The 25th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP provides a moment to reflect on the group's unquestionably profound effects on the management of HIV/AIDS, the queer community, the history of social movements in this country, and even the development of queer theory in the academy. But it should also encourage individuals to consider the ways in which ACT UP's legacy is one of complicated affective intensities--affects that produce individual feelings, but also those that drive cultural histories and are directed toward political ends. Remembering ACT UP's naissance, then, is an opportunity to recognize the political stakes of recounting a particular affective history, and also to cultivate a deep appreciation of the contradictions involved in deploying affect as an activist tactic. Especially salient to queer politics and scholarship today is the ambivalent relationship between pride and shame that was forged through ACT UP's activism. In order to interrogate the usually unquestioned choice of "pride" as an affect around which to rally, some queer activists and scholars have launched a "renewed engagement with a category that represents, by definition, the very opposite of "pride," at once its emotional antithesis and its political antagonist: namely, the category of shame." In this article, the author aims to investigate the history of ACT UP in order to illuminate both the ways in which the group deployed and produced affects, but also to inquire into the rhetorical maneuvers and conceptual tensions of the contemporary turn to shame in queer theory. (Contains 23 notes.)