if any, for... despair or grief.” – Deborah Gold (27:58)
• "We are the AIDS coalition to unleash power, united in Anger..." – Deborah Gold (32:12)
• “Someone can hold a group hostage by their particular strong feeling... turn an activist scene into a therapy session. And that's... not appropriate.” – Deborah Gold (35:29)
• “Crying as leadership development is what I'm hearing.” – Nicole (54:43)
• "They can't put the stuff they want to put back into the bottle... because we carry it forward." – Deborah Gold (56:02)

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Noteworthy Sections & Timestamps

• Intro, Yowei on Proxy’s mission – 01:02–03:40
• Nicole’s struggle and coping mechanisms – 09:07–13:21
• Parallels with ACT UP / Debbie’s background – 21:17–25:56
• Debbie on ACT UP’s culture, anger, and mourning – 27:58–38:53
• ACT UP’s emotional palette: anger, joy, erotic energy – 41:35–47:19
• Discussion of modern organizing & emotional cultures – 35:18–37:17
• Debrief on grief, burnout, and sustaining movements – 49:45–52:42
• Closing gratitude and cross-generational hope – 56:02–56:47

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Tone & Language

The tone is candid, witty, and emotionally raw—alternating between wry humor, vulnerability, and unflinching activism. The hosts and guests speak in plain, passionate language, often leaning into irreverence (“I stand on business that I will scare your boyfriend and your husband...”) but never shying away from the emotional or political stakes.

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Final Takeaways

• Anger can be a galvanizing, even sustaining, force for activism, but over-dependence on outrage can crowd out necessary grief and lead to burnout.
• Movements need room for multiple emotions: anger, grief, joy, humor, eroticism, camaraderie—all sustain different forms of resistance.
• Examining the “emotional cultures” of activism, past and present, sheds light on why movements succeed, struggle, or dissipate.
• Collective processing of hard emotions like grief may help movements and the people within them endure, transforming individual suffering into shared resilience.
• The legacy of ACT UP, and the wisdom of its veterans, continues to inform and inspire younger generations of organizers.

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Resources Mentioned

• Book: “Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS” by Deborah (Debbie) Gold

Contact & Community

• Have an emotional conundrum? Email: proxythepodmail.com
• Listen to more: patreon.com/proxypodcast

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Summary prepared for listeners and organizers seeking nuanced insight into the emotional underpinnings of activism and collective survival.

Transcript

[Deborah Gold]

Okay, Peloton, let's go.

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[Nicole]

Keep your chest lifted.

[Peloton Announcer]

That's Peloton iq, helping you lift smarter, train safer and move with confidence. With strength, yoga, pilates and personalized guidance, this is the future of fitness. Let yourself run, lift, flow and go. Head to onepelaton.com to learn more about the cross training TREAD plus terms apply.

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[Yowei Shah]

Not good for business.

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Now with AT&T business Wireless, routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time. And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though.

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[Yowei Shah]

I'm Yowei Shah. I have been calling myself an emotional investigative journalist lately, mainly as a bit. I like it though. Oh, really? Do you? Yeah. Okay, thank you. It makes, it makes sense. It also. It kind. You don't. You're not saying like you're a life coach or anything. Okay. This is very validating to hear from you because sometimes, like I had a conversation kind of recently with, you know, a journalist I really, really respect and she said this thing that has stayed with me ever since, where she was kind of like, yeah, what you do is. It's not so different from like, you know, like life coaching. And I was like, no. So my show is called Proxy. We take on personal problems that make people feel confused and isolated for whatever reason, and then we scour the world for a proxy for them to talk to. So like a stranger who has experience, you know, so like either someone who's been through the exact same thing or, you know, maybe a researcher who studied their issue for decades and has insight to share.

[Peloton Announcer]

Is this something your brain does naturally?

[Yowei Shah]

Oh, absolutely. This is something that I used to do as a reporter, just like for my own personal problems. That's kind of how I came up with the show was sort of like, I'll just call, you know, sources who've been through the same thing and experts and then magically, by the end of it, feel a little better. And I feel like that's one of my favorite parts of the job. Yeah, you just feel like a detective. We had a listener who wrote in, whose wife had left him after coming out as queer, and he was very Happy for her. I always feel like I have to make that disclaimer because it sounds like this could go left very quickly. But he had a lot of questions, and she didn't want to talk about it, and he didn't feel like he wanted to make it her problem. And so I ended up connecting him for a practicy conversation with. With my old boss, who'd essentially done the same thing with her husband, her ex husband. So that was a very, very interesting episode. Wait, what happened in that episode? And what was the big question? Was it just like, are you okay? You know, that's kind of the magic and mystery of this whole thing. You're talking to someone who is not in your direct situation. So, like, how could they give you closure? Right, right. Like, they can't actually tell you what happened, but they can say, I'm sorry that that happened to you. And, like, let me tell you about my experience. And you're able to, like, listen to another person's experience in a less defensive way.

[Nicole]

Right.

