Healthy Sex/Sick Sex
Colonized Sexuality and it’s Impact on the U.S. HIV/AIDS Epidemic
One key difference between these two communicable diseases, was the centering of sexuality in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which inherently changed the way the disease itself was moralized.
During one public health crisis, the global pandemic of Covid-19, one thinks to the stark differences between the perception of Covid-19 and of HIV/AIDS, particularly when AIDS was first discovered spreading throughout the United States. One key difference between these two communicable diseases, was the centering of sexuality in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which inherently changed the way the disease itself was moralized.
However, to understand why the AIDS epidemic was allowed to result in the deaths, we must look to the foundational ideas upon which our society uses to establish its views on the majority of people who were suffering from HIV/AIDS, queer men. In addition, when we look at how HIV/AIDS is treated today as a disease eradicated amongst “modern” queer enclaves, despite the fact that it is one of the leading issues in public health in developing (read: colonized) countries and poor people within the U.S. In doing so, we must define our understanding of colonized sexuality as the epicenter of colonial societies.
A fundamental concept to understand is how colonial hierarchies function by disseminating discourses about good/bad, light/dark, hetero/homo binaries. With colonized sexuality specifically, the most prevalent discourse stems from the standardization of sexual expression/attraction based on the two 'extremes' of homosexuality and heterosexuality, placing hetero as the default and correct sexuality and homo as the deviant and immoral sexuality, extending into lifestyle. Colonized sexuality is not just limited to attraction but encompasses identity completely. While attraction focuses on the aspect of who individuals engage in sexual and romantic relationships, these poles of hetero/homo not only express a personal sexual preference, but also organize how people are structured in relation to society writ large, since it determines how we participate in/encounter institutions. Sexuality is also used to situate us in a moral framework, as mentioned above, particularly in the concept of productive versus unproductive sex, where sex that does result in conception is deviant, though these discourses have evolved and shifted overtime. Sexuality is also based on the assumption and a foundation of sexual dimorphism, centering itself around the constructed ideas and roles of man and woman, even within homosexual relationships. Colonized sexuality has several other concepts within itself that it perpetuates, such as patriarchal hierarchies, white supremacy, Christianity, and cisheteronormativity. These concepts create hierarchies putting colonizers as superior and colonized as inferior, while also placing those who fall outside of the standard of 'correctness' as inferior even if they are benefited by one or additional hierarchies.
These binaries are not expressions of who people actually are but are ways of organizing people in relation to power and erasing and making invisible ways of existing outside of these binaries and being aware of those existences. Colonized sexuality destroys and makes invisible the identities that exist outside of it, as the further identities diverge from colonized standards, the less they are capable of existing within any colonized society. It feeds into the idea of sex as well, as sex becomes a means of furthering misogyny and degrading women. The connection between gender and sexuality is unbreakable within colonized sexuality and the hierarchy cannot survive without the existence of categories to label and differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable identities. These categories then play a role in the methods used to control the colonized population and assimilate them, annihilating any identities beyond what colonized sexuality allows. Sexuality specifically has always been a key site for maintaining these hierarchies because they so easily play on fears about subversive lifestyles, as it creates exclusion from many societal institutions [i.e marriage, child-rearing].
In legitimizing colonized sexuality, governments use the concept to control the bodies of their citizenry.
Some historical examples include European houses of correction, which were semi-judicial structures that functioned as centers of “treatment” for vagrants, beggars, and others who were unwilling to work or who were on the outskirts of society. The treatments were often punitive in nature and used capitalism as a way of legitimizing their treatments, touting “mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders”, using employment and work status as an indicator of health with a desire to not work signaling sickness and moral deviancy. Additionally, when individuals were placed in these “houses of correction”, investigations were made to see if their children were baptized and their wives were legally married to them, thus questioning the legitimacy of bonds of relationships through institutional powers (Church) of those who were labeled as requiring treatment.
