Tales of a Rainy Friday, Kathy Ottersten, and an ACT UP Funeral, RIP.
Torrential downpours fell from the sky as we watched @circusamok at Tompkins Square Park. We laughed; kids giggled, and danced about. Lower East Side scruffies hung about in the park, seeking cover from the trees. Sarah, AC, and Jay talked about the dangers of Project 2025 #stopthecoup2025. So did Jennifer, whose gender play had been attacked earlier in the week, unraveling a story in many characters, beginning with Phyllis, who needs a new hat, frets about chemtrails, and worries Biden is a robot. Phyllis leaves the stage to find her hat. And Jennifer walks onto the stage. Says it's true, Biden is not a robot. It's not a year to say I just can't. This isn't a Valentine's card. It's a chess move. It's not a single-issue election. Think judges and sustainability, climate policy and healthcare, queer and trans rights, civil liberties and voting. There is a lot to think about and protect. Voting is harm reduction, not a popularity contest.
June in New York rocks.
The whole time I was there, I was thinking about Kathy Ottersten's memorial the day before. What a gorgeous and heartbreaking night of stories. Wearing Andrew Vélez’ pearls, Jay Blotcher MC’d the event. "The farewell process was gut-wrenching, inspiring, and hopefully cathartic for the 60 or so mourners assembled, many who had fought alongside Kathy in the trenches," said Blotcher afterward.
Friday’s rain felt fitting.
"You take the risk to save lives," said Kathy. “Maybe that’s how you love people.”
One story after another, we listened.
Alexis Danzig stood up to recall the story of Kathy’s life, as someone in recovery, who took that suffering and alienation, fought the isolation, endured drug use and detox, losing friends to overdose and police brutality, turning pain into purpose. The madness must stop, thought Kathy, becoming an organizer and activist.
“My name is Alexis Danzig,” Alexis began, “and Kathy was my friend and ACT UP comrade. I'm going to share some remembrances sent by Deb Levine and Monica Pearl -- both of whom were co-defendants with Kathy in the 1991 ACT UP Needle Exchange Trial. Deb and Monica cannot be here today and send their love. But first -- thanks to Deb, I'm going to read a part of Kathy's 1991 court deposition -- and then I'll share words from Deb and Monica.
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When Kathy first joined ACT UP, we might have met Kathy as "Kathy," or perhaps as "Otter." In those days, Kathy's pronouns were she and her.
My name is Kathryn M. Otter. I am a 23-year old transsexual woman currently living in Manhattan. I am also a recovering drug addict who has over 7 years of sobriety. I grew up in an abusive home with an alcoholic father and a neurotic mother
who could never put down roots. As a result, I attended 6 different schools before 9th grade. I quickly learned that the way to smooth the emotional pains of my childhood was to drink, so by the age of 11, I was a daily-after-school-drinker,
besides the occasional nips between classes.
By the time I was 15, I was a crystal amphetamine addict with a $15 hundred to $2 thousand dollar a-week habit who supported herself by collecting drug money owed to coke-dealer friends. I worked with a Bowie knife and a .38 special, and snorted my way into oblivion. I also spent long hours loading needles for my friends who were into shooting, a habit that I was too scared to get into.
When I was 16 and living in southern Ohio, I was informally picked up on a weapons charge and immediately released. The officer told me I had 36 hours to get into drug treatment or charges would be filed. 24-hours later, I was detoxing in a rehabilitation center in northern Kentucky. I remained in treatment for 11 months, and I have never had another drink or drug since April 14, 1983.
I moved to New Jersey and became a staff trainee at a drug rehabilitation program. Over the next 15 months I rose to the level of senior staff member and helped run a group of 160 teen addicts. It was here that I first encountered AIDS in 1985. [at this point, Kathy was about 17 years old.] We had kids in the group younger than myself dying from AIDS which they had caught by sharing needles. Over the next 4 years, 4 of my old, using friends in Ohio also died from AIDS, all of whom contracted it from used needles.