[Yowei Shah]

And just consider. Just sort of kind of just without all of the personal baggage. Zoom out a bit and just kind of consider another perspective. Yeah, I did a little bit of reporting on, like, what is the sorcery in these Roxy conversations? And there's actually this interesting history in restorative justice where the victim or offender is not available, has passed away, or you can't find them, or is just not ready to take accountability, or doesn't want to participate. You can sometimes have that restorative, like that. That final, like, healing conversation with a proxy victim or offender.

[Peloton Announcer]

Interesting.

[Yowei Shah]

It's interesting. And also just like that, that can work. Isn't the idea also kind of at the crux of psychoanalysis? Yeah, well, like, psychodrama. I did. I talked to this psychodramatist. Do you. Are you aware of that? No. School of therapy. It's like, right after Freud, the founder of psycho drama, like, had beef with Freud, funny enough, but his whole thing, like, he's the founder of, like, role play. And so, like, all the role play that we do in trainings and, you know, in therapy, like, it has this background in a very particular school of therapy, psychodrama. And that is exactly what I think is going on, too, in these proxy conversations. And you're creating, I don't know, new neural pathways that can, like, attach to the memory, you know, and it's more positive. Yeah. So, yeah, let's listen to an episode of Proxy. Did you bring one? Yes. Okay, so this one is called Nicole Can't Stop Being aggro. And it's about my friend Nicole, who I love very much and I promise is very fun. I repeat, she's very fun, but she also can get stuck in aggro mode and it can be a little unpleasant for the people around her sometimes. And her conundrum is basically, she's this incredible organizer who's really good at channeling her anger into her work. She's a labor organizer, so she organizes domestic workers.

[Nicole]

Okay.

[Yowei Shah]

Undocumented domestic workers. She also does a lot of unpaid organizing around Gaza and a bunch of other stuff. And so in this episode, I find her a proxy who was a really big act up activist who kind of dealt with similar questions around anger and who has also studied the role of emotion in social activism in really, really interesting ways. I mean, it's just like, extremely my shit. I love, like, I don't know, before I started doing this, the show, I, like, I didn't know that there were emotion scholars, but there's like this whole discipline. People who study, like, emotion cultures and, you know, the history of emotions and. Yeah. So anyway, so she studies, like, emotion cultures and activism and. And so it just feels like this is a good episode to play right now for no particular reason. And yeah, it's also really funny. I have this friend, Nicole, and while she contains multitudes, there are two primary modes that are very Nicole. There's party starter Nicole, who's fun and funny. She's got the gift of gab, throws the best parties. Fun fact, Nicole was once a professional party starter at a casino. And then there's aggro mode Nicole, which I've never discussed before, at least not with her. I do remember early in our relationship being like, oh, yeah, Nicole feels very passionately about things. You definitely scared some of my boyfriends.

[Nicole]

I stand on business that I will scare your boyfriend and your husband, and then I will be happy about that. I'm sorry. I love you, Kyle, but yeah, like.

[Yowei Shah]

I think that that would be a common refrain from people who met you. It's like Nicole's kind of scary.

[Nicole]

Unfortunately. That's literally flattering to me.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole's a labor organizer and she's very good at what she does. Like, she's won every actual laws to get labor protections for domestic workers. She helps start the union at her job. Even outside of work, she's always organizing, always strategizing with friends about the next fundraiser for trans healthcare, the next protest against the genocide in Gaza. So going full throttle on a mission and being angry, even scary, it's something she channels every day. Honestly, I wish I could get more agro like Nicole and harness it like she does.

[Nicole]

Anger is easy for me to feel, to just like, keep pounding through on like aggro and meetings and actions and lobby visits and rallies and whatever. A lot of people could say it's unsustainable. And I'm like, bitch, I've been here for 15 years. When are we going to stop getting sustained? Like, I do find, like, it is fueling, you know, I think more people need to get mad. If you're not mad, we're not chill.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole knows she's ranting again. As her friend of 15 years, it doesn't bother me. I think it's cute. I like to joke that my contribution to making the world a better place is giving her massages to help her relax and keep going. But as useful as agro can be for Nicole, she doesn't want it to spill over into her personal life. What does getting stuck in aggro look like?

[Nicole]

You're like hanging out with people and they're like, what's up? And you're like, wow. And then like, and then everyone's like, oh, fuck. You can like see their little like whale eyed stares. That's when I like, I'm not like, acting as kindly to other people as I want or to myself.

[Yowei Shah]

A recent example, Nicole's hanging out with a friend. The friend tells Nicole she had dinner with someone who recently moved to Israel and thinks the war in Gaza is complicated. And then Nicole clicks into aggro mode without meaning to.

[Nicole]

I just like, ripped into it. What is the nuance in genocide? I just went off so fucking hard and it was literally just a report back of a conversation of my friend who strongly disagreed with that person. And everyone in our 3D reality is.

[Yowei Shah]

Like, who are you talking to?

[Nicole]

We agree with you. But I was like fighting with some phantom. And what did I gain there? It's just Disney yelling at a ghost. Do anything except for alienate my loved ones.

[Yowei Shah]

This is the part where I am duty bound to tell you that Nicole has worked on this. She listens to a lot of Tara Brock. She cuddles with her Boston terrier, Henry. She's been in therapy and it all helps.

