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The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people's first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community's existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the HIV and AIDS epidemic began to decimate gay male populations in the 1980s and 1990s, the expression of grief by friends of the deceased was inhibited by the social stigma attached to both the virus and their sexualities. This article tells how the grieving gay community used death notices and obituaries published in the fortnightly Sydney Star Observer to make the community's grieving a shared public emotion and an assertion of the value of the lives lost to HIV and AIDS. Based on interviews with men who read and/or placed the notices, this article not only conveys the emotional and political impact of the epidemic on the survivors; it argues that the death notices and obituaries were part of a wider cultural struggle over Australians' norms of grieving and of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the place of the HIV/AIDS crisis in urban geographies of sexual minority activism has powerfully insisted on the importance of community organising as a response to state and societal failures and to their homophobic, AIDS phobic and morally conservative underpinnings. This paper extends this scholarship by examining the urban social geographies of exclusion produced by such community organising efforts. It draws on the perspectives of long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS (LTS) in Vancouver to highlight the differentiated care geographies of HIV/AIDS that resulted from the racialised, classed and gendered politics and urban imaginations enacted by gay and allied HIV/AIDS organising. Though LTS networks, spaces and politics of care and community were more extended than Vancouver's gay community during the 1980s and 1990s, the centring of the West End gay village in many community-led responses to HIV/AIDS resulted in LTS geographies outside the West End being excluded from important systems of care and community. LTS narratives of the city at the time of the 'gay disease' thus tell an urban politics of sexual and health activisms as shaped not only by processes of heteronormativity and homophobia but also of racially, colonially and class-inflected homonormative urban imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in New York City in the 1970s, gay men and lesbians created public access television programs to shine a spotlight on their experiences, communities, concerns, and businesses. This article asks, "How did public access programming provide an emerging televisual forum for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people to circulate community affects, experiences, and activism?" Looking to the "AIDS" episode of the 1983 cable access series Our Time, this article traces emerging affective responses to the AIDS epidemic, fear and anger in particular, present in the episode. This article argues that the content and aesthetics of the episode produce a televisual emotional pedagogy about AIDS, making sense of the rising panic to channel these feelings toward collective action. While little research has explored gay and lesbian public access programming, this article reveals that it provides a significant contribution to television history and to mediated archives of feelings in response to AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historically contextualises the origins of a transnational gay male aesthetic many now think of as homonormative. While typically understood as a depoliticisation that 'recodes freedom and liberation in terms of privacy, domesticity, and consumption' (Manalansan, 2005: 142), homonormativity also has an associated look defined by a set of slick surface appearances relating both to the body and design. Recognisable in various locations across the globe and in multiple settings including cruise ships, resorts, and gyms, this aesthetic is, above all, associated with gaybourhoods and gay villages. Using Soho's gay village in London as a case-study of the emergence of this generic style in the 1990s, its branded emphasis on 'affluence', minimalist interior design and idealised gym bodies is contextualised with references to yuppification and AIDS. Constituting a 'clean break' with earlier forms of urban gay culture now stigmatised as 'dirty' and 'unhealthy', the homonormative aesthetic can be viewed as an example of 'de-generational unremembering' following the first traumatic phase of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s (Castiglia C and Reed C (2011) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9). By placing AIDS at the centre of a discussion of homonormativity, some of the assumptions about its privilege can be queried while at the same time maintaining a critique of how class-specific 'aspirational' imagery was deployed to detract from the stigma of the health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the relationship between the Irish gay press and the AIDS crisis during the 1980s. This article aims to fill this gap by presenting the findings of a study dealing with the AIDS epidemic in Ireland and how it was confronted through the alternative media platform of OUT magazine. Using issues of OUT, it argues that alternative media in Ireland were pivotal in generating vital public health information for the gay community, particularly when the mainstream press and Irish government were not providing the necessary resources. This article also highlights the activist potential of alternative media such as OUT, as it engaged with public bodies in an attempt to hold them accountable for their response, or lack thereof, to the epidemic. The Irish gay press is thus an important example of how alternative media are critical when mainstream society ignores a particular group's public health needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how online outreach workers within AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) discursively imagine notions of "gay community" and the tensions between inequities in varying conceptions of "community" that operate in providers' and managers' sexual health online outreach. Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) of interview data from a community-based research project examining sexual health outreach among gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) men, we provide an analysis that problematizes notions of a unitary "gay community" while illustrating how certain privileged subjects are deemed ideal for inclusion and representation within both online and ASO communities. Moreover, we interrogate how online medical health regimes constitute the ideal neoliberal gay male subject who self-responsibilizes and individualizes his sexual health while erasing inequities relating to social location and intersecting identities. Our analysis highlights how homonormative politics infiltrates GBQ sexual health programming and the ways in which understandings of the "self" and gay subjectivities are constituted through biopolitical apparatuses and online sexual health surveillance. We argue that it is necessary to move online sexual health outreach beyond specifically focusing on the needs of white GBQ men by bringing a greater awareness to the continual exclusions which operate within GBQ "communities". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this contribution to the “Cartographies” section of the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author focuses on the terrains of digital media, geosocial networking, and sexually based social media in LGBT communities. Addressing the communal potentials and ethical complications of geosocial connections made possible by such sexually based social media, the author asks whether digital forms of cartography via applications such as Grindr and Scruff simplify, complicate, or merely expose historically longstanding notions of queer interconnectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the age of AIDS, lesbians' sexualities were strangely protected from the epidemic spread of the HIV virus, even while many lesbians' social and political lives were deeply impacted by its catastrophic effects on the gay community. The “so close but yet so far” phenomenon defining lesbian experience during the AIDS crisis evoked mixed and complicated emotions unique to that sector of the gay community. This article highlights the manifold emotional experience for lesbians, which paralleled an equally complex web of identifications and disidentifications with gay men. Although this perpetuated a sense of invisibility for lesbians during the epidemic's crisis years, it may have contributed to opening a space for new possibilities of feminine sexualities and identities as the crisis receded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to examine patterns of and concerns about drug use among a convenience sample of MSM in 2005, and compare the prevalence of illicit drug use among 1999 and 2005 samples of MSM in England and Wales. It draws on data from cross-sectional surveys of MSM in gay community venues and services across England and Wales, 2480 in 1999 and 3913 in 2005. We report that in 2005, cocaine, cannabis and alkyl nitrites were the drugs most commonly used in the previous year by MSM inside and outside London. Drug use was significantly more common among men who were younger and resided in London, and among those who reported greater numbers of male sexual partners and were HIV-positive. Frequency of use was generally high among those who used a drug, and poly-drug use was also high. A substantial minority of men who used illicit drugs were worried about use. More men in 2005 than in 1999 reported using various drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine. We conclude that use of drugs is widespread among the MSM surveyed. Exclusive use of any one drug is rare. There is an urgent need for drug prevention and treatment interventions, which are accessible and acceptable to MSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the inequality of access of people to the international policy process. It is argued that this presents an important challenge for global social policy considerations. The work explores the question of how these inequalities are produced, maintained and reproduced by looking at the relationship between international organizations and non-governmental organizations. As an entry point discussions of social exclusion are introduced and then linked to the concept of durable inequality. This move provides a way of looking at how conditions of exclusion are maintained and reproduced over time. Two instances of IO/NGO relationship are looked at as illustrative examples. The first case looks at the processes whereby international gay and lesbian organizations are trying to obtain formal NGO consultative status with the United Nations by applying to the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The second case looks at the role of NGOs within the formal structure of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which has created a new perspective for international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the study of stigma dividing gay community. It has been reported that stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS has been around since the start of the epidemic but little is known about the HIV/AIDS in gay community and how it has affected men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV. A study is conducted to have a better understanding of the effects of stigma on this population and to lessen its harmful effects. Two types of protocol are conducted. The SUMS I, the first phase of the study protocol was conducted between June and November 1997. 250 participated and completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire and a semistructured interview and was paid $30 each. The second phase (SUMS II) was conducted between May and September 1998. 206 participated and completed the questionnaire. The study showed that distinguished HIV/AIDS stigma in the current sample was not related to sexual risk behavior. However, those who distinguished higher levels of HIV/AIDS stigma in the gay community were more possible to look for partners in settings that will ease anonymous sex, like private sex parties and sex clubs.

