A Queer History of the United States (32 page)

AIDS: Resilience and Resistance

Within three years, that common enemy would take forms that were eerily familiar, but in a context that was nearly unimaginable. On June 5, 1981, the
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly,
a newsletter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), mentioned five cases of an unusual pneumonia in patients in Los Angeles. A month later, on July 3, the
New York Times
printed a short article headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” By December the CDC had identified nonhomosexual men with similar symptoms. As the year ended, there had been 121 deaths from what was at first called gay-related immune deficiency. Eventually it would be given another name: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

By 2007, AIDS would claim the lives of 583,298 women, men, and children in the United States and 2.1 million worldwide. In the early stages of the pandemic, researchers did not understand, as they would by 1983, that the disease was caused by a virus that would later be called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). At first it was largely unclear exactly how the virus was spread, and there was no easily available diagnostic test for HIV until 1985. This lack of facts rendered AIDS particularly frightening.

HIV/AIDS is not specifically connected to homosexuality or same-sex sexual behavior. But because it was first detected in gay males and rapidly spread through the gay male community, it immediately became associated with gay men in the public imagination. This quickly lead to three dire consequences. First, gay male sexuality, now synonymous with a fatal illness, became more stigmatized then ever before. Second, this stigmatization led to numerous laws that discriminated against people with AIDS in insurance, the workplace, and housing. In some municipalities, children who were HIV-positive or diagnosed with AIDS were forbidden to attend school. Third, because people with AIDS were so demonized and because they were often associated with outsider groups—by 1983 it became clear that intravenous drug users, Haitian immigrants, and a small number of hemophiliacs were also at high risk—the media and state and federal governments provided little in the way of basic education or even news coverage.

This was true of even the most respected news sources. In October 1982 the country was in a panic because an unknown person in the Chicago area had placed cyanide in Tylenol capsules, causing seven fatalities. The
New York Times
printed thirty-one stories about the Tylenol poisonings during October and another twenty-nine throughout November and December. By October 5, 1982, 634 people in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS, and over a third of them had died. The
New York Times
ran three stories about AIDS in 1981 and three more in 1982.
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Because of the deep denial of the situation’s gravity—denial that clearly would not have occurred if the majority of people being affected by AIDS had been white heterosexuals—medical research, prevention education, and basic care for the women and men who were sick started far too late. This lack of response, which in retrospect can only be understood as willful negligence, helped construct a social situation that allowed an epidemic to spread unchecked.

In many ways the rapid, catastrophic growth of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a perfect illustration of R. I. Moore’s ideas in
The Formation of a Persecuting Society
. Moore argues that European medieval society created categories of “dangerous” groups—Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals—whose ostracization made the majority feel safer. Moore’s theory conflates neatly with Mary Douglas’s notions of purity and danger. Douglas points out how societies put into place edicts, laws, social proscriptions, and prejudices that maintain the preexisting conservative underpinnings of society by controlling or stopping what they understand to be cultural pollution.

These two theories are essential to the larger social picture, but they are based on personal lives. Author Sarah Schulman notes that the message of her 1990 novel
People in Trouble,
set in the early days of the epidemic in New York City’s Lower East Side, was “that personal homophobia becomes societal neglect, that there is a direct relationship between the two.”
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This observation—that personal prejudice has a fundamental, devastating effect on public opinion and policy—explains to a great degree how ignorance, misunderstanding, dislike, fear, and hatred of homosexuals could escalate to such an extent that large numbers of Americans could simply not care about the deaths of their fellow citizens.

Occurring just three years after the repeal of the Dade County ordinance resulted in a wave of antigay sentiment across the nation, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was perfectly suited to the rhetoric of the religious and political right. Pat Buchanan, a conservative Catholic Republican leader, wrote in a 1990 column that “AIDS is nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature.”
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Shortly after this, popular televangelist Jerry Falwell stated that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
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These theological sentiments easily translated into political action, as shown in a funding letter from the conservative American Family Association:

Dear Family Member,

Since AIDS is transmitted primarily by perverse homosexuals, your name on my national petition to quarantine all homosexual establishments is crucial to your family’s health and security. . . . These disease carrying deviants wander the street unconcerned, possibly making you their next victim. What else can you expect from sex-crazed degenerates but selfishness?
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As Gayle Rubin posited in her essay “Thinking Sex,” published in 1984, “It is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.”
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AIDS was caused by a virus, not by homosexuality. It was, however, a “gay disease” in the important sense that because many of those affected were gay men, the moral, social, political, and legal stigma attached to homosexuality shaped the country’s response. As a result, hundreds of thousands of deaths occurred in circumstances that were unjust and a direct result of the behavior of the majority.

Although a great deal of excellent work was done in medicine and in prevention and education strategies, in general the fight against AIDS was inseparable from a cultural mandate to restate, and at times legally reinforce, traditional attitudes about sexuality. By 1984, cities such as San Francisco and New York began initiatives to close down bathhouses and sex clubs, claiming they were public health hazards. Certainly the transmission of HIV could happen in these sites, as well as in private homes. It is clear, from selective enforcement and the use of coded language, that these efforts were actually attempts to regulate sexuality rather than promote public health.
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The epidemic was also used as an excuse to arrest female and male prostitutes.
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Thanks to tremendous scientific progress since the 1950s, new drugs were able to cure or treat diseases—syphilis and gonorrhea being prime examples—that were previously untreatable. The inability to treat or cure HIV/AIDS caused a panic that allowed people to keep their anxiety and anger tied to the idea of unregulated sexuality.