[Nicole]

I am most of the time self reflective and like, regulated and grounded. Enough. Please keep this in the tape.

[Yowei Shah]

But even on the day we spoke, agro mode had managed to slip out.

[Nicole]

I think I might have made my mom cry this morning by accident. No, Marge, my mom is like the kindest and most generous person in the world. And then she'll call me to see how I'm doing, and I'll be like, mom, can't you tell that I'm at work? And I'm like, I would never talk to anyone like that.

[Yowei Shah]

Poor Marge. We love Marge.

[Nicole]

I know. I know. Just, like, all of my frustration is there, and then it's, like, coming out on my poor mother who just, like, wants to make sure I've eaten. Which, newsflash, I probably haven't. Sorry, Mom.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole has a theory. She thinks she's getting stuck in agra mode because it's easier for her to plan the next action, the next meeting, to keep organizing on the hamster wheel, to stay away from feeling grief. Grief for everything going on in the world. Because that's scary.

[Nicole]

Grief is such an overwhelming. And I think I'm afraid that if I slow down to feel it, then it will just, like, totally overtake me. And if I'm stuck in my sadness, am I gonna be unable to put one foot in front of the other and make a plan around this? Organizing is a very practical toolbox with real next steps. And if I felt that, then would I be able to do the next steps?

[Yowei Shah]

There is, however, one sad thing that Nicole allows herself to dwell on. Sometimes late at night, Nicole will curl up with her dog Henry, in bed. She'll open up her laptop and pull up these videos from a queer activist group known as ACT up, who lost countless members during the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s. The videos are raw footage of their meetings, even their funerals. In one action, activists march towards the White House carrying ashes of their lovers, friends, and family in urns. And when they reach the iron gates, they throw the ashes onto the White House lawn. Nicole watches these videos and cries. It's the one tiny island of grief she allows herself. Do you think it's kind of like going to see a sad movie and, like, letting yourself feel sad?

[Nicole]

Yeah, I mean, it's like a safer place to have an emotion.

[Yowei Shah]

But when it comes to the overwhelming sadness of everything happening here and now, Nicole just organizes. And if that means sometimes scaring her friends, boyfriends.

[Nicole]

So be is just easier to get stuck in big mad and work, work, work and plow through than just being like, this is horrifying, period.

[Yowei Shah]

But Nicole wants to know, is this healthy? Is this just the fate of an organizer? After the break, Nicole talks to someone who's been in her exact situation just 38 years ago.

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[Yowei Shah]

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[Deborah Gold]

Okay Peloton, let's go.

[Peloton Announcer]

That's the new Peloton Cross Training Tread plus powered by Peloton iq. Built for breakthroughs with real time insights and endless ways to move.

[Nicole]

Keep your chest lifted.

[Peloton Announcer]

That's Peloton iq, helping you lift smarter, train safer and move with confidence with strength, yoga, pilates and personalized guidance. This is the future of fitness. Let yourself run, lift, flow and go. Head to onepelaton.com to learn more about the cross training TREAD plus terms apply.

[Nicole]

Lunch was great, but this traffic is awful.

[Yowei Shah]

Um, can we stop at a bathroom? Are you alright?

[Peloton Announcer]

I keep having stomach issues after eating.

[Yowei Shah]

Like diarrhea, gas and bloating, abdominal pain.

[Peloton Announcer]

And sometimes oily stools.

[Nicole]

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[Yowei Shah]

My doctor about EPI and if Creon could help. How are you feeling?

[Nicole]

I feel nervous, but also I've been on vacation in the woods for a week and a half. So, you know, six pence, non the retro over here.

[Yowei Shah]

I don't see you nervous very often. I have to say.

[Nicole]

I know I'm really. I'm having a niche emotional conundrum, which is I'm nervous. Do other people experience that?

[Yowei Shah]

Well, why are you nervous?

[Nicole]

I'm nervous because I extremely admire ACT up of the 80s and 90s and have been fangirling about this topic for, like, 10 months and feel, like, very emotional about it. So I don't want to seem dumb.

[Yowei Shah]

The prexi's here. Are you ready?

[Nicole]

I'm so ready.

[Yowei Shah]

So the proxy. I knew I wanted to find someone from ACT up, so I started poking around and came across someone who not only was an ACT UP activist, she'd also studied the exact question Nicole was asking about grief and anger. She was a political theorist who focuses on emotion, specifically the feelings that encourage or discourage political activism. She'd even written a book looking at the role of feelings in the rise and fall of ACT up. Reading through it, I was like, this is extremely my shit. I was so excited for Nicole to meet Deborah Gold, who goes by Debbie. Okay. All right, I'm going to let her in.

[Deborah Gold]

Hi.

[Nicole]

Hi there.

[Yowei Shah]

Hello.

[Deborah Gold]

Hi. Hi. Can you hear me? I think I'm using the correct microphone.

[Yowei Shah]

We do a round of introductions. Okay.