We systematically review quantitative research relating to the sexual behaviours of MSM in PSEs. We examine the methodological rigour of these studies to determine an appropriate framework for future PSE-based research and quantify sexual behavioural trends therein. Medline, BIDS, Web of Science and recent HIV/AIDS conferences were searched according to a systematic inclusion criteria. Nine papers were included for review. Recruitment of participants' outwith PSE settings, and low response rates (6%) of participants contacted in situ , question the validity and generalizability of current evidence. Most PSE users were gay or bisexually identified and half of men in the gay community reported recent PSE use. Around 10% of men reported casual status-unknown/serodiscordant unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) within PSEs. HIV testing rates amongst PSE users were similar to the wider gay community, though the proportion of men who tested positive was twice as high. Rates of casual UAI suggest that PSEs represent important sites for HIV prevention. However, since extant evidence is scant and methodologically flawed, further research is urgent. Such work must recruit participants in situ, and obtain satisfactory response rates, to be generalizable to the wider population of men who cruise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the life of a straight therapist in the gay community over the past three decades. The article is presented as a first person account profiling the career of the psychotherapist. Many discriminatory acts by police in the late 1960s and 1970s against gays in the United States that are presented in the article. There are many examples of discrimination, such as police raids of gay bars and the such. The author recalls his own struggle trying to identify the possibility that he was bisexual considering how comfortable he felt around gays and lesbians. The author also describes his experiences such as visiting gay bars as part of social work studies. Details of gay liberation acts and organizations of the late 1960s and 1970s. The treatment of the author's first client with AIDS which was followed by many more with the disease as the HIV test became available for the first time. The details of different treatment and therapy methods that the author tried for clients coping with HIV or AIDS is explained. The background of AIDS epidemic as it began to increase in the 1980s is explained.

