Queer History, AIDS

One of the assigned readings this week was a New York Times article from 1981 titled ‘Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals’. This article was written at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, before the medical world and the public knew what HIV/AIDs was. The article refers to HIV/AIDS as ‘Kaposi’s Sarcoma.’ The article suggests that there is “no evidence of contagion,” for Kaposi’s Sarcoma and that the “outbreaks” are localized to “homosexuals.” The language in this article is both fear mongering and othering, casting homosexual men as deviants and straight people, who do not engage in homosexual sex practices, as safe from contracting this disease. For example, one line from the article reads:

“The reporting doctors said that most cases had involved homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.”

Before reading this article, I had very little knowledge about the emergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis. What knowledge I did have I learned from my mother, who was in her late teens during the epidemic and described this time as “very fucking scary.” For me, this article highlighted the prevalent attitudes towards gay men and the public’s impulse to demonize homosexual sex practices: don’t worry, you’re safe as long as you’re not gay. What is most upsetting is that this article was only written at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis and that attitudes towards gay people would become more intolerant as the crisis escalated. For example, one year after this article came out, the New York Times published another article referring to the (now HIV/AIDS) epidemic as ‘GRID’: Gay-related Immune Deficiency.