Hi, I’m Dan Glass and I’m an HIV-positive activist.
In 1989, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP London Chapter, formed during the rising AIDS-related deaths and government inaction.
Today, ACT UP London is a diverse, non-partisan group, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the HIV pandemic, along with the broader inequalities and injustices that perpetuate it.
For World AIDS Day on 1 December 2025, we staged a Living Act of Resistance.
We held a minute’s silence, then lay on the cold, damp paving stones of Trafalgar Square to mark the millions lost to AIDS-related deaths and to condemn government complicity in preventable loss.
We chanted: “We mourn the dead, we fight like hell for the living.”
Resistance felt both intimate and collective.
Ben Gilbert’s colour photograph shows about 30 of us lying on our backs, fanned out around a statue on a large traffic island at the top of Whitehall. This statue is of Charles I on horseback. He looks down towards the Houses of Parliament, just visible in the distance.
The base of the monument is draped in a red banner.
We’re holding handmade cardboard gravestones over our bodies.
The inscription on one reads: ‘Silence Equals Death’.
Some have brought red roses and candles.
Three people are standing facing us. One holds a cardboard gravestone that reads ‘For a Friend’.
Another holds a list of names with the heading: ‘Never Forgotten’.
I remember that above us, birds cut a V through the sky, rotating leaders, sharing responsibility.
Nature knows how to organise far better than Westminster does.
Public mourning is political: it insists that our lovers, friends and family should still be here, kissing, arguing, creating, dancing.
Lying there, grief and rage are intertwined.
As the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz wrote, “I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg.”
Forty years later, we’re still incubating it. Forty years on, people are still dying while governments stall, stigmatise and privatise care. At the same time, global inequities in access to testing, medications, housing and mental health care persist.
HIV is not just a medical issue, it is political, economic, gendered and racialised.
ACT UP London exists because Silence Still Equals Death and Action Still Equals Life.
This is the end of Stop 02.
Continue to your left, passing a display case, to read Stop 03 on the wall opposite the exhibition’s entrance.