Reclaiming Two-Spirits (Queer IdeasQueer Action) by Gregory D. Smithers

Author:Gregory D. Smithers [Smithers, Gregory D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2022-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

In 1981, reports of a deadly new illness caused alarm across the United States. In Los Angeles, five previously healthy young men were diagnosed with a rare lung infection. At the same time, men in New York were being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma.15 At first, medical professionals and community leaders weren’t sure about the scale and scope of what they were dealing with. What they did know was the illness appeared to target gay and bisexual men, with major outbreaks in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Straight Americans called it the “gay virus.”16 It was a callous slur. In 1982, the Centers for Disease Control labeled the virus AIDS, for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. An acronym—short, pithy, terrifying.

Media reports filled newspapers, popular magazines, and television news programs. A generation of Americans—not just gay and bisexual men—were shaped by AIDS. In the early years, journalists reported that gay and bisexual men and intravenous drug users were at greatest risk. Americans learned that AIDS was contracted through the exchange of bodily fluids, like semen or blood, or through the sharing of needles. Within a few years of the first reports of the syndrome, cases of women and children contracting AIDS also emerged. No one was safe from a virus that entered the bloodstream and presented flu-like symptoms that quickly manifested into acute infection.17

To most Americans, the face of AIDS was white, gay, and male. Television images of previously healthy young men withered by the virus shocked viewers. For white gay men, AIDS undermined the few advances they’d been able to make. Back in the 1970s, their whiteness had propelled some gay men to political gains and economic advances. The specter of the “gay virus” and the “gay fear” it inspired threatened white gay America with a new era of marginalization; it seemed to be wiping out a whole generation of gay men.18

AIDS first appeared in the United States in the early 1960s. It was not until the early 1980s, however, that doctors in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles began reporting clusters of AIDS patients. Between 1981 and 1987, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 92 percent of the 50,280 new infections occurred among men, with almost 60 percent of those occurring among whites and 25.5 percent among African Americans.19 The symptoms of infection included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that typically presents on the skin or lymph nodes, and pneumocystis pneumonia, caused by a fungus that leads to inflammation and fluid accumulation in the lungs. Doctors and medical researchers scrambled to better understand what had become a global pandemic.20

The trigger of the disease remained unclear. However, in 1983 researchers reported that AIDS was caused by the human T-lymphotropic virus type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus, or HTLV-III/LAV. The cumbersome term was soon changed to HIV, for human immunodeficiency virus; its source was traced to West Equatorial Africa. In these parts of Africa, humans had long hunted chimpanzees for their meat. Medical researchers

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