ACT UP/Chicago leader dies

Frank Sieple, who was part of the inner core of ACT UP/Chicago, has died. Here are few excerpts of a long profile I did of Frank for The Advocate in 1990.

"Oh, I've been acting up for a long time," explained Frank Sieple, when asked what first led him to ACT UP/Chicago. "I got permanently kicked out of high school when I was a sophomore. I was questioning authority when I was 14."

A 29-year-old flight attendant, Sieple joined ACT UP in 1987 because he was "really tired of seeing friends diagnosed and dying while the newspaper wrote about the good things the government is doing."

"I tried other activist groups," Frank said, "but I always ended up stuffing envelopes. I realized I needed to speak out in the streets if I wanted to see change in my lifetime. ACT UP fights back rather than just accepting one AIDS death every 18 minutes. We know there are drugs to prolong lives and the knowledge out there to find a cure."

Frank has the support of his family in the Chicago suburbs and his lover of eight years, Bob, although he says his mom and dad worry that he might get hurt and Bob had to acquire a taste for being surrounded by "hard-core activists." ...

Frank considers Chicago's "hard-core activists" his family. "Danny [Sotomayor] and Tim [Miller] and Billy [McMillan] and Carol [Jonas] and Ferd [Eggan] and I have a camaraderie," he said. "When they get sick or I see them manhandled by police, I really feel that part of me is being taken away."

The group's activism, Frank says, stands in stark contrast to "the passive attitude of people who just go to work and to bars and hope to get lucky on weekends and then everything is alright and they don't have to worry about repression and discrimination."

"Ultimately, they will be confronted with discrimination and they'll have a choice," he said. "They can fight back or go back into their closets and hide." ...