George H. W. Bush Protest

When George H. W. Bush was inaugurated in 1989, the AIDS crisis was not slowing down. People hoped he would take a position of leadership on the issue, but he did not champion AIDS education, prevention, and treatment as activists wanted him to.¹ This led to widespread anger towards the president. One of ACT UP’s strategies was something they called “republican drag”, where they dressed as republican donors to enter functions. ACT UP used this strategy in 1990 when George Bush visited the Quidnessett Country Club in North Kingstown, RI. The RI Republican party was hosting a fundraiser in which President Bush was to be the guest of honor.² ACT UP/RI aimed to disrupt that fundraiser in order to call attention to Bush’s inaction on AIDS. President Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, the first comprehensive AIDS relief legislation, later that same year.³

¹Tasleem J Padamsee, “Fighting an Epidemic in Political Context: Thirty-Five Years of HIV/AIDS Policy Making in the United States,” Social History of Medicine 33, no. 3 (December 28, 2018): 1001–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky108.

²“Club History | Quidnessett Country Club - North Kingstown, RI,” accessed December 9, 2024, https://quidnessett.com/club-history/.

³Planning Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on the Ryan White CARE Act: Data for Resource Allocation, “Overview of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and the Ryan White CARE Act,” in Measuring What Matters: Allocation, Planning, and Quality Assessment for the Ryan White CARE Act (National Academies Press (US), 2004), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216136/.