This foundation of ‘correctional’ treatment can be seen in the development of hysteria, an ailment solely women were diagnosed with that then allowed them to be locked up and ‘treated’. Hysteria was but in fact just results of oppressive sexual norms and poor care to begin with, which created an avenue to medicalize what was seen as ‘abnormal’ sexual behavior in women. A more recent example is conversion therapy, a ‘treatment’ of identity that seeks to correct individuals who express same-sex attraction, and this underscores how historically medical institutions have been used to control and oppress identities that have been deemed unnatural, ultimately delegitimizing identities. The delegitimization of identities is a process that has been used to strip power from marginalized identities, oftentimes resulting in the recategorization of the identity as an anomaly, illness, etc. In doing so, this results in a lack of autonomy over the expression of said identity, either as the identity is medicalized, thus allowing medical institutionalization, or criminalized, thus allowing penal institutionalization. This process of delegitimization is a key practice of colonial hierarchies, which results in colonial hierarchies having effects that reverberate beyond questions of self-rule and sovereignty, which are often the most obvious effects of the hierarchies of colonizer and colonized, and in fact shaped the sexual lives of people who are members of colonial societies as well.
A painting of a bastardy examination:
“These were taken before two Justices and enquired into the circumstances under which a woman about to give birth to a bastard child had fallen pregnant…[and] are particularly concerned to discover the identity of the father”(Hitchcock, Howard, and Shoemaker, 2018).
Fig. 1“William Hogarth. A Woman Swearing a Child to a Grave Citizen. c.1729.”
We are “no more able to conceive of a politics without the fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child”.
In the past century, many of these corrective practices have been targeted towards queer peoples and women overwhelmingly. Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive frames the conceptual drive behind this targeting in the concept of reproductive futurism. Reproductive futurism is the positioning of the figure of the Child as the symbol of the future, forever on the horizon of what people fight for. Edelman describes how we have created a political foreground we are “no more able to conceive of a politics without the fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child”. In this establishment of reproduction and reproductive capability as a necessity for any future, the Child constantly serves as a ‘pure’ symbol of an ideal future and threats to the Child are threats to the continuation of colonial civilization. This then places the Child as a figurehead of nationalistic interests, the perfect citizen whose unalienable rights to the domain left by past generations, which in and of itself is the mindset of settler colonialism.
This centering of the Child as the representative of the future places queerness as a threat to the future, as well as results in the oppressive policing of reproductive bodies. Queerness exists outside the social norm in part because their existence disables the possibility of the child, the very existence of queerness creates the possibility of futures without children as the future proprietors of the past. Queerness is then also constantly cast as a threat to literal children, whether in the stereotypes of queer men as pedophiles, but also in the idea of queerness ensnaring children and therefore creating queer adults. These constructs cast queerness as erasing the existence of the Child and explicitly harming the Child, therefore erasing, and harming the future of American society.
Regarding the policing of female reproductive functions, the constant political struggle to protect the autonomy of female bodies belies the interests of the state in ensuring the continuing existence of the Child. This can be examined through the difficulties women face in attaining permanent birth control/sterilization, and even forced sterilization of women in certain racial groups, as well as access to abortion. As the Child represents the interests of settler colonialists and current dominant cultural groups, ensuring the children who are born are representatives of the dominant cultural group is also imperative. Using the definition of colonized sexuality I described above, we might interpret the ideology of the Child to be a function of colonial relationality, furthering the centering of productive heterosexual relationships within the greater hierarchies put in place.
Fig. 2 Danica Ellis of Bookriot’s breakdown of topics in the 850 books TX Rep. Matt Krause asked the Texas Education Agency were present in the state’s schools, possibly relating to House Bill 3979, which banned the teaching of any materials from which “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex” (HB 3979).
Therefore, in the interests of protecting the Child (and future), political and social movements scapegoat marginalized groups and communities by casting them into roles that threaten the Child. The most recent example of this can be found in the calls from GOP politicians in Texas for banning books that contain material they deem “inappropriate” for children.