[Nicole]

Well, hi, Debbie. I'm extremely excited to talk to you. I'm Nicole. I am a labor organizer. I organize domestic workers. So nannies and house cleaners and caregivers.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole tells Debbie her whole deal, and I love dogs. And then Debbie tells Nicole about herself.

[Deborah Gold]

Okay. Let's see. I teach at UC Santa Cruz.

[Yowei Shah]

And that's when I realized just how many similarities the two of them have. Like Nicole, Debbie is queer.

[Deborah Gold]

We formed a group called Queer to the Left, which is what it sounds like.

[Yowei Shah]

Like Nicole, Debbie is Jewish and anti Zionist.

[Deborah Gold]

And I'm part of a group here called Santa Cruz Jews for a Free Palestine.

[Nicole]

Love it.

[Yowei Shah]

And like Nicole, she's a union die hard.

[Deborah Gold]

And now I'm co chair of our faculty union.

[Nicole]

Obsessed with your biography already?

[Yowei Shah]

I just have to note for the listener, when Debbie was going through her biography, Nicole's fanning herself. And then when Nicole was going through hers, Debbie just raised a fist. All right. But it's especially Debbie's work with ACT UP that I knew Nicole would be fascinated by. So let me give you a little context about ACT up if you're not aware, because these activists were seriously badass. I'm embarrassed to say I only just learned how much they accomplished.

[Deborah Gold]

A mystery disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of America.

[Yowei Shah]

Back in the early 80s, when the AIDS epidemic broke out and thousands of people were dying, mostly queer people, drug users, sex workers, black and Latino people. The media and even some medical authorities blamed gay men for causing the epidemic. The lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an Religious leaders claimed AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuality. People with AIDS were evicted from apartments, fired from jobs, disowned by their families. Hospitals refused to treat people with aids. Funeral homes refused to handle their bodies. And what did the government do? Nothing. For years. No plan, no emergency funding. They clearly did not care. For example, listen to this. In 1982, the first white House press briefing where AIDS is mentioned, It would be another three years before Reagan would even publicly acknowledge aids. In response to this inaction, a group of people came together in chapters across the country to force the government to do something about AIDS. Like Debbie. In 1987, Debbie was a PhD student in political science in Chicago and met someone from ACT up.

[Deborah Gold]

They invited me to an ACT UP meeting and I never left.

[Yowei Shah]

After that, Debbie dropped out of grad school, got a job at a bookstore and threw herself into ACT up.

[Deborah Gold]

Mainly because I was learning a lot more in the streets.

[Yowei Shah]

ACT UP won huge victories. They accelerated FDA approvals for life saving drugs. They secured major funding for AIDS research and services. They made public health policy and research more inclusive. They changed the way the mainstream saw AIDS in queer people. They saved countless lives, even if they didn't save many of their own. Debbie lost 10 friends herself for maids. And then in 1995, Debbie's act up chapter in Chicago disbanded. She went back to grad school to make sense of what had happened. And as she was doing her research, she felt an emotion she hadn't felt in her entire time with ACT up.

[Deborah Gold]

I'd be looking at something in a newspaper article, and I would just burst into tears. And sometimes it was someone who I knew who had died, but sometimes it wasn't. It was just something more mundane. And that grief was really jarring to me because I had really mostly felt anger. And so I kind of was undone by doing the research. I fell apart. And that started me down a whole path trying to figure out what had we all done with our grief.

[Nicole]

Yeah, this is very designed in a lab exactly for me, so thank you both for facilitating that. So I have been an organizer since 2010, and I have been burning on anger for 15 years, and I haven't slowed down, and I'm not getting burnout.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole tells Debbie how obsessed she is with ACT up, how she feels a kinship through the activism she does with queer friends and comrades after her workday as a paid labor organizer is done.

[Nicole]

I cry very regularly reading about that, about the organizing, but how she's afraid.

[Yowei Shah]

To feel grief about the bad things happening today.

[Nicole]

Last week, a mentor of mine self deported to a country she hasn't been to for 21 years because she doesn't want to get hunted down and, like, permanently incarcerated in this gulag of a country. And if I were to stop and feel my feelings and, like, experience grief every time something happened, I would never get off the floor. Yeah. And now, just, like, we are down the barrel of, like, so many guns of things and people and issues I care about. And probably feeling sad would be a do I need to question for me.

[Yowei Shah]

Right.

[Deborah Gold]

That really makes sense to me. ACT UP was an antidote to despair. That's how when it formed in a moment where no activism had translated into any effective wins and people were dying and no one cared. So as a movement, to be a proper AIDS activist, you had to be outraged. And in that culture of feelings, there was very little space, if any, for what I would call bad feelings, hard feelings like despair or grief. We didn't really want to talk about it or allow it.

[Nicole]

Okay, if this is too personal, please, obviously. But, like, how you dealt with so many friends dying, I cannot. Like, I feel very emotional thinking about that. Like, thinking about. I'm in meetings all the time. Like, meetings for my paid organizing work and my unpaid organizing Work and looking around and being like, what if four of these people died next? Like that. I cannot stand thinking about that.

