By day, Benjamin H Shepard works as Professor of Human Services at City Tech/CUNY. By night, he battles to keep New York from becoming a giant shopping mall. To this end, he has done organizing work with the Center for Popular Democracy, Rise and Resist, the Professional Staff Congress, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, Absurd Response, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, More Gardens Coalition, Times UP!, Right of Way, PlanetOverProfit, and Occupy Wall Street.

Eric L. Sawyer is a cofounder of three influential AIDS organizations in the US: The original AIDS Activist group ACT UP NY; Housing Works, Inc. one of the largest US providers of housing, drug treatment, medical care, and support for homeless people living with HIV; and also Health GAP, Inc. a global advocacy organization which fought for access to essential medicines, including HIV anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world. From 2008 until 2016 Eric was the Civil Society Partnership Advisor in the New York Office of UNAIDS facilitating Civil Society involvement in HIV issues at the UN Secretariat. Sawyer is also a long term survivor of HIV/AIDS.

Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, nonfiction, and theater, and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is an Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Northwestern, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.