As one can imagine, the list of books entails stories with LGBTQIA+ characters, mentions of anti-racism, and any sexual content that veers away from cisheteronormative, productive sex. The impacts the ideologies that are founded upon colonized sexuality are represented in practically every realm of society, including the legal, political, social, and health fields. Particularly in the field of health, we see the moralizing of health status as an external indicator of internal character.
While few scholars have described the AIDS epidemic in the US in terms of colonial thinking, then, I argue that colonized sexuality is the background condition for the governmental, societal, and medical response to the AIDS epidemic. The first discovery of AIDS was due to increasing diagnoses of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia among otherwise healthy gay men. Initially the CDC even attributed AIDS to gay men, calling it GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency, centering gay men and their lifestyles as the onus of the sickness. In this way, the connection between moral behavior was connected to physical health, which has had enormous ramifications to this day.
Fig. 3 “Newspaper article -- "As Reports Increase About Rare Illness Killing Gay Men, Researchers and Consumers Ask....Do Poppers Cause Cancer?"“
The response from the Reagan administration revealed how deeply these beliefs were embedded into American culture and society, beyond that of social prejudices. By 1981, the CDC was aware of AIDS, and by 1982 they had named it as such, but Reagan first acknowledged AIDS in 1985, and his first speech addressed to physicians was in 1987, and at this point 40,000 people had died from the disease. During this time, funding for the CDC and other federal research agencies was cut by Reagan’s trimming of the federal budget and funding for AIDS research was repeatedly vetoed till it was included with research for other illnesses like Legionnaire’s disease and TSS. It was deeply revealing that the leader of the USA’s response to an illness associated with the gay community was to ignore and deflect addressing the epidemic that was spreading throughout the country. However, it is unsurprising once we begin to look back onto the concepts discussed earlier, as it benefited the state to have a disease that largely affected the gay community, as the gay community was a threat to the norms that allowed the state control over its body of citizenry.
The AIDS crisis was an epidemic, it was everywhere and yet the media, the government, and so many others remained silent about it, leaving gay men and many others to die on their own. This silence was deliberate, and it was fatal, it was an intentional erasure of the suffering that the AIDS epidemic was bringing upon the gay community.
Fig. 4 “The Silence = Death Project, color lithograph, 1987“
Fig. 5
“The Georgia State University Signal, 1983-08-02“
However, because of this silence and the ostracization that AIDS incurred, the queer community was in a way forced to come together as when gay men began dying and falling sick at massive rates, lesbians were the ones who stepped up and became caretakers. Many of the gay men who were diagnosed with AIDS were ostracized from their families and so their friends were the ones who stepped up. At the time the gay and lesbian communities were not close, yet with the crisis and the silence from the rest of society, the queer community had to look inwards to help itself.
The refusal to care for gay men and those infected with AIDS was another way in which colonized sexuality manifested itself within the healthcare system. First, it must be established what care is: “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web"(Fisher and Tronto, 1990, p. 40). However, when we look at how care is treated in our culture, it is greatly undervalued, due to the assumption that caring is “women’s work”. The devaluation of the labor women do and the devaluation of femininity overall is a function of the patriarchy, which is further seen in how the wages and salaries paid to workers in the provision of care is considerably low, as well as the assumption that care is menial work. These assumptions and understanding of care, made it easier to deny care or provide substandard care to people with AIDS, particularly those who were already stigmatized and seen as ‘deserving’ of the diagnosis. Even within the queer community, the people who did the work of care included large amounts of lesbians, again reinforcing the idea of care as an inherently feminine act.