[Deborah Gold]

In terms of dealing with the deaths of so many comrades, really, and friends, and for many people, lovers and ex lovers. I mean, one thing is many of us engaged in caretaking during the movement. One from among us would start to get sick, and people would set up a schedule, doing people's laundry and buying groceries and bringing meals. It included changing diapers and going with people to doctor's appointments and people who were wasting away and could no longer walk. And we were in our 20s and 30s. You know, we were doing things that people our age, really, in this country and in privileged communities don't typically have to deal with. So it was really intense on that level. But I think the way we dealt with it, or this is the way I dealt with it, and I think many of us was, through our anger and through planning another action, making another fact sheet, taking over someone's office, disrupting a meeting, and also all of the fun stuff that we did as well, I think helped to fill the holes that opened up every time someone died. I remember when Ortez Alderson, he was in active New York, but he then had moved to Chicago, and a bunch of us were on his care team because I remember his lover, I think, worked nights or something, and so we were often there, like evenings into the night. And I remember at his memorial service, other people did eulogies, and I got up and I read a bunch of statistics about who was dying, how they were dying, how much money was not being provided to convey, I guess, to people that Ortez didn't die. He was murdered by the government and by a society that didn't care that gay men were. Were dying. I was just full of fury. But I also think it was a way for me to not fall apart as I was commemorating my friend. And I think that's often how we leftists think about emotions, is we need to convert them. Don't mourn, organize. Turn your grief into rage.

[Yowei Shah]

Yeah. You talk about this moment in your ACT UP chapter where someone proposes to start meetings with a moment of silence.

[Deborah Gold]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Yowei Shah]

And the chapter instead votes to start meetings with a moment of rage.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah, I mean, I don't remember who proposed it, but it was so counter to the ethos of ACT UP Chicago, and I think to ACT UP more generally that it just wasn't gonna fly. Every meeting we began by saying, we are the AIDS coalition to unleash power united in Anger committed to direct action to fight the AIDS crisis before saying, if there are any cops in the room, you need to identify yourselves and leave.

[Nicole]

Man, I would have done so well in ACT up.

[Yowei Shah]

I am right there with the emotional culture. Debbie, were you an angry person before ACT up?

[Deborah Gold]

I have a hard time with my own anger, actually. Like, in my personal life. I have no problem expressing anger at authority. Fig. That's not as difficult for me. Much more difficult is when I'm angry at, like, my lover or my parents. It can be hard for me to get angry. I feel it. But I have an anxiety that my anger could really get out of control. And so I think I really damp it down. And so I probably was drawn to a movement where I could access anger and express it.

[Nicole]

Do you think there's something there around, like, people who had, like, unleashing the anger of people whose anger had been, like, so structurally, systematically tamped down?

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah.

[Nicole]

Women, queer people ripping a mask off and just going, like, buck wild.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah. I think many of us were very familiar with being good little queers, like, hiding ourselves, hiding our true feelings in order to survive. And I think that ACT UP really shifted that where the shame was on society and on the state. ACT UP gave us an opportunity to rip into this society that hated us. And we knew they hated us because they didn't care that people were dying, you know?

[Nicole]

Do you think that it was like. And we're not supposed to use words like bad and good, and I have certainly been accused of being a black and white thinker sometimes, but, like, was it bad that the primary emotional driver was anger? Is that, like, an unhealthy, dissociative response? It feels real.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah, absolutely. I don't feel like it was bad at all. I feel like it was a very important, as you put it, driver of act up's activism, and millions of people's lives were saved as a result of it. So, yeah, And I don't think anger is toxic. I don't think anger is bad. And I think anger in these forms is vitally important for most activists.

[Nicole]

Well, I'm like, maybe I feel so drawn in part to ACT UP because I conform to the emotional palette of ACT UP in a way that I actually feel like I can be out of sync with the organizing milieu that I'm in now.

[Yowei Shah]

Nicole is talking about her unpaid activism, not her labor organizing job.

[Deborah Gold]

Yes. Yes, Right. That makes sense to me.

[Yowei Shah]

You're nodding vigorously, Debbie.

[Nicole]

Why?

[Yowei Shah]

Why does it make sense?

[Deborah Gold]

It makes sense to me because I do feel like activists today are sometimes attuned to feelings in a way that is a little off putting to me as well. Someone can hold a group hostage by their particular strong feeling about something or turn an activist scene into a therapy session. And that's. To me, that's not appropriate. We're not a place to deal at that level with the fact that we're all broken people because we all live in a society that has broken us. So it's not appropriate there sometimes. I'm not saying this is across the board or anything. I think they're much more sophisticated about feelings than I'm suggesting.

[Nicole]

Yeah, maybe. I mean, like, I've been part of it. I'm like, the fuck are we talking about this for? Like, you need to go deal with your therapist. You need to go talk to your friends about this. I'm sorry, that makes me sound so harsh, but when people are doing that, I feel the need to, like, go into this counterweight. And then I feel like judgmental of myself. I'm like, it's so harsh of me. That's not actually who I am. Like, I'm coming from a deeply empathetic perspective.