As a recovering addict and member of the gay and lesbian community, I've been to more than a score of AIDS funerals. Friends of mine have gotten sober only to find out they are HIV positive. I do not know exactly how many people I know who are HIV positive or who are persons with AIDS. It is a daily part of my life that over the past few years I have adjusted to.
I currently manage a photography studio in Chelsea. We do copy-work for people whose loved ones have died from AIDS, who want to pass on old photos to their families. 3 years ago the New York City Health Department said that 1 in every 8 men in my neighborhood were dying from AIDS. I see people walking by who are wasting away from this disease.
I go to AA meetings and NA meetings, and I've become friends with people who will probably not survive the next 3 years.
It is at those times that I know that every needle exchanged, every person educated about AIDS, may be another life saved. I’ve lost too many people already, this madness must stop!
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The ACT UP Needle Exchange trial directly challenged the New York City Department of Health, the New York City justice system, and pressed for immediate policy changes to help save real lives. The Needle Exchange 10 helped win the right for New Yorkers to access clean needles and support.
Deb Levine recalled, “Kathy and I were arrested together on March 6, 1990. We were two of ten AIDS activists distributing sterile syringes and bleach kits to injection drug users (IDUs) to prevent one of the key modes of HIV transmission -- the sharing of HIV-contaminated works. I'm sure very few of you need a reminder, but bear with me as I give a little context. At the time, needle exchange programs were illegal in part because New York and ten other states prohibited syringe purchase and possession with exceptions made only for authorized medical workers and patients with prescriptions. The law against syringe purchase and possession served as political cover for rejecting out of hand, harm reduction models like safe injection practices to in favor of only promoting abstinence-based substance abuse treatment. Illegal possession, sale, or furnishing of needles and syringes was classified as a misdemeanor violation, punishable by up to a year in prison. But we knew that sterile injecting equipment could save lives. We also knew that the "wrong" people's lives were at stake. Outside of the AIDS activist community, the general public was more comfortable with the criminalization of addiction, and so public health policy was determined not by doctors and addiction treatment researchers but instead by law enforcement, prosecutors ,and politicians. No one in government was interested in meeting addicts where they were, listening to their needs and holistically caring for their health. Or in simpler terms - treating them like human beings. Harm reduction advocates however vigorously argued that needle exchanges did not endorse addiction; indeed, ACT UP demonstrated that harm reduction programs served as an inflection point, a bridge through which addicts could act on their own behalf to protect their health and begin to link to available treatment services when they felt themselves ready. Members of ACT UP and the National AIDS Brigade were arrested performing the work that should have been the purview of the public health care system. To fill that abdication of responsibility, we created and ran an underground needle exchange program in New York City. We distributed syringes bought out of state and smuggled into NY, we offered bleach kits to clean syringes, we handed out condoms and dental dams, we discussed safer-sex practices and offered information on addiction treatment programs. Many many AIDS activists participated in this initiative. But ten of us: Kathy Otter, Richard Elovich, Gregg Bordowitz, Cynthia Cochrane, Monica Pearl, Dan Williams, Phillip Flores, Jon Stuen Parker, Velma Campbell and I agreed to risk arrest and jail time by giving out free sterile syringes out in the open and disposing of dirty works so as to challenge and overturn that syringe prohibition law in court. Ten of us were arrested but only eight of us stood trial for illegal needle possession. Two of us had much less of a safety net if sentenced to prison. Velma Campbell, who worked with the National AIDS brigade, had been a cocaine addict, but she had been drug-free for the past five years. She could not risk incarceration because she was enrolled in nursing school. Phillip Flores, also with the National AIDS brigade, dropped out because he was an active injection drug user with a history of arrests. In the deposition he submitted for our motion to dismiss the charges in the interest of justice, Flores wrote that he saw thirteen friends die of AIDS. Actually, he dictated the affidavit to Cynthia Cochran, because he couldn't read or write. Nor could he risk jail time because it would trigger a much longer sentence for him. The rest of us also calculated the breadth of our privilege that enabled us to risk going to jail and each of us made the personal decision to go to trial and accept the consequences of the judge's decision. In an article about the development of needle exchange practices in the US since the 1980's, public health researcher Katherine McLean wrote that "needle exchange attempts to establish injecting drug users as legitimate members of the national body and further allows this group to demonstrate their qualifications through the uptake of risk-conscious health practices." Kathy, whom I did not know well when we were arrested, was probably the most relaxed when we eight stood trial. They were in their element when testifying on the stand; when they were challenged by the ADA to recollect exactly where they were at the time of their arrest, they were able to pinpoint the spot on the Lower East Side because they knew it well; they often frequented the discounted clothing shops on Orchard Street. The laughter that spontaneously broke out from the spectators disrupted the prosecutor's rhythm and the presiding judge, Laura Drager, chimed in that she shopped there too. She and Kathy shared a "girl" moment. Kathy was a New Yorker at heart when being one meant that you browsed the Lucite bra boxes at Orchard Corset or Kaufman's Lingerie. In preparation for trial, Kathy did not hold back the brutal details of their life and why they were committed to seeing this action through. They told their life story on the stand -- not to exact pity, but instead to express the extraordinary hardships of coming out and surviving as trans and as a recovering addict in all their particularities. When Kathleen McLean writes of the risk taken by those who established and benefited from needle exchanges in order to insist on their position as "legitimate members of the national body," I think of Kathy. I think of the risk calculation Kathy must have considered, given that we all expected to end up in Rikers Island serving some time. But Kathy never expressed fear. One of my organizing jobs for that action was to ensure that each of my co-defendants told of their personal investment in their affidavits attached to our court papers. Please listen to what Kathy wrote about themselves --- it is a narrative so memorable, so raw and utterly unapologetic. Kathy was twenty three when they wrote this. I was, and still am, in awe of them.”
Monica Pearl writes about her meeting in 2023 with activist and journalist Hannah Gold, who will be speaking later:
When Hannah said I could come see the harm reduction facilities, I imagined a street corner operation like back in the day. Hannah took me to the municipal office that houses the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center down on Canal Street. I was astounded. She showed me the board of needles that users could choose from depending on which drugs they were using – including hormones for sustaining trans existence – and fentanyl strips and even, unofficially, a safe space to shoot up. Hannah explained Narcan to me, gave me a Narcan training on the spot, and a dispenser to take with me. (You’ll probably know that Narcan is the nasal spray that can immediately turn around an opioid overdose.)
When Hannah introduced me to the workers as one of the original Needle Exchangers, each one stopped what they were doing, and looked right at me and thanked me.
Tears sprang to my eyes. I hadn’t kept track. I didn’t know.
Sarah Schulman once encouraged me not to refer to myself as "a former member of ACT UP," but as an ACT UP veteran. This made me realize: in ACT UP we belong to each other; I feel that fervently. To this day. These are my comrades. You, here, are my people, and will always be.
I miss Kathy – and I am very, very sad she is gone, and that we couldn’t save her.
I really hope Kathy knew and felt something along the lines of what I learned and felt that day with Hannah at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center. That we actually saved lives. That we have a literal legacy.
And I know Kathy carried on saving lives because that was who she was and what she needed to do. Kathy Otter – ¡presente!"
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.”
It was a time of friendships forged in conflict, with both the movement and the culture about it As Ottersten told Hannah Gold in an oral history published, September 28, 2023. “When I came out as trans, I didn’t know any other trans people. According to medical knowledge at the time, we just did not exist. So when I went to my first ACT UP meeting, which was the same month I started hormones, I wanted to make sure I was seen. I would wear tight, sleeveless t-shirts, relatively revealing jeans or daisy dukes, and sneakers. The outfit was androgynous, but on me it looked outrageous because I was growing my breasts in at the time. I transitioned on the floor of ACT UP, and I cannot tell you how many times people came up to me over the course of the first couple years and said, ‘You’re just a self-hating faggot. You can’t accept being a gay man so you’d rather cut yourself apart.’ I chose to stimulate that discussion as often as I could. I wanted to be asked questions, that was part of my activism. By transitioning in that space, I was also trying to show that trans people are whole people the entire way through the process, and that I wasn’t ashamed of, or defined by, my transition.