The societal response to AIDS was largely represented both by capitalist interests and Christian religious interests, alongside general fear mongering that was placed on people with AIDS. AIDS from the beginning was associated with gay men and so the rhetoric that American society was using constructed AIDS as a disease affecting "sinners," primarily "promiscuous" gays and secondarily drug abuse” (Kowalewski, 1990). These were identities that already had considerable stigma around them, but the conflict within religious communities regarding AIDS was that people with AIDS were simultaneously “sinners” and sick, and many Christians sought to help the sick but condemn sinners. Ultimately, as Kowalewski’s Religious Constructions of the AIDS Crisis outlines, there were three main responses; firstly, blaming the victim: which detailed defining AIDS as a divine punishment as a failure to adhere to traditional norms of sexual morality. Second, embracing those who were sick and defining AIDS as just a disease which can be prevented through avoidance of certain behaviors. The last response was an amalgamation of the previous two and sought to reconcile the two extremes by defining AIDS as a public health crisis but continuing to maintain the sacredness of traditional morals against homosexuality and labeling AIDS as deterrent to ‘sinful’ behavior.
This was all contingent on the Eurocentric understanding of sexuality, that was emphasized through the Christian religious doctrine that facilitated the condemnation of non-hetero lifestyles. The religious response was in a manner, most of the general public’s response, who viewed queerness as predatory and deviant, and so when AIDS was discovered in gay men, the same labels were placed upon the disease itself. Even though researchers had established that HIV/AIDS could only be transferred through bodily fluids, anyone with AIDS was then maligned and demeaned in a similar manner that queer people had been maligned and demonized prior to this. In fact, the AIDS epidemic further emphasized the idea of queerness as contagion, embedding within the cultural memory of Americans the connection between queerness and sickness.
Fig. 6 “Newspaper clipping -- "Wall Street Closed for 15 Minutes by Angry Gays"“
In actively seeking to deny health insurance to this ailing population, American corporations were accomplices in the deaths of these gay men, which they believed they were justified in doing.
Capitalism as a system is one that results in the death of queer individuals and other marginalized groups, and our healthcare system is built upon that same economic standpoint.
At this time employer based private health insurance was prevalent and young gay men in the workforce made up considerable portions of insured individuals in the US. Therefore, the issue of AIDS became intertwined deeply with hiring practices and health insurance coverage and due to the lifelong and fatal nature of the disease, it became an expensive disease to provide coverage for. Healthcare became a major political issue for gay rights activists, who saw that gay men were the largest affected population that also possessed health insurance. Some companies began to dismiss employees on the basis of their sexuality alone or because an AIDS-related illness made them unable to work.
As the crisis went on, other companies took greater measures to avoid hiring gay applicants so they could deny them health and life insurance, with practices like investigating their living circumstances, checking their mail to see if they were living with other men, and asking neighbors if they had any information regarding their sexuality or living partners. Another approach was to change the rules for those already enrolled in group policies, “either by imposing new limitations on what employees could claim, changing the terms and conditions of the policy, or even threatening to terminate the policy altogether” (Bell 2018). Furthermore, within certain cities, the “concentration of an escalating AIDS caseload in a handful of urban centers, together with the growing reliance of [people with AIDS] on underfunded and overstretched public hospitals, threatened to bring the health systems of those cities – New York in particular – to the brink of collapse” (Bell, 2018).
The attitude of the corporate world to HIV/AIDS regarding healthcare and the labor of gay men can also be further fleshed out by looking to disability, specifically Robert McCruer’s Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. Within our society, there is an established system of compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, as if these conditions of ‘able-bodied’ are created they create the disabled body to contrast and illustrate the extremes of good and bad bodies.
This echoes the establishment of colonial hierarchies, where the standardization of certain bodies are then used to exclude and eradicate ‘bad’ bodies. This is the same process that is used to create the binary of hetero-homo, and these two systems of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are thoroughly woven together, ensuring that compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa.
Furthermore, ‘crip’ bodies, just as queer bodies, are seen as threats to futurity of the heteronorm, which is visible in the ways both queer peoples and disabled people’s relationships to children is corrupted, where ideologies like eugenics demonize crip bodies’ reproductive functions and queer people are associated with pedophilia.
