1957

Gay activist and co-founder of Act Up Utrecht

Frank Vos was born in 1957 in the village of Maartensdijk near Utrecht. At the age of twenty he moved to Utrecht. As a volunteer at the PANN parties and café, Frank got to know a group of fellow activists. Together they travelled from demonstration to demonstration. When the AIDS epidemic broke out, Frank was one of the initiators of aids activist group Act Up Utrecht.

PANN

From his first weeks in Utrecht, Frank was taken to the PANN parties. The first evening at PANN was also the first kiss in public with a boy. Frank started working as a volunteer at PANN quite soon after. Here he met a group of friends with whom he would fight racism, homophobia, environmental pollution, and armature during the 80s and 90s.

Community shop

Around 1979 Frank started doing volunteer work at the Community shop, comparable to today’s Wereldwinkel (Fairtrade shop). He had been left-wing from a young age and found a group of like-minded people there. The volunteers of the Utrecht Community Shop were for a clean and fair world and organised activities and discussions on subjects such as Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), racism, homophobia, sexism, and nuclear energy. For Frank, this was also a place where he could be openly gay, without prejudice from his fellow volunteers. Although his volunteer work at the Community Shop was separate from the parties he attended at PANN, both were important in the development of Frank’s activism.

Left-wing activism

Due to his broad view of left-wing politics, Frank did not always feel at home in the gay movement and at the same time not entirely at home within the left wing of Utrecht. Frank had radical ideas about gay liberation and oppression of other groups that he could not express in either movement. That is why he took the initiative himself. In the early eighties, he camped in Woensdrecht for three days with a bus full of PANN volunteers, to protest the arrival of cruise missiles. He protested in Amelisweerd, the Utrecht city forest, against the felling of trees, walked with queer groups on union demonstrations and was a volunteer at Utrecht Reporting Point Against Discrimination (Meldpunt Utrecht tegen Discriminatie). Frank:

The establishment was against you, so I was against the establishment. Against armature, for equality for everyone. So also against racism and fascism. Of course you see connections, the ruling power, which likes to determine what everyone can do.

AIDS activism

Frank first encountered AIDS in the late 1980s. He then became a buddy in Amsterdam, where he was paired with an AIDS patient. During this time, he became increasingly angry. People were dying and Frank felt nothing was being done to help these people.

When he went on a trip to the United States shortly after the death of the man for whom he was a buddy, he met Act Up. Inspired by that movement, he registered with Act Up Amsterdam upon his return. Shortly afterwards he helped to set up Act Up Utrecht. He was committed to making medicines available and the rights of people who were HIV-positive, among other things. Act Up believed that it took too long for medication to be approved in the Netherlands, that there were too many cutbacks in care and shelter, and that resources such as condoms and clean syringes should be made available in prisons. To draw attention to their goals, they put pressure on pharmaceutical companies and protested, for example at AIDS conferences.

Always active

Frank has been active his entire life for gay liberation and against the oppression of everyone. For example, he co-initiated the Roze Front Tour 1991, a bus tour through the Netherlands that drew attention to international gay oppression in various places, and the International Queer Liberation Tour 1995, a tour through eight European countries by 25 gays and lesbians with cultural performances and protests against radical right-wing politics. Frank was also co-founder of the independent magazine Queer fanzine De Pats and coordinated the Utrecht actions against the then English anti-gay laws, clause 28. These laws prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by government institutions. Frank also organised the first queer parties in the squat ACU Utrecht and was involved in the organisation of the national pride (Roze Zaterdag) in Utrecht in 1986.

His activism almost cost him his life. In 1995, during a night out with his current husband, Frank was stabbed by gay bashers in Utrecht and ended up in hospital. Following the stabbing, his friends organised a demonstration against homophobia. However, this event did not deter Frank from continuing to work for liberation and against homophobia. He is currently still active in and for the LGBTIQA+ community in Zaanstad (near Amsterdam) together with his partner Oscar. For example, he is chairman of the local lhbtiqa+ organisation ‘De Zaanse Regenboog’, co-organiser of local annual pride ‘ZaanPride, is involved in organising safe spaces for LGBTIQA+ people in his hometown, co-writes a new local lgbtiqa+ policy document, is co-organiser of the national pride in Zaanstad in 2025 and remains a linchpin in the local LGBTIQA+ movement.

Fleur Renkema