Never Silent - ACT UP and My Life in Activism Book (Paperback)

RELEASE DATE - 6 JUNE 2023

The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject of David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuous activism In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration, it announced.

After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of AIDS, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash PowerACT UP in the West Village.

It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. ACT UP would change the course of AIDS, pressuring the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and three administrations to finally respond with research and treatment plans that ultimately saved millions of lives.

Staley, a shrewd strategist with nerves of steel, organised some of the group's most spectacular actions, from shutting down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to putting a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms.

Never Silent is the inside story of what brought Staley to ACT UP and the explosive and sometimes painful years to follow, years filled with triumph, humiliation, joy, loss, and persistence. Never Silent is guaranteed to inspire the activist within all of us.

"A fascinating biography of a life lived in and through activism." --Dave, Goodreads

"Should be required reading for anyone who teaches social movements, public health history, the history of HIV and AIDS, or late 20th century American history." -- Nursing Clio

"A clear-eyed, hard-earned, even affectionate recollection of a valiant fight against AIDS and bigotry." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Staley is the best kind of guide to this history, particularly in relating the science behind AIDS treatment in common terms. Equally charming and even-handed, this is one story on the queer underdogs who roused a country from its indifference that should enter the AIDS canon." -- The Washington Blade Online

"Never Silent is a gorgeous book, or rather it's several gorgeous books all at once. It's the clear-eyed, at times shockingly honest, very funny, wildly sexy, and enormously moving memoir of one of the most important activists of our times. It's an incisive, precise, and revelatory insider's history of ACT UP and of the protean role the group played in reframing the global medical, social, and political response to AIDS. And, with his remarkable combination of radical daring, intellectual rigour and an ethically grounded pragmatism; with his capacity for joy, even in the midst of tragedy; with his breathtaking confidence that justice will come for those who fight for it, Peter Staley has written an electrifying primer for anyone who's thinking/worrying/wondering about how to change/save the world." --Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America