[Deborah Gold]

Maybe it's useful for us to think not in terms of either or, but in terms of both. And navigating some of those feelings doesn't mean letting them take you over or losing track of what we're really here for. But as I'm saying this, I'm also thinking about situations I've been in where I feel like someone is holding the group hostage with their feelings. And that happened in ACT UP too, by the way.

[Yowei Shah]

Can you give an example?

[Deborah Gold]

Well, this might not be exactly that, but in ACT Up, I do recall one of the refrains that happened amid internal conflicts was people saying to one another, where's your anger? First they would say, people are dying. You're talking about women and the opportunistic infections that they get. But meanwhile, people are dying. Where's your anger? And it was a very complicated moment where within the movement there was so much desperation, such a scarcity mentality, that people who were fighting AIDS as it was affecting a particular population were sometimes seen as not caring about other people with aids.

[Yowei Shah]

Did anyone say that to you, Debbie?

[Deborah Gold]

Well, sometimes we were so furious that some gay white men weren't dealing with racism, weren't dealing with sexism, or were even acting in sexist and racist ways that we would want to do a teach in. And they would say, people are dying. We don't really have time to do this. It was actually similar around grief. People are dying. We don't have time to grieve these deaths. It's like a crisis mentality which is really understandable and doesn't acknowledge that we're in it for the long haul.

[Yowei Shah]

After the break, the important feelings to feel for staying in it for the long haul.

[Deborah Gold]

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[Nicole]

Keep your chest lifted.

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[Yowei Shah]

Welcome back to the show. At this point in the conversation, Nicole wants to know what emotions besides anger and grief would be useful for organizers to tap into with the goal of winning. And Debbie walks us through the feelings that played a role in the rise and fall of ACT up, beginning with the first ACT UP meeting that made her immediately want to lock in when the epidemic started.

[Deborah Gold]

I, let's see, 1981, I was 17 or something, so I was as ignorant as everybody and didn't really get involved until that ACT UP moment. But the activism that I was doing on campus was about an anonymous group of students who went by the name the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist had engaged in an orchestrated hate campaign with death threats campaign against gay students and faculty. And they had been suspended for their suspected involvement. But they were, they were then being allowed to graduate. And so people found out that they were going to be allowed to graduate and we all started protesting that. And so someone from ACT UP came to one of those protests and invited me to come talk to ACT UP about what was happening and to see if ACT UP would support us. So I really went to my first ACT UP meeting not thinking that I was going to hang around, just trying to get their support for what we were doing on our campus. But it was so exciting and so vibrant.

[Yowei Shah]

What was exciting and vibrant about it?

[Deborah Gold]

I mean, it was very sexy. There was already an ACT UP uniform by that point. The uniform was white, T shirts cut off, jeans, combat boots, Doc Martens piercings and tattoos. Just really good looking people, you know, Very queer, Very, very queer.

[Yowei Shah]

Debbie, I heard about the ACT UP uniform from Nicole.

[Deborah Gold]

Oh, that's so funny. Oh, and leather jackets. I forgot to say leather jackets.

[Nicole]

I got one already. I'm here. I'm in it for the hot people of 1987.

[Yowei Shah]

So basically, you walked into a room of very hot, stylish queer people.

[Nicole]

Sounds awesome, ideal.

[Deborah Gold]

And also incredibly smart and politically savvy. I mean, I do think that feelings are really important in nourishing activist spaces and movements and in ACT up. I think in a world that hated queers and where there was no recognition of anything that we had to offer the world, the movement was a space where we started to recognize one another. I think I quickly felt that we were creating a world where I could become different than I was. I think there was a lot of shame about gay sexuality and the so called fast gay lifestyle among many gay men because there was a sense that maybe we brought this on ourselves by having multiple partners and having fun. And so there was something about how sexual everything was that we did. You know, meetings where people were flirting and cruising and sitting on one another's laps and kissing and, you know, there was just a lot of erotic energy.

[Yowei Shah]

What's like a favorite sexy story?

[Deborah Gold]

Oh, well, I did have more public sex, like sex in parks than I had ever had before or since, you know, because people would be out till all hours and it was a way to sustain ourselves.

[Nicole]

Man, I'm like, I'm about to go buy more white T shirts.

[Yowei Shah]

Debbie mentioned this story where one day in 1990, she and about 150 fellow activists got arrested and thrown in jail. But it didn't go the way the cops planned.

[Deborah Gold]

They didn't have enough jail cells. And so they put us into this one large holding area, big room, and everyone was in really good spirits. A lot of joking around and a lot of erotic energy. People were kissing, there was a lot of touching, and at a certain point, some police officer got really pissed off at people and demanded that we stop kissing. No same sex kissing in jail. You have to now sit boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. And then Ortez Alderson, who I mentioned earlier, Ortez, every so often would stand up and say, there will be no kissing. And we would all start kissing. They couldn't control us.

[Yowei Shah]

This reminded Nicole of something she's experienced with her extracurricular organizing, something she sent me many a stressed out voice memo about.

