I’m perennially sickened by people who distort the relationship between AIDS and the fight for state-recognized partnerships (gay marriage/civil unions/etc.). It’s not that AIDS and the backlash made people get “”socially conservative”” or “”homonormative”” or whatever the buzzwords are; it’s that the AIDS crisis illustrated how vulnerable our communities are without protections for our relationships. You can argue all you want that we shouldn’t need legal protections to be safe, but please understand that terminally ill gay men were evicted from their apartments immediately after watching their partners die horribly because they couldn’t inherit the lease or the property (or couldn’t do so without paying heavy taxes). Gay men were unable to attend the funerals of their long-term partners because homophobic parents had custody of the remains.
This still happens, in states without gay marriage; a woman in Indiana was told that she was an “unrelated third party” when she tried to arrange her wife’s cremation. Reducing this real suffering to “you want marriage rights because you want to prove you’re just like straight people” is horrible, and I don’t know how that argument ever left someone’s typing hands without them realizing that they were absolute garbage.
This seems to me to lack some historical context. The Aids crisis gave rise to a lot of radical, progressive and very vocally sex positive activist, most prominently in the form of Act Up, by far the biggest activist organisation fighting the Aids Crisis.
These radical organisations knew marriage was an answer that would only serve the few who could access it (those with a long term partner & the money to pay the rent & an apartment to begin with & documentation & a housing contract that didn’t allow eviction etc etc) and as a result they focussed not of housing through marriage but on housing as a right for all. They did not focus on access to health care insurance through marriage but on free universal health care. etc etc.
When these organisations became too big to ignore, the media looked for and pushed into the spotlight their own white gay middle class male spokespersons to voice ‘the gay opinion’ and they made sure that was a conservative opinion focussed on far more limited goals.
Sarah Schulman, an Act Up activist, described this extensively in ‘The Gentrification of the Mind’ (great book, I highly recommend reading it)
The visibility created by the AIDS crisis forced the dominant group to change their stance. They could no longer insist that homosexuality did not exist. What they could do is find representative homosexuals with whom they were confortable, and integrate them into the realm of public conversation. If they didn’t, the gay voice of America would be people with AIDS disrupting mass at Saints Patrick’s Cathedral. It was crucial to the containment crisis that acceptable gay personalities be identified and positioned as ‘leaders’ even if they had no grass roots base. It was kind of like the CIA setting up a puppet government.
Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, are too unruly, to angry, to radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change to accomodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. So instead of the representative radicals, there was an unconscious but effective search for palative individuals with no credibility in the community. This replacement proess became visibile in the late nineties. It was the moment when the corporate media was creating its own gay personalities, who were entirely different from the people featured in the gay-owned press. And eventually the grassroots voices were drowned out completely.
There is absolutely a historic, well-documented move from radical AIDS activism focussed on justice for all in the 80′s and early 90s, to a far more limited conservative gay rights moment with a strong focus on same sex marriage in the late 90′s.
There is a lot that can be said about why the late 90′s LGBT rights movement became so much less radical and more conservative. Part of it is the media issue described above, another is that a lot of gay people who had survived the AIDS crisis had lost dozens or hundreds of friends and needed rest, another is that many of the best radical activists had died and simply weren’t there anymore, part is that a new generation of gay people growing up with the idea that our sexuality is dangerous and should be contained.
There are more reasons and recognition of the role of trauma in gay conservatism is important, but we can definitely recognize that it is conservatism and that AIDS activists themselves have shown that a better, more radically inclusive activism isn’t just possible, it’s incredibly powerful.
Recommended viewing: United in Anger. A History of Act Up
QueerAnarchism 