In the mid-1980s, controversy emerged in a number of American cities over the roles gay bathhouses and sex clubs might play in the spread of AIDS, and in raising safe-sex awareness. In 1984, San Francisco became the first city where political debates broke out over AIDS-related policies for bathhouses and sex clubs. These debates were dominated by questions of public health and gay civil liberties. A variety of proposals were put forward during 1984 to try to reconcile these two concerns, or to give one a higher priority than the other. Certain officials in San Francisco's government, and members of its gay/lesbian/bisexual community, strongly disagreed over whether the businesses should be closed, should make their own AIDS-prevention efforts, or should continue operating under new regulations. Policies implemented for the city's baths were disconnected from the known AIDS risk of different sexual behaviors, and from research findings on AIDS and the local baths. Political and judicial decisions concerning San Francisco's bathhouses and sex clubs that were made in 1984 had continuing influences on these businesses through the later 1980s and the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores how might the end of AIDS be understood as an AIDS discourse that tells about the relationship of the gay and lesbian community to AIDS. Details of how artists living with HIV/AIDS responded to the calls for post-AIDS identities and cultures; Comments on the new AIDS-as-crisis discourse among the black and Latino leadership in gay community; Discussion of two dancer-choreographers whose work enables people to think through the contradictions and challenges of the end of AIDS.

The article reports on the operation of gay culture and gay community in Adelaide, South Australia. The aim is to uncover the social and cultural aspects of how the HIV/ AIDS epidemic is operating and being operated upon in South Australia. A study was conducted to find what was the prevailing thinking about HIV and Adelaide's sexual and social formations in this context. The data for the study was collected through twenty-one, face to face, life history interviews, five group interviews and other ethnographic work, including textual analysis of gay community print materials.

Discusses important facts about the relationship between homosexuals and AIDS in the United States, with emphasis on the ambiguities and stakes of the coming together of these two realities. Questions concerning the meaning and place of human sexuality; Room for personal ethic, reflection and a more responsible behavior; Social, psychological and moral reactions to AIDS within the homosexual community itself.