[Nicole]

So part of my direct action experience is you're like doing the direct action and there's like multiple people that you're dating who are at the thing and multiple people who you just dumped or who dumped you and their new person, and you're just like, this is cool. This is also pretty stressful right now. And sometimes I'm like, jesus Christ, how did I get myself into this insane situation? I better not be put in the paddy wagon with the same person. And I wonder if you ever had experiences where you're like, it's too many lovers at one action.

[Deborah Gold]

I don't remember feeling that I may not have had quite as many lovers as you. That may be what the difference is.

[Yowei Shah]

The faster queer lifestyle. Right.

[Deborah Gold]

Sometimes it was people lived in different cities, so it wasn't really a problem.

[Nicole]

You gotta date across chapters. You gotta be strategic.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah.

[Nicole]

So, like, the emotional palette is, like, extreme erotic energy and extreme anger.

[Yowei Shah]

Are those the two main emotions?

[Nicole]

That's what I'm hearing.

[Deborah Gold]

I mean, there was also a lot of humor, a lot of campy humor also. I don't know if this is an emotion, but an intensity. I mean, to be honest, everything else bored me. I found the rest of the world utterly boring at that point. We were living at such a high pitch where you felt like you were engaging in really meaningful work. That was changing things. And the right wing was so intense in that moment. There were calls to quarantine people with aids, to tattoo people with hiv. It was a really horrific time in terms of the right wing. We were fighting for our lives and the lives of our comrades. I think that lent a sense of urgency to what we were doing. It was like, us against the world, and it felt very powerful and exciting, and it was so fun. Even in the face of all the death, it was so fun.

[Nicole]

It's like such a buzzkill to talk about, like, our movements need joy. I'm like, I don't want to party with anyone who's, like, speaking very, like, tenderly about joy. But I think it's really important for people to have fun.

[Deborah Gold]

I think sometimes we activists, because the issues we're tackling are so serious and the injustices are so enormous and frequently deadly. I think we tend to inject seriousness into activist spaces, and that sometimes can crowd out the possibility of humor and campiness and even creativity, because those can be cast as kind of unserious or you're having too much fun. Given the world we live in, we can do both.

[Nicole]

I think it's like that element which is just actually true kind of collective camaraderie, that's the gateway drug to me, I think, is genuinely having fun.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah.

[Nicole]

And part of that's cruising in the park after the action.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah.

[Nicole]

But on the tip of effectiveness, I'm wondering what the relationship between, like, emotions and anger. And grief and the ending of ACT UP Chicago, if any there were. And, like, what advice you would give for other people around that.

[Deborah Gold]

Well, it was very difficult to deal with the ongoing deaths and the sense that even though we had had all these victories, we're not winning. Everyone I know is dying. We're not going to be able to save anyone's life, including perhaps my own.

[Yowei Shah]

The early to mid-90s were a difficult time for Act Up. The drugs that initially seemed promising had ended up disappointing, and people were still dying in massive numbers. Plus, the gay community was turning away from AIDS to issues like gay marriage and gays in the military and found ACT up to be a threat to. To the acceptance of gay people by mainstream society. And in that climate, Debbie says, ACT UP activists began to feel desperate, prompting internal conflicts. They were exhausted by the sheer difficulty of what they'd been doing for years with no end in sight.

[Deborah Gold]

So what did people who felt despair end up doing? People were feeling it, but because there was no space for it in the movement, a lot of people just kind of exited, quietly exited the movement. And I'm not convinced we could have dealt with that despair. How, How. How would any of us have been able to deal with that despair? But I do wonder what would have happened if we had been able to collectivize it. In some sense, the despair because we created no space for it was incredibly individual and almost shameful because to despair was to basically convey that you had given up and that was not an acceptable thing. I think that that contributed to the movement's demise.

[Yowei Shah]

Debbie still remembers the last meeting of ACT UP Chicago. They were talking about how their bank account was being charged because their balance was below a certain amount. And so they voted to close the bank account and to no longer meet at the restaurant because it was too expensive. In other words, they were voting to shut the chapter down. At one point, Debbie began to laugh at the absurdity of closing up shop for such mundane reasons when people were still sick and dying. She laughed so hard, she started to cry. She was just 30 years old.

[Nicole]

In hindsight, would you have done it differently if there had been more space for the mourning and the collective grief? Do you think that would have cut down on the despair that led to people leaving and the ending of the group?

[Deborah Gold]

I mean, the devastation was tremendous. So it's hard to say that if we had dealt with it, think we would have lasted longer as an organization or something? It's more that I think a lot of energy can go into disavowing a Feeling that exhausts me. I've done that too much in my own life, trying to get away from the really hard feelings. So just at the level of energy and being able to continue on, I think figuring out ways to deal with that, and not in ways that derail the movement, not in ways that turn the movement into a therapeutic situation, but inventive ways, creative ways. Not just saying, hey, we don't have time for that. We don't have time for grieving right now. It's too urgent. We need to just act. And I think we should listen when we say stuff like that. We should wonder about ourselves a little bit.

[Nicole]

Yeah. I feel like it's thinking about how I can be more attuned of when I'm like, the real work is over here. Anytime I'm probably talking about the real work should probably be a flag that I'm trying to disavow other things that are happening in the space that are important. Yeah. So you said you fell apart when you ended with act up and you're going back into dissertating. What was that about?