Some of this sex negativity and discomfort came from within the gay and lesbian community. Many of the lists of “dangerous” sexual activities found in early HIV prevention guidelines included activities, such as S/M, that were socially frowned on but not able to transmit HIV. Even after routes of transmission were scientifically proven and the use of condoms was being promoted to prevent them, many guidelines also urged gay men to limit the number of their partners. Editorials in the LGBT press frequently called for gay men to move from a community adolescence of sexual promiscuity to a “more adult” world of monogamous relationships. Even as late as 1998, journalist Andrew Sullivan articulated these sentiments: “The gay liberationists have plenty to answer for. . . . Saving lives was less important than saving a culture of ‘promiscuity as a collective way of life,’ when, of course, it was little more than a collective way of death. . . . They constructed and defended and glorified the abattoirs of the epidemic.”
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As much as the entire LGBT community was under attack because of the AIDS epidemic (despite the reality that lesbians were at extremely low risk of transmitting HIV to one another sexually), women and men formed health-focused community organizations from the moment that the first cases appeared. They continued to do so under increasingly severe conditions. The mortality rate from HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s was staggering: the total number of reported deaths was 1,476 in 1983, 11,932 by 1987, and 31,129 by 1990. Not all of these deaths were of gay men, but a high proportion were; in some urban areas, such as San Francisco, the vast majority were. The massive tide of illness and death—as Canadian poet Michael Lynch put it, “these waves of dying friends”—trumped the long history of divisions within the LGBT community. Organizations such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, Boston’s AIDS Action Committee, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation provided counseling, health care, home visits, and education, often not only for the gay community but for anyone affected by AIDS. LGBT legal groups quickly began fighting discrimination against all people with HIV/AIDS.

This response was possible in part because of the tightly knit, cohesive, self-sustaining sexual communities that had been forming since the end of World War II. Sarah Schulman argues in
Stage Struck
that the bars, baths, and other meeting places that were blamed for the AIDS epidemic were the very structures that gave the community the knowledge and networking that allowed for efficient organizing when the epidemic began. This sentiment is echoed in “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” written by Allan Bérubé and submitted as a brief when the California Superior Court was deciding whether San Francisco could legally close bathhouses for health reasons.
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The constant political backlash, going back to 1977, had also made gay and lesbian political organizing more effective.

The other major reason AIDS organizing was so productive had to do with the use of knowledge and models originating in other movements. The large number of lesbians and feminists aiding the effort included many women who had become politically active during the 1960s and 1970s and were highly familiar with the theory and practices of the women’s health care movement. Beginning with the publication in 1973 of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, feminists—knowing they could not trust the male-dominated medical establishment—began their own support networks, research groups, and publications. Their intent was both to inform women of their own health needs and to demand from the medical establishment the basic care and medical attention women needed. The organizational underpinnings of the women’s health care movement were evident as people with AIDS began to better understand the complexity of their medical, social, and political needs. In addition, community-based AIDS services, such as a free breakfast program and free community health clinics, were started and executed with great success by the Black Panther Party, first in Oakland and then in other cities. The Black Panther Party’s approach to community organizing was largely based on the Communist Party model of cells that was used by Harry Hay to form the Mattachine Society.

Despite some misinformation and early bias, the advent of what would eventually be called “safe sex” was a major innovation that occurred in response to the AIDS epidemic. The phrase was first used by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen in their 1983 pamphlet
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach
. The phrase “safe sex” came to embody not only concrete strategies to avoid HIV transmission, but also a new approach to the epidemic that completely resisted the impulses of sexual regulation and repression that were being articulated in response to AIDS. The sheer necessity of having to negotiate sexual activity demanded that the parties involved talk about their desires and their actions. This was, in the midst of dealing with the immediacy of illness and death, a reclaiming of the sexually based community formation that had started decades before.

Along with this new way to discuss sexuality within the gay male community and the continued valuation of sex as a positive good, another discussion was taking place within the lesbian and feminist communities. At a 1982 conference at Barnard College, several women delivered papers that promoted a more open discussion of women’s sexuality. These papers, which included Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” contradicted the politics of feminists who were involved in antipornography campaigns and who were critical of nontraditional sexualities such as S/M, role playing, and changing gender identity. These women, many of whom came out of a radical feminist and gay liberation background, were interested in formulating a new language of discussing female pleasure and sexuality that was in direct opposition to the sexually regulatory modes of the social purity groups of the nineteenth century and their contemporary descendants. The connection to the AIDS epidemic, although not noted at the time, is clear in retrospect. As Cindy Patton wrote in 1986, “Lesbians/gay liberationists throughout the AIDS crisis have insisted that AIDS must not be viewed as proof that sexual exploration and the elaboration of sexual community were mistakes. . . . It is essential to maintain the vision of community in order to navigate the difficult waters of political backlash.”
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