Amy Bauer

Note: In later years they would identify as trans and use the name Jaime Bauer, but on March 13, 1989 they were known as Amy Bauer and used she/her pronouns.

Background: Amy is a 30 year old white, Jewish lesbian. She grew up in Stuyvesant Town on the east side of Manhattan, went to P.S. 40, Hunter High School, then MIT where she studied Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urban Planning. She never felt comfortable with pressure from her family and society to be conventionally feminine, and started coming out between high school and college. In Boston, she started getting involved in activist organizations, particularly Women’s Pentagon Action, which made connections between war, the patriarchy, women’s oppression, and the military industrial complex, and saw the Pentagon as the root of all evil in the U.S. She learned a great deal about effective civil disobedience techniques with Women’s Pentagon Action. She moved to New York to take a job with New York City Transit. She started getting involved in gay causes, which led to her getting involved in AIDS causes, which led her to ACT UP. She initially came to an ACT UP meeting in 1987 to convince ACT UP to participate in civil disobedience at the 1987 March on Washington to protest the Bowers decision. Amy has been with her girlfriend Donna for about 6 years.

Role in ACT UP: With her prior background with groups that engaged in civil disobedience protests, Amy is the main ACT UP civil disobedience trainer and coordinator of civil disobedience at ACT UP actions.

Groups/friends at the meeting: The other civil disobedience trainers

Specific tasks at the March 13, 1989 meeting: Amy Bauer is on the agenda to give a 10-15 minute introduction to civil disobedience training, with the assistance of the other civil disobedience trainers. The civil disobedience trainers should gather at the beginning of the meeting and talk through the specifics of the training. 

This training will:

a) convince people that if they are going to engage in civil disobedience that they should come to one of the longer civil disobedience trainings that will take place before Target City Hall, and 

b) give anyone who does not come to one of those longer trainings a basic understanding of what they need to know about civil disobedience. 

This will consist of actually getting the people at the meeting to form small groups and practice sitting down in the street in protest, and making their bodies go limp if they are being dragged by police. Minute 4:10 to 18:28 of the video entitled ACT UP Pre-Action Meetings on this page shows this training in action. This document outlines the training.

Amy will also try to get a sense of who is planning to get arrested at Target City Hall. She’ll do this both when she is talking to the Floor and by going around to the various affinity groups to ask.

Additional information: https://actuporalhistory.org/numerical-interviews/048-jamie-bauer