HG: “It sounds like you were facing quite a lot of transphobia even within ACT UP.
KO: “Yes. Many within ACT UP opposed my identification as a woman. There was an area where women mostly sat, and I was not allowed to sit there. I was asked out of a lot of queer women’s groups. But I don’t want to portray that as universal. When one person gave me a hard time at a meeting, others would come up to me and say, “Don’t take it personally, they don’t get it.” And I just couldn’t hate them for it, because I was in an organization where people were going through the worst grief of their lives every day. They were challenging the world, and I was challenging them. That’s something Pax Christi taught me: Even when you know in your heart that you are correct, you have to give somebody else the grace to be wrong, because you’ve also been wrong before.”
A prophetic message, give people grace to be wrong, a lesson in friendship and conflict.
Many of Kathy’s conflicts and lessons grew a difficult relationship with a world, that seemed to consume the poor, sex workers, drug users, etc. As Kathy told Sarah Schulman in her December 28, 2017 interview with the ACT UP Oral History Project:
“So, coming to ACT UP at that point was a functional thing since I was working on these other issues. I was out of the city for 1988, and when I came back in ’89, I wasn’t going to be a Trans person, as far as I was concerned. I knew what I was, and I’d been through already two minor breakdowns and all kinds of other issues, and so I came back to stick a shotgun in my mouth. My friend John, who was a little drag queen, five-foot-one Debbie Harry impersonator, somewhere in the background at Wigstock, in the movie, I called him the night that I stuck the shotgun in my mouth when I took it out, because as I was sitting there, I realized the only reason I was thinking about killing myself was because of everybody else, because I was so sick of humanity. I had no idea of what the hell I was supposed to be and how I was going to get along in just the world around me. And that little realization at that moment, I said, “Oh, fuck everybody.” That was it. I just was not going to care what people thought about me anymore. I gave him a call and I said, “You know, you just got to talk to me.””
From the start, there was a feeling of being in a big family. As Sarah Schuman put it, ACT UP was not a consensus-based organization. There were a lot of Jewish people, Italians, a lot of screaming. Kathy recalled, “I walked into ACT UP, for me it was, first of all, I just was like, “Okay, there are people here who don’t like me and probably will never like me, but this feels like family.” Big Irish families argue all the time. I’ve been in them. So, it felt like family, it felt like I had permission to try, permission to speak in a way that I’d never had before, and so I opened my mouth and it went from there…”
The friendship and the fights were always there, as Kathy explained to Sarah Schulman:
“We get set in our ways. So it was that too. Among even the Lesbians, the divide was very much age-wise. One of the older Lesbians used to come, and she disappeared, I think, off the face of the Earth, but she’d be in her seventies now, a woman, Sukie, …. she was also homeless and would stay with me and would sit and tell me how much I wasn’t a woman...”
Still, it was a place where trans people could be safe, recalled Kathy, “ACT UP’s place for the Trans movement wasn’t speaking about the Trans movement, because that wasn’t, as you say, part of the public conversation then. What it really was, was to be, for us, a place where we were safe…”
For Kathy, “ACT UP’s greatest achievement was, was showing the rest of the freakin’ gay and Lesbian community we didn’t have to be screaming at each other all the time…” It was also about working together. “We can still do this. All these communities can work together and find their points, and if we need to argue about other things, we will. But let’s first come at it from a point of respect for each other.”
We saved lives, recalled Alexis Danzig and the others, thinking of Kathy’s courage, willingness to endure arrest, to live the movement, its trials, with their risks, including prolonged jail time.
Ann Northrop and Charles King told stories about the friendships born of their time on trial, first in the Safe Sex Six, for the disruption of Mass at St. Patrick's in 1989, and then the syringe exchange medical necessity case.