What links these two moralizing discourses is the shared logic of colonized sexuality, thus when the AIDS epidemic began and started functioning as a mass disabling event, with the ‘creation’ of disability when gay men began to develop it, the responses from corporations was just as grounded in ableism as it was in homophobia.
The ways through which the understanding of colonized sexuality is represented in the AIDS epidemic continues to affect our healthcare system to this day.
In part, a large portion of this is the centering of heterosexuality as the normative understanding of sexual behaviors and placing the heterosexual relationship as the baseline against which sexual behaviors are analyzed.
As Eckhert discusses in his 2016 study, “A Case for the Demedicalization of Queer Bodies”, much of researchers’ attention is filtered through the preconceptions regarding the ontological status of a sexual outlier to population level heteronorm.
Many modern studies of queer existence and their treatment in healthcare medicalize queerness as a condition, as heteronormative biases pervade much of experimental design that seeks to uncover a mechanism for queer sexual orientations (Eckhert, 2016). This medicalization harkens back to the pseudo racial science that was extremely common in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the development of phrenology among others.
An important concept to understand prior to continuing is that of symbolic annihilation, which was originally coined by feminist scholars in the 1970s, symbolic annihilation is what happens to marginalized groups when they are omitted, absent, grossly under-represented, maligned, or trivialized by mainstream media coverage, ranging from television, TV, to textbooks.
This search for ‘understanding’ queerness is a result of the invisibility of sexual minorities, which encompasses the ideas that queer symbolic annihilation as the reason for the exclusion of queer identities in health professions education, and by consequence, in healthcare, which ultimately results in queer (un)intelligibility as a repercussion of this systemic erasure. As a result of this invisibility, healthcare spaces are overwhelmingly heteronormative and typically result in the constant othering of queer people in these spaces.
An example is how individuals often experience “coming-out” to health care providers as a result of heteronormative generalizations, described as a “enduring perpetual outing” (Rickards and Wuest, 2006), which perpetuates the heteronormative practices within institutionalized healthcare environments.
Even when queer identities are recognized in healthcare fields, they are “indexed through social and health disparities such as HIV, through (psychiatric) diagnostic schema, or embodied via identarian-based categories” (Argüello, 2016), social determinants that are frequently the result of marginalization and dehumanization that occurs in cisheterosexist societies.
The structures of colonial hierarchies continue to evolve to legitimize themselves as these discourses will persist for as long as colonial thinking does, because it links together these moralizing discourses and organizes people along these lines of “good bodies/bad bodies” binaries.
And so when moralizing these identities, the colonial society creates an enemy out of these bad/deviant bodies by posing them as threats to society, future, the status quo, all while erasing the existence of systems that have exist outside of colonial society, therefore perpetuating the illusion that colonial society is the only way society and living could exist.
All these factors contribute to the health disparities that are present between queer populations, as the cisheteronormative generalizations that are present in healthcare spaces are a detriment to the health of queer peoples, and result in poorer health outcomes.
References:
Argüello, Tyler M. "Fetishizing the Health Sciences: Queer Theory as an Intervention." Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 28, no. 3 (2016/07/02 2016): 231-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2016.1191407. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2016.1191407.
Bell, Jonathan. "Between Private and Public: Aids, Health Care Capitalism, and the Politics of Respectability in 1980s America." Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (2020): 159-83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818000518. https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/between-private-and-public-aids-health-care-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-respectability-in-1980s-america/5DFDF1E4749ED89329A47ADF5E7E795F.
Caswell, Michelle. "Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight against Symbolic Annihilation." The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 26-37. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26.
Eckhert, Erik. "A Case for the Demedicalization of Queer Bodies." [In eng]. The Yale journal of biology and medicine 89, no. 2 (2016): 239-46. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27354849. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4918872/.
Edelman, Lee. No Future : Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization; a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York, New American Library, 1967.
