Sexuality and Socialism : History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation by Wolf Sherry(Author)

Author:Wolf, Sherry(Author) [Wolf, Sherry(Author)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Disease Control (CDC). Lesbian attorney and activist Ur vashi

Vaid argues, “The decline of ACT UP and direct action began,

in my view, the instant media coverage of actions displaced

the political calculus of right and wrong.”66

While government officials snidely created a hierarchy of

patients and pitted “wor thy” breast cancer victims against

“unworthy” AIDS sufferers, in its early years ACT UP refused

to take up the call for universal health care, despite growing

numbers of Americans facing a lack of health care.67 (At their

twentieth-anniversar y march in lower Manhattan in 2007,

however, ACT UP announced its launch of a two-year cam-

paign to fight alongside allies for single-payer universal health

care.68) As Bob Nowlan rightly surmises, when the gay move-

ment accepted the medical establishment’s treatment of AIDS

as a separate health issue that only affected certain marginal

populations of society, it played into the hands of those in

power who were all too content not to have to put resources

into a disease that initially affected mostly gay men and intra-

venous drug users.69 Strategies for the movement were deter-

mined on the basis of personal experience, as opposed to

lessons from histor y or through collaboration with those not

afflicted with AIDS. Activists with a broader political strategy,

such as Mar xists, were viewed with suspicion by AIDS writ-

ers like Cindy Patton and Simon Watney. For example, in

Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, Watney

denounces Mar xists as “puritanical separatists” and rejects

any unified theor y of how to approach the AIDS crisis, opting

190

SEXUALITY AND SOCIALISM

instead for “pragmatic” strategies like lobbying and looking to

Princess Diana, who occasionally interrupted her monarchal

duties to hold AIDS babies or attend a benefit concert.70

In keeping with its ID politics framework, ACT UP always

embraced the active participation of lesbians through the insis-

tence that women who have sex with other women were as

likely as men to contract HIV/AIDS and thus had a direct stake

in the struggle.71 Yet, while many prominent AIDS activists then

and today are lesbians, studies do not bear out the claim that

women who have sex exclusively with women are ver y likely to

contract HIV/AIDS. Anyone who is sexually active can get

AIDS, and there are risk factors for sex workers—many if not a

majority of whom are women. But according to the CDC’s latest

figures on those who tested positive for HIV/AIDS, “Of the 534

(of 7,381) women who were reported to have had sex only with

women, 91 percent also had another risk factor—typically, injec-

tion dr ug use.”72 The point here is not to peddle a falsehood

about lesbian immunity to AIDS but rather to challenge the nar-

rowness of a political outlook that star ts with the assumption

that people must be rattled into believing they are likely to get

AIDS in order to become involved in a movement to fight for a

cure and against institutional indifference.

The prevalence of postmodern concepts in Queer Nation

and other LGBT movements of the late twentieth centur y cor-

responded not only with the educational and class background

of many leading activists, but also with a common notion that

in a postindustrial society the working class could not be

looked to as an agent of change. And even if

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