“We decided to take it to trial,” recalled Northrop, to publicize the horrors of the Catholic Church, refusing even modest gestures of reproductive autonomy or safe sex in their facilities.
“Few criminal trials were as fun as the St Pats Trial,” recalled Charles King. At one point, Northrop, who was defending herself, put up a motion to have the words, “In God We Trust” taken down from the court. The defendants eventually got sentenced to 75 hours of community service.
King got to know Kathy on the ACT UP Housing Committee that went on to become Housing Works. The two went to jail countless times before St Pats. Thousands of lives were saved as result of the push to legalize syringe exchange. Charles King, an ordained Babtist minister, finished with a reference to Psalm 139:14:
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Jacob Kellman followed, telling dark stories about Kathy’s life and the world of sex work and street justice she came to know.
Several attendees referred to a friend Kathy lost, Mary Fuentes killed by a cop, who ended up at Hart Island, New York’s potter's field, a public cemetery. “Love knows no time,” they recalled Kathy telling them, inviting friends to come to Hart Island with her.
“Look at us aging together,” said Sarah Schulman, greeting the crowd as she stood to speak. Its hard not feeling responsible when a friend takes their own life. ACT UP came before the gender revolution, said Schulman. Yet, non-binary people always felt loved and integrated in ACT UP.
Rather than think of it as an early departure, think about how long the person stayed, said another speaker, their voices, blurring.
Hannah Gold followed telling stories about meeting Kathy and conducting one of the oral histories I refer to.
Ottersten’s sister, Lauren, recalled Kathy as the exalted first child. Still she looked out for her, even when her parents worried about her always carrying her. “She never dropped this baby,” said Lauren. Yet, when Kathy suffered, she felt it too, Lauren followed, referring to the ups and downs, moods and anguish that gripped Kathy. Still Ottersten moved beyond that self hate with the help of activism, of ACT UP. She would not become the person she was without you. Through you, she found a cause. You let her do that. And you changed the world. And my family is the recipient of that. She struggled and I loved her. She talked about it and she did it. She made a decision and she did it. Its my duty to understand that. I think about it all the time, imagining her beyond this corporal existence.” Lauren paused, referring to moments she hears her sister. “I think Kathy is right here, with us all.” Forgive others, Kathy taught me, forgive them for being less of themselves. Forgive, said Lauran, demonstrating so.
Ava was the last to see Kathy. If you see a queer person you love, check on them. You have to check on them. Make sure they are ok. That's what she was good at, saving queer people’s lives. Hearing her stories made my life better.
I love that ACT UP is still going.
"Kathy experienced harassment during our time in ACT UP," said Brian Zabcik, speaking toward the end of the memorial. "They were the subject of transphobia in ACT UP, and this is part of the history of ACT UP." Brian went on to read part of a message that Kathy sent to him earlier this year when ACT UP was debating what to do about a member who was harassing other members. Kathy wrote:
“I’ve been circling around for hours as to where to start on the point of the meeting tonight. It’s funny you mention about forgetting, as yes, we do most certainly forget. I forget arrests of mine, and then something will pop up and I’ll go, yesssss, I remember that, ACD for that one. What I have a remembrance of, in regards to you, is that someone said something shitty and transphobic on a Monday night as we were chatting for a moment before a meeting [back then], and you turned and gave them a look back that made them walk away. For me that was an important moment, as very few people would even think to defend me, whereas I suspect that for you it was just you not allowing someone you liked to be mistreated, and so wouldn’t have registered a blip in comparison to other things going on.”
With the help of a few friends, Kathy stayed with ACT UP and with organizing, acknowledging what happened and letting others know about it too.
Listening to the stories, I was immensely moved, watching Jay and Brian and Ann and Eric Sawyer, who spoke last, recalling meeting Ottersten with love and admiration. I love the stories, the meaning I find in the working through we were going through as the sun went down, before that Friday when it rained. Thank you Kathy. RIP.
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