SOCIOPOLITOMETAPHISIQUE-O
The Role of Comedy in (Slowly) Attaining A Non-Dual Society
Power for Everybody: The End of Dominance and Submission
Activist Models of Power
Cultural Appropriation & the Birthplace of Choice
Blasted Youth Looks Good in Digital: the Internet Generation
Shades of Gay
The 1980s found a grieving and fighting gay community pushing for changes in public perception, and government and private response to an epidemic that was sweeping their ranks, as well as affecting many others. After a radical shift in the late 60s and early 70s, in which gay liberationists allied themselves with many other radical causes and groups, and a divisive and hedonistic late 70's, AIDS once again pushed gays into activism.
Queer people were among the first affected and first to organize in response to the mysterious new epidemic. By 1982, a number of AIDS-specific voluntary organizations had been formed in the United States, several of them gay-specific. Gay peoples' involvement was personal, and through it gay people forged a response to HIV that was fierce, meaningful, and inclusive. Though gays were not solely affected, the gay community took the lead in HIV organizing, pressuring the government and pharmaceutical companies to higher levels of accuracy, reporting and compassionate response. At a time when the San Francisco Police Department was equipping officers with special masks and gloves for use when dealing with a “suspected AIDS patient,” gay AIDS organizations were already disseminating comprehensive safer sex information for gay men. While the Social Security Administration halted face-to-face interviews of AIDS sufferers due to fear of contact, Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz had established a set of sexual behavior modification guidelines that are just as relevant today: limit one's number of partners, eliminate the exchange of bodily fluids, and know your partners.
Gay people had no illusion that the government would take care of them in the midst of an epidemic many saw linked directly to sin and perversion. They demonstrated the communities' outstanding ability to unify, organize and stand together with passion against a common foe. According to Stephen Epstein, "[T]he watchword was self-reliance."Gay people, he says, had to become their own experts on HIV, “"ultimately, that was the only reasonable hope gay people might have of surviving." Writers for newspapers such as Gay Community News in Boston and the New York Native strove to communicate the causes and implications of the new disease. They became the voice of a movement that would occupy center stage in the gay community for much of the next decade.
However, much of that watchfulness and activism has fallen from the national and mainstream gay activist radar. With the development of AZT, the first drug found to be effective in reducing HIV-infected persons' viral loads, AIDS was in the process of being perceptually reinvented. AIDS was declared to be manageable; a chronic sickness instead of a death sentence--for those who could pay.
Not everyone in the gay community felt that it was over, that it was time to simply learn and play the new game--provide resources, test, and provide treatment to those who could afford it. In reaction to the assimilation of gay AIDS organizations into mainstream AIDS service organizations, which some saw a compromise of the radical tactics necessary to secure a real and effective response from the government and corporations, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power formed in 1987 in New York.
With their powerful message of SILENCE=DEATH, spelled out in their pink and black logo, ACT UP catalyzed a new wave of AIDS activism aimed at holding powerful entities responsible for their negligences, compromises and inefficiency. ACT UP, in rebellion against what they percieved as assimilationist, nonconfrontational and ineffective approaches by mainstream gay AIDS organizations, protested the Federal Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical giant Wellcome, the developer of AZT. ACT UP's actions were successful in lowering the price of AZT and shortening the federal drug approval process by two years.
With the development of still more effective drug combinations in the mid-1990s, HIV continued to lose visibility. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bush's Republican administration again took power, and AIDS education and visibility took another dive. Gay rights struggles shifted into a new framework, compliant with capitalism and divorced from other struggles. Gay power was emphasized through assimilation - into marriage, into the military, into the workplace, and into the economy. [White] gay people were encouraged to build a “pink economy,” to show others their worth through their ability to spend. To many people, including middle-class white gays, HIV wasn't over, but it no longer felt epidemic. But for others, it was only gaining momentum.
The average Black American is eight times poorer than his or her white counterpart. In 2002, 8.1 million Black Americans were living in poverty--23% of all Blacks in the US. The median income of African American males is 72 cents on the dollar when compared to white males.
Black people, other ethnic minorities, and working class whites have decreased access to healthcare and are much less likely to access or afford services such as preventative care and testing. The HIV fervor had mostly passed by the Black community, but the virus had not. Soon after AIDS surfaced, Black and Latina females began to be represented disproportionately in HIV statistics. In the twenty-first century, Black infection rates across the genders quietly began to rise.
"The black community was slow to respond to the epidemic that has swept across this country for over a quarter of a century because the epidemic was branded as a White-male homosexual disease. [. . . .] Homosexuals were seen as “outside of the veil” of the black community." says Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his essay, "Nobody Should Have To Die Like This."7 Mentally insulated against the threat of HIV, not unlike most non-gay Americans, less likely to access healthcare services until the need became dire, and without large, out and cohesive same-gender loving community, Black Americans were broadsided by HIV.
People who are unable to access testing or educational material on HIV are more likely to engage in unsafe sex, to follow superstitious or folk knowledge about transmission, to only test once they have become ill, to spread HIV to multiple partners, and to die earlier due to later treatment.
Less than 5% of discretionary AIDS spending in the United States is spent on minority HIV/AIDS initiatives.9 The risk of death from HIV is about seven times greater in HIV+Black people than whites, and although Black Americans constitute just 13% of the US population, they accounted for 47% of HIV/AIDS cases in 2004. 4 "In America today, AIDS is virtually a black disease, by any measure," says Phill Wilson, executive director of The Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles.
As middle-class white gays practice their consumer power, they participate enthusiastically in a capitalist structure built on the backs of Black and Brown working-class people here and abroad. White gay people with power have ceased to pay attention to the oppression of other groups, have abused and exploited their ability to assimilate, have made every effort to conform to the dominant economic and moral structure, and have put an unnaturally hyper-focused attention upon the issue of marriage, to the exclusion of issues vitally affecting those of lower socioeconomic status.
It is the responsibility of white gay people, whose battle for liberation has now come to bear so much fruit, to step down from the wanton expression of consumer power, from the mirage of self-actualization and self-worth offered by social acceptance, purchases and lifestyles, to offer themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people whose liberation is still a long, hard way off.
So far, white gay Americans have taken the capitalist bait offered them, which allows a small number of queer people (white, GLB, middle and upper class, family values oriented) to play on par with the privileged of America--in fact, in some cases to exceed the standards of the middle class, such as in the case of childless gay male couples, whose incomes often exceed that of otherwise similar heterosexual pairs. Backed by a sense of achievement, righteousness and just a touch of rebellion, marketed to and packaged by capitalism, white gay people have lost touch with the responsibility of real activism. The aspirational, unreflective culture of gay America tempts but does not reward lower-class gay people, especially the young or otherwise disenfranchised. Those who are not rewarded by gay “achievements” of the twenty-first century must recognize the situation and demand and forge new kind of activism, based upon solidarity with and between people of color, women, working class people and youth.