Most of the people I’ve read who have commented on historical affect of AIDS agree it is and was tragic and disastrous, which of course I agree with. But when commenting on the affect it had on the gay rights movement (mostly in the 80s), they usu. say it harmed the movement somehow.
Is that true? Actually, it may have generated more empathy and compassion for gay people. Plus, in my opinion at least, it put gay people on people’s radar again. After 8 years of Ronald Reagan, gay rights became almost a distant memory in people’s minds, etc. But with AIDS, people were talking about it again, no?
The AIDS epidemic was concurrent with the Reagan Administration, so there was no “eight year” lag in discussion of Gay Rights.
I would not even say that there was much public discussion regarding gay rights prior to the AIDS outbreak. The new manager at the bookstore where I worked introduced a lot of gay-oriented fiction in 1978, surprising the staff, but there was no accompanying push for “Gay Rights” in the literature he brought in or the discussions that arose in the back room.
From Stonewall to the mid-1970s, I suspect that the movement was pretty fringe and got little attention from the general public other than to sneer at or act horrified by Gay Pride parades. From some time in the later 1970s, the movement got more serious, (raising the ire of the Religious Right), but not really getting much attention from the general public. (The late 1970s did have various events that moved to “humanize” views toward homosexuality, with gay characters appearing on TV shows beginning with such as HOT L BALTIMORE in 1975, Barney Miller, 1974 - 1982, and Soap, 1977 - 1981.)
It was the AIDS epidemic, during which a number of people, (typically in show business), were outed by the simple expedient of contracting the disease, that compelled more people to face homosexuality as a human condition, as people whom they had admired or whose performances they had enjoyed were revealed to be homosexual.
In other words, the movement slowly grew throughout the entire period without ever being pushed to the background by “the Reagan years.” Whether AIDS more helped or more hindered the movement, I do not know. It helped by showing people that a lot more people were Gay than was generally suspected, making it less alien. It harmed by providing fodder to those who declared homosexuality a “lifestyle” that was licentious without providing a foundation for genuine love.
It also harmed by making gay men seem more dangerous to the general population. There was a LOT of AIDS hysteria in the early and mid 80s, fueled by ignorance of how people got infected and by general anti-gay (and very bad anti-bisexual) prejudice. Stories of gay men deliberately infecting other men, talk about quarantining or tattooing AIDS victims, loss of jobs and relationships when someone’s HIV status was revealed (often involuntarily…there was a LONG fight about whether or not it was right to legislate that HIV status be made public, the fear of which kept a lot of people from getting tested).
I don’t know if it’s even possible to convey just how awful things were to people who weren’t at least peripherally involved in the whole thing (I was just a kid, but I was also gay and these kind of things definitely got caught in my attention-net). This continued up through the mid 90s to a lesser extent.
It had a big effect on the goals of the movement. In the 70’s and early 80’s, gay rights advocates generally saw themselves as establishing a counter-cultural movement that would that would defy, challenge, or at least exist apart from mainstream American culture. A generation later, they generally wanted to be inside the mainstream. The most obvious evidence of this change is the issue of gay marriage. In the 70’s and early 80’s, many gay rights advocates were either opposed to the idea or not much concerned with it.
When your life partner is dying from AIDS but you aren’t allowed to visit them in the hospital because you’re not family, you tend to see the value of marriage. Also when you’ve got insurance from your job, and your life partner is desperately sick, and if you were married to them they could be covered by your insurance, you see the value of marriage. Same thing with suddenly losing your home, savings or shared assets when one partner dies early.
On an extremely cynical level, AIDS might have improved the image of homosexuals among the public and consequently strengthen the Gay Rights Movement as the sexually promiscuous culture encouraged by bathhouses and “cruising” fell out of favour due to AIDS and tended to encourage monogamous relations leading to homosexuals being seen as normal loving people.
That would not be so much “cynical” as inaccurate. I doubt that cruising among young men has fallen off among gay men any more than it has fallen off among straight men (and women).
More to the point, homosexuals have always had the same impulse toward monogamy as heterosexuals. (That is probably one reason why so many gay men went ahead and got married; they have the same impulse for a stable relationship in a family, but when homosexuality was outlawed/labeled insanity/whatever, heterosexual marriage was the only available outlet for such impulses.)
A) This is kind of insulting, insinuating as it does that being seen as “normal loving people” requires conformity to the majority culture and sexual ethos, and B) this is incredibly inaccurate. Only a minority of gay voices at any point in the AIDS crisis were calling for a rigid monogamous framework to prevent the spread of the virus. Overwhelmingly more were calling for thorough adherence to safer sex through condom and dental dam use and such things as mutual masturbation. It was suggested that you sleep with people you’ve known and have an idea of their sexual practices instead of strangers, but that was never really a key item in the safer sex toolbox (so to speak), especially in more urban areas.
If anyone is interested in the sociopolitical impact of AIDS, I strongly recommend one of the finest non-fiction books I have ever read, And the Band Played On. What I found most interesting about Shiltz’s view of the AIDS epidemic is that it was partly the political will of the gay movement that kept the disease spreading. The clearest example I can remember is when the data indicated that HIV was being spread through the gay bathhouses, and there was a huge clamor from gay communities to resist what they viewed as yet another attempt to marginalize them. The book is basically this masterpiece about all the writing on the wall and how consistently, across so many different groups of people and organizations, the evidence was ignored or progress was halted and nothing was done until it was too late. Shiltz wrote the book before getting himself tested, and then later he, himself died of AIDS. After that book I will never look at AIDS the same way again.
I realize the above statement may seem to be implying that gay people are somehow at fault for the consequences of AIDS, and I don’t believe Shiltz meant that at all. Even though in retrospect the resistance to CDC guidelines and all the political ground wars seem very foolish, you have to keep in mind that nobody really understood what was going on. The pieces of the puzzle were scattered all across the world. In that context, at that moment, the gay community had no reason to believe it was anything other than more oppression. Add in the fact that people were dying all around them and those who hated them were essentially celebrating their deaths, and their reaction is quite understandable. That to me is one thing that’s so gripping about the book. For the most part, you understand that everyone involved was doing what they thought was best at the time. The book isn’t really about pointing fingers so much as telling a story about one of history’s greatest tragedies. Qin you might consider reading it. It is extremely informative.
I remember back in high school, one of my teachers told us that the gay bar and the bathhouse were the primary institutions of gay culture. I rebutted that by that same standard, the primary institutions of straight culture were the singles bar and the brothel.
Yeah, there were (and are) a lot of gay folks being very promiscuous. But there also were (and are) a lot of straight folks being similarly promiscuous.
Male gays are much more promiscuous than male straights for the simple reason that men are much more promiscuous than women on the whole. Shiltz wrote that some gay men reported having more than 1000 sexual partners a year due to bathhouse culture. I have serious doubts that there are any non sexual professional women who have that many.
Who are the straight men being promiscuous with? Each other? Every time a straight man has promiscuous straight sex, he’s doing it with a woman who’s having promiscuous sex.
It is true that there isn’t any such thing as a bathhouse for straight people. A bathhouse is essentially a brothel where the customers are also the sex workers.
This is exactly what happened to my sister when her partner died. She lost the proceeds of 17 years to her partner’s “family.” The only thing nobody wanted was the partner’s three biological daughters.
Ever wonder how much further we’d be in the fight against AIDS if we hadn’t ignored it for ten years cause only “those” people got it?
