The Cultural Inheritance of AIDS: Gay White Men and the Shaping of AIDS History in the U.S.A.

• In Event: HIV and AIDS in the States of Emergence: The Ongoing Crisis as a Condition of Possibility

Abstract

Over the last five years scholars, writers, activists and artists have been charting the emergence of AIDS history being shaped and shared in the USA, interested in the stories that are told and not told in cultural production such as the film How To Survive a Plague (2012, David France),  the exhibition Art AIDS America (2016, USA touring), and the book, The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience (2013, Perry N. Halkitis) As scholars including Jih-Fi Cheng, Hugh Ryan, and Alexandra Juhasz have argued, a common theme among the output is that it is decidedly white, male, middle class, gay and urban. While there has been some work to both pushback against the whitewashing of HIV/AIDS history and make clear the impacts of such a limited revisitation little has been done to explore how the narrowcasting of the past came to be. In my paper, I propose looking at the ways the relationship between gay men and HIV/AIDS has come to be and the impact it has had on the stories that get told and don’t get told about the early responses to HIV in the USA.

I will look at the ways in which archives focused on HIV/AIDS, such as those at the New York Public Library, were formed, and the impact of their structures have on who has ownership and access to the stories told and not told. The physical and logical realities of where information about the early responses to HIV are instrumental in understanding the flow of information. Questions arise: How have the decisions made a generation past on how to store the remnants of early AIDS work impacted what is shared now? What role does structural bias against black people, people of color, women, trans communities and other people impacted by HIV play in who has access to archives? What tactics have been used and can be used to increase what is understood as the archive?

Alongside locating my own relationship to HIV as a white gay man and how it was formed, the paper pays specific attention to the ways in which AIDS was and still often is pathologized as a gay white disease, and the ways in which the white gay community can be seen as domineering and attempting to lord over the story of HIV in the US–often at the experience of other communities also impacted by the epidemic. Such insight begs a question: How has this relationship of association impacted the story of AIDS in the US and who feels they have the right to retell history?

Author

• Theodore Kerr, The New School