[“By the time of Stop the Church, in 1989, Petrelis had been deeply involved in ACT UP. But he had a social problem. “No one would let me in their affinity group … People felt I was too angry, too over the top and—you know, look, I guess I did set myself up as an isolated character for whatever reason.” So when the morning of December 11 rolled around, Michael almost didn’t go to the action, he was feeling so excluded, but he did pull it together and ended up inside the cathedral.
With his friend Carl Goodman, Michael walked into the ten-o’clock mass. He didn’t see anyone else from ACT UP. Then he saw Bill Dobbs walking around, and he doesn’t remember the police on the inside at this point. Carl and Michael were out in the middle of the church, right on the center aisle, and the mass began. Cardinal O’Connor made an announcement about there being an expected demonstration that day, and he wanted his parishioners to stay calm. O’Connor quickly led the congregation in a prayer, and it was at this point that ACT UP started the action. Different members of different affinity groups stood up, read statements about what was wrong with the church, its attitudes toward gays and lesbians, its attitudes toward AIDS and HIV prevention. Michael remembered that he wanted to be heard. And he didn’t want to do a sit-down action. “I [stood] up on the pew where I was, and started screaming, O’Connor, you are killing us. You are killing us!
“And I couldn’t hear myself, because there’s this cacophony of competing voices from the parishioners saying the prayer … ACT UP demonstrators trying to read their statements, trying to be heard. I do remember hearing noises of the boots of the cops on the tiles, you know? Which I thought was kind of surprising because there was so much of this noise. And standing up and screaming, O’Connor, you’re killing us! Just stop it, stop it! And then an usher for the church came over and asked me to sit down. I said, No, I’m not going to sit down! He goes away and then came back and said, Please sit down. I got down in a little bit. Stood up again, started screaming again. This time, there was a policeman who came over to me and said, You’re going to have to sit down. I said, Okay. Sat down, and got up a minute or so later, doing it again. And I guess it was at that point, I went into this thing of Well, it’s a Fellini movie.
Listen, I’m half-Italian, so I felt like this was fine. This was more than fine for all of the surreal aspects of this. And I eventually was pulled down from standing up on the pews screaming, by two cops. They got me into the aisle. They put the handcuffs on me, and they’re leading me out, and as they’re leading me out, this fellow says, Well, who are you? and everything. And I said, Why do you want to know? It turned out to be a reporter from the Times. And [he] quotes me the next day and everything. Then I got all this hate mail. I was listed in the phone book.”
When Michael got out of jail, he discovered that the action was big news. And a number of people in ACT UP were mad at him for having violated the group decision to have a silent die-in. But Michael’s attitude was Well, that’s what I wanted to do. “Someone had thrown a Communion wafer to the floor. And of course that action is what the church seized on, as this horrible act of blasphemy and outrageousness. It was like, Oh please, you can get another wafer, you can’t bring your friends back from the dead.”]
Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman
