Michael R. Botnick, PhD (cand.)
Seronegative gay men experience discrimination from within the gay community as funding for and services to this sector diminish. Seropositive gay men (and the organizations that provide for some of their needs) have culturally, economically and socially dismissed the socio/psychological needs of seronegative gay men (survivor guilt, safer sex education, etc.) in favour of providing social and resource-based services to seropositive gay men. As the disparities in service and advocacy increase, the social distance between the gay movement and the AIDS movement correspondingly increases. If this trend continues, the social gap will serve further to push HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men into polarized camps, resulting in a wider separation of the gay movement and the AIDS movement. The stigmatization of HIV-positive people will subsequently increase both within and outside the gay movement, and any ability to present a unified Gay Liberation front will correspondingly diminish.
Despite the existence of other population groups whom HIV has either infected or affected, this analysis focuses solely on gay men and the disease. One manifestation of that narrow cast will be the use of the term ‘gay liberation movement’ as opposed to the more inclusive (and more politically correct) ‘gay and lesbian’ or ‘lesbian and gay’ liberation movement. The social issues confronting lesbians are, in many respects, different from the social issues challenging gay men, especially concerning cruising, dating, relationships, visibility, and what is most important, living with or without HIV in the body. To be sure, HIV is a force majeure in the gay male community. It is far less so in the lesbian community.
I examine the conflation of a medical phenomenon with a social movement, and while so doing, suggest, in the strongest terms possible, why that fusion is spurious and ought to be deconstructed in favour of a reunification of the gay liberation movement somewhat apart from the medical issue of AIDS.
My main concern is to explore the issue of social movement sustainability in the gay movement, in the face of a multi-fractured community. While scholars have written many articles on the dynamics of race and gender in fragmenting the gay and lesbian community,1 very little has been written on the growing cleavage between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, and the impact of this disunity on the sustainability of a cohesive gay liberation movement. Huber and Schneider emphasize this point:
For researchers interested in lesbian and gay studies, one of the more exciting ventures would be an investigation into the ways in which AIDS has or has not strengthened and altered the growth and infrastructure of the community.… For example, Altaian (1987) suggests that AIDS is now so much a part of gay men’s experience as to ‘further isolate us from both lesbians and non-gays, while strengthening our own communal organizations.…’
AIDS has made clear that gay identity and community are not grounded solely in relations of sexuality. Many theoretically driven research efforts are possible, some focusing on cultural differences in these patterns and others focusing on the processes of coming out and the ways in which AIDS has been integrated into the social experience and patterns of sexual activity of recently self-identified gay men. Finally, there is now a generation of gay men, between the ages of 25 and 50 who might be labeled AIDS survivors, ones who, given the social and demographic patterns of gay life, could well have become infected but did not. A range of sociological methods might well be marshaled to specify the practical, political and cultural meaning of surviving. (Huber and Schneider, 1992: xxii–xxiii)
IS THERE A CRISIS IN THE GAY LIBERATION MOVEMENT?
The most serious problem facing the gay community today is “how to sustain the gay rights movement in the face of AIDS. AIDS has killed so many men, weakened so many others, and taken over so many gay community resources that it sometimes seems that the movement and the fight against AIDS are the same” (Cruikshank, 1992: 181).
While I refer to ‘the gay community,’ and the ‘gay liberation movement,’ we must view these constructions with caution. The construct of ‘gay community’ may exclude many men (and women). In modern pluralistic societies, individuals rarely belong to a single community; our lives intersect a range of community organizations and social groups based on geographical, occupational, ethnocultural, age, social contact and leisure preoccupations. Gay communities are as eclectic in attitudes, political beliefs, social and sexual behaviours as the larger community (Marchand, 1989). Gay people do not have to live together to feel a sense of community-the boundaries of place and time only serve to locate some particular people; descriptions of their relationships, interaction and knowledge are specific to the group, but are not dependent on the particular group for their sense of common purpose, lifestyle or community (Warren, 1972).
Since gay communities change with fluctuations of interests and composition due to in-migration, the processes of socialization make research into these communities extremely complex. In-migration to major centres has been a phenomenon common to homosexual men for decades. Gay men tend to seek the social and cultural support of their peers, ‘a place where they can be gay.’ Since the introduction of HIV and AIDS into the homosexual matrix, in-migration has increased in great measure due to two significant factors: (1) the inability of infected gay men to obtain requisite medical and social services in smaller communities (with or without a reasonable degree of confidentiality), and (2) a generalized increase in urban tolerance of homosexual activity as contrasted to a greater degree of homophobia in smaller centres. In addition, as more and more HIV-positive men migrate to the major urban centres, the ratio of HIV-positive to HIV-negative men increases, increasing the demand for social and medical service support and correspondingly, the ability of the overall gay population to support their HIV-positive peers (financially and socially) diminishes.
The homosexual and bisexual communities consist of sub-populations whose members are difficult to identify and locate. They often feel subject to stigma (while homosexuality is rarely embraced by the general population, the tolerance of homosexuality appears to be higher in white middle class social groups than it is in many other ethnocultural groups, most notably Asian, Latino and Black communities) and therefore mistrustful of authority and authoritative research (Kalichman et al., 1990; New Zealand AIDS Foundation, 1990). In short, there is no specific entity as “the gay community.”
