One of the offices of House speaker John Boehner was occupied by seven protestors who decided to remove their clothing during the protest. The incident took place on Tuesday morning and the protestors demanded that budgets for programs involving AIDS not be cut. Three of the protestors were arrested, according to The Advocate.
The office was located in the Longworth House Office building in Washington, D.C. and Boehner was not in the office when the protest occurred. Quite a few of Boehner’s aides were in the office when the protest occurred to see the protestors strip off their clothes to reveal their bodies, which were painted with slogans. Some of those slogans said “AIDS Cuts Kill” and “Fund PEPFAR, Fund Ryan White, Fund Global Fund, Fund Medicaid, Fund HOPWA.” Protestors came from Queerocracy, ACT UP New York and ACT UP Philadelphia.
ACT UP New York’s Eustachia Smith said the following in a press release: “global health programs will lose $689 million, while domestic AIDS programs will lose $538 million.”
Cassie Gardner, from Queerocracy, said, “When you strip away the rhetoric of the fiscal cliff and the grand bargain, you see that these terms are a way to thinly veil draconian budget cuts that will leave millions around the world with absolutely nothing.”
U.S. Capitol Police public information officer Shennell Antrobus confirmed to ABC News that “three females arrested for lewd and indecent acts in the Speaker’s Longworth office. Demonstrators disbursed that area.”