From January 1988 to September 1989, 209 HIV-1 seropositive male blood donors who reported sex with men were interviewed at 20 U.S. blood centers. Most (59%) were Black or Hispanic and self-identified as bisexual (30%) or heterosexual (25%). During the year before their last donation, 73% of homosexually, 62% of bisexually, and 29% of heterosexually identified men had engaged in unprotected anal sex with men. Overall, few had ties to gay communities; however; 24% of bisexually and 58% of heterosexually identified men had female primary partners. There were no racial/ethnic differences in gender of partners in the last year, although Blacks were more likely to identify themselves as bisexual (44%) and Hispanics as heterosexual (34%). These data suggest the need to target prevention efforts at men having unprotected sex with male or female partners, regardless of sexual identity, and to examine social network and cultural influences affecting sexual behavior and sexual identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the impact of AIDS on gay men's sexual practices with the use of a content-analysis of personal advertisements within the personals section of "The Village Voice" magazine. Previous research focusing on changes in gay male sexual practices as a result of AIDS often avoids taking into consideration the meanings which sexual practices have within the gay community. An analysis of the language used by gay men to refer to their sexuality is especially important in light of the particular discourse, or the configuration of power, that has been attached to AIDS, in contrast to the discourse attached to other sexually transmitted diseases. This discourse, and its corresponding keywords, is unique because the gay population was the first group to be affected by AIDS in large numbers in the United States.

This article identifies differences among gay and bisexual men in three cities in Pennsylvania who decided to be tested for antibodies to HIV. HIV antibody testing has been controversial since these tests were developed in 1985. The controversy has centered around a number of issues, including the accuracy of the tests, their usefulness as a prevention tool, the widespread use of the tests with low-risk populations, the psychological impact of testing, use of the tests for insurance screening, employment and admittance to school; the reporting of test results and the decision whether to contact partners of people who test positive. The project took place in late 1987 and 1988 in three small Pennsylvania cities with populations ranging between 35,000 and 66,000. Each city had an institutionalized gay community with at least one gay bar, one gay organization, one AIDS services organization and an outlet where gay newspapers and gay magazines were available. A cohort of 110 gay and bisexual men was recruited, and data for a cross-sectional analysis were gathered about their risk factors for seroconversion to HIV and the subsequent clinical and immunologic manifestations in seropositive individuals. These data were ob- tamed through collection of blood samples and collection of medical and sexual data by questionnaire.

Presents the abstracts of articles about homosexuality. 'Aids and the gay community: Between the specter and the promise of medicine,' by R. Bayer, published in the periodical 'Social Research'; 'Law reform in France,' by C. Courouve, published in the 'The Cabirion and Gay Books Bulletin.'

Organizations, like individuals, can be discreditable and potentially stigmatized. This can affect both the members of the organization and its operation. This study examines how workers in an AIDS service organization in Ontario, Canada, manage its public image as a way of dealing with the stigma which surrounds much of their work. Using data from in-depth interviews with staff members and volunteers, the study describes worker concerns about the appearance of being too closely associated with the local gay and lesbian community and documents some of the strategies they employed to manage the organization's public image. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between organizational impression management and viability in the context of the stigma and uncertainty which surmunds the HW epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the issue of AIDS epidemic among the gay community and heterosexuals. Sex between men entered public health discourse as gay bowel syndrome, decades before methodologically sound social surveys demonstrated that heterosexual couples account for a much larger proportion of episodes of anal intercourse than male dyads. Yet the failures of AIDS prevention and the resurgence of indicator sexually transmitted infections (STI) suggest that we remain as ill-equipped to control STI epidemics among stigmatized sexual minorities as we were a quarter-century ago.

The article discusses various issues that highlight the effects of HIV infection on GLBT communities in Australia. It also presents information on the forum "Out There Too" organized by the HIV/AIDS Programs Unit of the SA Health Commission in March 1996. Researcher Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli in the forum examines issues associated with gender and sexualities. AIDS has considered as an illness that is still without a cure and revealed the great depth of caring which exists throughout Australian society.

Pays tribute to the late sociologist Michael Pollak, who died of AIDS on June 27, 1992. Major sociological works; Career highlights; Biographical and educational background; Research on gay lifestyles and the consequences of AIDS.

The article discusses the author's view on the establishment of an AIDS activist movement and the representation of gay community in filmmaking.

Focuses on the extent of health education about AIDS in Great Britain. Prevalence of misconceptions about the disease; Commonality of AIDS in the gay community and among drug addicts; Efforts of the government to disseminate information and create awareness about AIDS.