Reflection on "Sexual Health, Activism, and the Arrival of HIV/AIDS"

**To clarify, when talking about "gay rights", I'm using "gay" as a catch-all for the LGBTQ community, as that's what the movement was called at the time. When referring to individuals, "gay" means male identifying individuals who are attracted to men.**

    I attended Sexual Health, Activism, and the Arrival of HIV/AIDS: The Story Behind "It's a Sin", hosted by the University of Cambridge in England. The two speakers were Richard McKay, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and George Severs, a PhD student at the university. I decided to attend the event in the first place because I'm really interested in LGBTQ health and how queer people dealt with the stigma that accompanied HIV/AIDS, in addition to what they did about it. 

    The event was split into two parts: a history of HIV/AIDS and the gay sexual health movement pre-1970s, and a history of radical activism in England surrounding HIV/AIDS. I found the first part especially interesting as it wasn't a topic I had really thought about before. Queer people- more specifically gay men- became very visible in the 70s, so I always associated their health movement beginning there. Professor McKay talked a lot about WWII, however, and how the draft actually brought many gay men to urban centers in all-male living environments. I learned that, before the war, most people thought venereal diseases (now called sexually transmitted infections) could not be spread in same-sex sexual encounters. That was really surprising for me to hear since the hyper-sexualization of gay men and the blaming of STIs on the gay community was all I had known about the general public's view on gay sexual health. Professor McKay said, however, that that began mostly with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In fact, some men in the early 20th century used this earlier assumption to justify having sex with other men, saying that they were too worried about getting a VD from sex with a woman. 

    One thing I noticed and felt critical about was the absence of trans, BIPOC (specifically Black and Latinx), bisexual, female, and older activists featured in the talks. The gay rights movement of the 70s and 80s is characterized by most mainstream media as white, young, and gay.** Both speakers did very little to address that, and when asked about it in the Q&A following the official event, they didn't speak much to it. Professor McKay did mention that VD in lesbians went largely unrecorded, most likely because it was much easier for women to say that they had gotten it from a man without much questioning. In addition, VD was not always identified in the first place in women due to sexism in the medical profession, so very little data existed. He also said that VD in non-white individuals was often attributed to their race, so racism in the medical profession erased whatever other identities those individuals held. Although I found that very interesting, it didn't fully answer the question of why these people were erased from the gay sexual health movement itself.

    George Severs talked a little more about what I had been expecting: racism was so rampant in the queer community that BIPOC people weren't even embedded in those spaces, and thus were left out of the conversation. For example, women of color apparently made up high levels of the HIV cases in the UK in the 1980s due to a heightened level of immigration from African countries. Those women were largely excluded from major activist groups such as ACT UP, so they created their own spaces. Severs didn't speak at all as to what those spaces looked like, however. The woman moderating the Q&A- Miriam, who didn't seem to be officially part of the event but knew a lot about the material- also mentioned that there was a lot of biphobia within the HIV/AIDS movement. She said that was partly because there was the idea of "cross contamination"; of bisexual people having sex with both queer and straight people and therefore single-handedly spreading diseases between the two groups. I had never heard of that before but it made a lot of sense in tandem to what I know of biphobia in the modern age. It also made me feel pretty disgusted.

    I would still love to learn more about the erased voices in the HIV/AIDS movement, and am also considering looking more into Professor McKay's work. He spoke a little bit about the type of archival material he had access to and it sounded very interesting. The event also reminded me that this past is not so distant, as many members of the audience typed into the chat their own memories of a time when being out was a death sentence: not just because of the discrimination, but because of the "gay plague". Those experiences were very humbling to hear about, and I'm so glad I was able to be apart of the discussion.