[Deborah Gold]

I remember I was in Chicago. I was in my apartment reading through newspapers and magazines. And I don't think it went on for days and days, but I think it happened frequently during the research. And it would take me by surprise. It was that sort of being caught really unaware and suddenly just weeping and then kind of having to pull myself back together, you know, As I said, it kind of undid me. I don't know if it was within language, really.

[Yowei Shah]

Debbie, what do you think? Not feeling grief for so many years. What do you think that did to you?

[Deborah Gold]

I don't. I'm not sure that I even know. But back to Nicole, to your conundrum. Actually, I think one of your concerns was that if you allowed yourself to go there, you would be a puddle. And I don't think it really would take you out of the struggle. But I also think that it's maybe useful for us to think about how movements really can't rely on so few people. A movement can't sustain itself. If people feel like I'm the only one who can do this, I have to do this. Everybody needs to be able to take a break.

[Nicole]

Yeah. Crying as leadership development is what I'm hearing. And there are like, there's tons of people, but constant battle for me to not feel that way.

[Deborah Gold]

Yeah.

[Nicole]

I feel like I have a lot more permission now to feel the range of my feelings. And I feel like I'm going to be more. What Was the phrase like the emotional culture. I feel like I want to think more about the emotional cultures that I'm trafficking in and think about how those shape how I feel. That feels like a really new idea to me.

[Deborah Gold]

And to be perfectly honest, Nicole, it sounds to me like you're already completely attuned to all of that.

[Nicole]

So it is a battle every day living in hell. I just, I really just. I feel like now I'm gonna experience my grief and whatever. I do love to cry, by the way. I just, I appreciate the conversation and I'm just also so deeply appreciative of you and what all of the Act UP people did. And I just really, really know that, like, because you all did, we can now. And I'm like so appreciative and like that. That legacy is like extremely alive in me and in so many other people.

[Deborah Gold]

Oh, Nicole, thank you. I think that this cross generational thing matters deeply and what all the young people are doing, like the change in language and the they them and the possibility of living gender differently, that has been opened up by mostly younger people. That is just so important for me, but also really inspiring. So they can't really put anything back in the bottle. That's the thing. They're going to damage a lot of us. The harms our beyond belief. But they can't put the stuff they want to put back into the bottle. They can't put it back into the bottle because we carry it forward.

[Nicole]

I am fanning myself in a different way now so as to dry my tears full circle.

[Yowei Shah]

Fanning at the beginning, fanning at the end.

[Nicole]

That's the binary.

[Yowei Shah]

Thank you to Nicole for being so good at channeling your aggro and for being self aware about it. And thank you to Deborah Gold for being our proxy. She wrote a book called Moving Politics, Emotion and Act up's Fight against aids. And she's working on a book called the not yet of Politics, also about political organizing and emotion. I cannot wait to read it. Okay, you feeling sickos? That was our last full episode of the year. We're gonna take a break for the next few months to recharge, that is sleep and work on the next batch of cases for you. Speaking of which, we're in the market for some new emotional conundrums at the moment. On my wish list of things to investigate conundrums having to do with clothing design, history, food, spirituality.

[Nicole]

Really.

[Yowei Shah]

I'm open to it all though. Get in [e-mail] in the meantime, we'll be popping into the feed every so often with a bonus teaser because we have a full catalog of exclusive episodes you can listen to. If you are that hard up for Proxy over the next few months, just go to patreon.com ProxyPodcast to become a member. Proxy is an independent podcast that depends on listener support. Thank you so much everyone. Starting at $5 a month you'll get access to our exclusive bonus episodes plus ad free episodes in the chat. And if you just want our newsletter you can become a free member. Our newsletter is chock full of BTS updates and liner notes for episodes this week. You will get piping hot reading recs from Nicole and Debbie. Just go to patreon.com proxypodcast to get all those brownies. This episode was edited by Tim Howard, mixed by Kyle Pulley and produced by me, Yowei Shaw with help from Charlie Klein. Music in this episode by Tim Howard. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Proxy is a proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a network of independent creator owned listener supported podcasts. Audrey Martovich is the Executive Producer of Radiotopia. Yuri Lozurdo is the Director of Operations discover audio with Visionadiotopia FM. As always, you can follow us on Instagram ProxyPodcast and I'm oweyshaw and if you like the show and want to help us grow, consider rating and reviewing us on Apple podcasts. That stuff matters. Apparently. You can also tell a friend about the show. Like if you know someone who would get something out of today's episode, text them a link right now. All right everyone, thank you for listening and getting us to a Year two of emotional investigative journalism. You guys rock. Happy holidays and take care of yourselves and each other.

[Nicole]

I also have watched a lot of footage of their meetings. Oh really More nerdy than watching many multi hour oral history interviews is just like a shaky camcorder in like basement of people.

[Yowei Shah]

Like debating how many hours of meetings have you watched?

[Nicole]

I don't want to talk about it.

[Deborah Gold]

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Um, can we stop at a bathroom? Are you alright?

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