Fed Up Queers

Fed Up Queers, or FUQ, was a queer activist direct action group that began in New York City. The group was made up mostly of lesbians such as Jennifer Flynn (who later co-founded the New York City AIDS Housing Network as well as Health GAP), though notable participants also included gay rights pioneer and Stonewall riots veteran, Bob Kohler, and writer, Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore. The activists who formed FUQ came together loosely for a few actions in 1998, but the first action attributed to Fed Up Queers was on World AIDS Day, December 1, 1998, when they visited New York State Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn's house in Queens at midnight to protest her stance on names reporting.

The group grew out of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up), Sex Panic!, and the October 19th Coalition. As co-founder Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore wrote, after the success of the political funeral for Matthew Shepard, "we tried to create a large-scale radical queer activist group, but we got stuck in endless process and the meetings got smaller and smaller, [so] some of us formed an affinity group called Fed Up Queers to do smaller, targeted actions. ... Originally the idea was that we would only meet when someone had an idea for an action, we wouldn’t get bogged down in process, but then we mostly went from one action to the next, since someone always had an idea."

Fed Up Queers held political funerals for murdered transpeople and queers, and fought restrictive AIDS policies, but focused much of their work on then mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD. Fed Up Queers gained notoriety in the media for three actions:

First, they were the first of the more than 1,200 people arrested protesting the murder of Amadou Diallo by New York police officers. As one participant wrote, there had already been "protests, but no one was getting arrested and we wanted to raise the stakes. We wanted to block the Brooklyn Bridge, but we only had eight people who could risk arrest, so we said okay, we’ll block the bridge with eight people. That’s how desperate and angry and empowered we felt." Arrestees eventually included Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, former mayor David Dinkins, and actors Susan Sarandon, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Dick Gregory.

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