What needs, therefore, to be taken on faith is the notion that there exists a core structure of gay men who collectively compose the gay community. Numerous social, political, activist, and other types of groups of gay men meet regularly; gay bars, baths and other social venues abound. Gay iconography2 is visibly displayed on bodies (tattoos, T-shirts, jewelry), storefronts, bumper stickers, apartment windows, balconies, and virtually anywhere one can display a symbol.
From this core group (which while virtually immeasurable, is extremely large) have historically emerged the members of the ‘gay liberation movement’-those members of the community who are most active. Margaret Cruikshank defines the ‘gay community’ as
the lesbians and gay men who consider themselves part of a political movement. Membership in the community is thus chosen rather than automatic. The phrase “gay culture” designates their attitudes, values, tastes, artistic and literary works, groups and organizations, common experiences, festivals, special events, rituals, and their sense of a shared history. (Cruikshank, 1992:119)
What is significant is the fact that the collectivity of gay men who comprise the gay culture/society/movement share a commonality based on sexuality, discrimination, and opposition to compulsory heterosexuality. The gay community of the early 1980s mobilized itself by ideological transformation to contain and resolve the social, psychological, and spiritual issues that AIDS raised. The crisis mobilized the gay and lesbian community by concentrating its focus on a single threat and by involving many people who before had not been politically active. This frame transformation brought together not only adherents and potential beneficiaries (principally Persons Living with HIV [PLWHIV]), but also conscience adherents and constituents. Gay organizations, becoming increasingly aware of the debilitating social implications of the AIDS syndrome, changed many of their key objectives, from social and political equality for gays and lesbians to policies and programs dedicated to understanding the disease, seeking ways of preventing its spread, and advocating for decent health and social care for the infected.
AIDS has had an enormous impact on the survivors of these [dedicated and talented gay organizers of the 1970s] men, especially lovers and friends. Many made great sacrifices of time, money, and careers to care for the dying and often they had no energy left for the gay or lesbian political work that would have engaged them in normal times. Thus gay organizations lost workers and supporters at the same time that their resources were drained by the AIDS crisis. (Cruikshank, 1992: 182)
The crucial point is that the crisis of gay activism has been impacted by the advent of AIDS Service Organizations. As news of the ‘gay plague,’ or as scientists originally called it-Gay Related Immuno Deficiency (GRID)-spread, one of the first psychosocial manifestations of AIDS was the negative reaction of the gay community to sex itself. “The very free, open, exuberant, and celebratory attitudes toward gay sex in the 1970’s changed in the 1980’s as gay men, especially those in large cities, struggled against sex-negative attitudes in themselves and in the often hostile heterosexual world” (Cruikshank, 1992: 38). Prominent gay writers, most notably Larry Kramer (New York) and Randy Shilts (Los Angeles) actively campaigned for the closure of all gay bathhouses.
From a purely medical standpoint, however, the bathhouses were a horrible breeding ground for disease. People who went to bathhouses simply were more likely to be infected with a disease-and infect others-than a typical homosexual on the street. A Seattle study of gay men suffering from shigellosis,3 for example, discovered that 69 percent culled their sexual partners from bathhouses. A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having his typical 2.7 sexual contacts a night risked a 33 percent chance of walking out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhea, because about one in eight of those wandering the hallways had asymptomatic cases of these diseases. (Shilts, 1987: 19)
One of the first groups to recognize that sexual contact spread AIDS (well before the Center for Disease Control-Atlanta issued warning bulletins to doctors) were an ad hoc group-the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.’ The ‘Sisters’ were (and still are) gay men in nuns’ habits, often on roller skates, who “blitzed” bars, baths and social events with condoms and a ‘safe sex message.’ Today, most major centres have outreach volunteers who do essentially the same thing, but without the nuns’ habits. The point of this grassroots campaign was, and still is, to combat the negative view of gay sex, in part so as not to play into the hand of the right wing moralist position that gay sex was “bad.” “The basis for the attack on gay sex is a religious belief that sex exists only for procreation” (Cruikshank, 1992: 49).
Parents raise most children in a heterosexist environment. As such, when they are young and most impressionable, they generally are taught that sex is something that men and women do together, after they are married, in order to have babies. As children mature, and establish their own identities, this simplistic idea of sex as purely a procreative act is usually moderated by other values-values obtained in the school, among peers, in the media, and through a host of other sites of information. However, for a gay person, not only must the stigma of non-pro-creative sex be overcome, we must surmount the double bind of same-gender sex as well. Carol Warren writes that “the gay world has two distinctions: it is almost universally stigmatized, and no one is socialized within or toward it as a child” (Warren, 1974: 4).
Identity is a construction, but for the gay person, identity is a reconstruction. Furthermore, in the age of AIDS, for many people identity has yet again had to be reconstructed-this time as either a person with HIV or AIDS, ...