Goldberg, Lisa, Annette Ryan, and Jody Sawchyn. "Feminist and Queer Phenomenology: A Framework for Perinatal Nursing Practice, Research, and Education for Advancing Lesbian Health." Health Care for Women International 30, no. 6 (2009/05/26 2009): 536-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399330902801302. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399330902801302.
Kowalewski, Mark R. "Religious Constructions of the Aids Crisis." Sociology of Religion 51, no. 1 (1990): 91-96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711343. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711343.
Müller, Alex. "Beyond ‘Invisibility’: Queer Intelligibility and Symbolic Annihilation in Healthcare." Culture, Health & Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2018/01/02 2018): 14-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1322715. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1322715.
Tronto, Joan C. "An Ethic of Care." Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging 22, no. 3 (1998): 15-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44875693.Argüello, Tyler M. "Fetishizing the Health Sciences: Queer Theory as an Intervention." Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 28, no. 3 (2016/07/02 2016): 231-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2016.1191407. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2016.1191407.
Bell, Jonathan. "Between Private and Public: Aids, Health Care Capitalism, and the Politics of Respectability in 1980s America." Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (2020): 159-83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818000518. https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/between-private-and-public-aids-health-care-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-respectability-in-1980s-america/5DFDF1E4749ED89329A47ADF5E7E795F.
Caswell, Michelle. "Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight against Symbolic Annihilation." The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 26-37. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26.
Eckhert, Erik. "A Case for the Demedicalization of Queer Bodies." [In eng]. The Yale journal of biology and medicine 89, no. 2 (2016): 239-46. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27354849. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4918872/.
Edelman, Lee. No Future : Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization; a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York, New American Library, 1967.
Goldberg, Lisa, Annette Ryan, and Jody Sawchyn. "Feminist and Queer Phenomenology: A Framework for Perinatal Nursing Practice, Research, and Education for Advancing Lesbian Health." Health Care for Women International 30, no. 6 (2009/05/26 2009): 536-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399330902801302. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399330902801302.
Kowalewski, Mark R. "Religious Constructions of the Aids Crisis." Sociology of Religion 51, no. 1 (1990): 91-96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711343. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711343.
Müller, Alex. "Beyond ‘Invisibility’: Queer Intelligibility and Symbolic Annihilation in Healthcare." Culture, Health & Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2018/01/02 2018): 14-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1322715. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1322715.
Tronto, Joan C. "An Ethic of Care." Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging 22, no. 3 (1998): 15-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44875693.
Images:
Header: “Oct 6: Remember Their Names: Fight for the Living,” 1989. LGBTQ Poster Collection, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
Fig. 1: Tim Hitchcock, Sharon Howard and Robert Shoemaker, "Pauper Settlement, Vagrancy and Bastardy Examinations (EP)", London Lives, 1690-1800 (www.londonlives.org, version, 2.0 March 2018).
Fig. 2: Ellis, Danica. Presumed Reason for Book Challenge. Digital Image. Bookriot. November 5, 2021. https://bookriot.com/texas-book-ban-list/.
Fig. 3: Gazette Newspaper, “Newspaper article -- "As Reports Increase About Rare Illness Killing Gay Men, Researchers and Consumers Ask....Do Poppers Cause Cancer?" (Gazette Newspaper, Volume 3, Number 6),” Georgia State University Library Exhibits, accessed April 27, 2022, https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/current/items/show/2230.
Fig. 4: HHR, “The Silence = Death Project, color lithograph, 1987,” Georgia State University Library Exhibits, accessed April 27, 2022, https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/current/items/show/536.
Fig. 5: “The Georgia State University Signal, 1983-08-02,” Georgia State University Library Exhibits, accessed April 27, 2022, https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/current/items/show/2823.
Fig. 6: New York Native, “Newspaper clipping -- "Wall Street Closed for 15 Minutes by Angry Gays",” Georgia State University Library Exhibits, accessed April 27, 2022, https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/current/items/show/1913.