A Litany of Saints: Remembering the Early Years of HIV/AIDS Activism in the First Year of a New Pandemic

With the emergence of COVID-19 in the U.S., many LGBTQ people found ourselves reflecting upon the early years of HIV/AIDS and how our communities responded to the lack of robust federal and state response to this preceding public health crisis. As the leaders of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center (BSC) in eastern Pennsylvania became a central resource for our community sharing up-to-date information about COVID-19 and organizing vaccine clinics, they also recognized the historic nature of this moment as many elders in our community consistently tried to make sense of the current crisis by contemplating their past AIDS activism and organizing. In March of 2020, BSC staff and archivists received grant funding to conduct an oral history project called "40 Years of Public Health in the LGBTQ Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBTQ Health Experiences From HIV/AIDS to COVID-19," which recorded both timely commentary on the impact of COVID-19 on LGBTQ people and memories of HIV/AIDS organizing that seemed urgent and relevant to our contemporary moment. Offering excerpts from oral histories collected in 2020, this piece explores how COVID-19 spurred LGBTQ people in the Lehigh Valley to share stories about communal grief, health inequity, political responses to pandemics, and organizing to support the health of minoritized communities.

The Personal Is Archival

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

VHS Archives, Committed Media Praxis, and “Queer Cinema”

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multisited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival engagement, and committed activist interventions into contemporary AIDS activism and queer media.

‘Responsible, effective and caring’: Gay Health Action, AIDS Activism and Sexual Health in the Republic of Ireland, 1985–1989

This article explores the role and impact of Gay Health Action (GHA), a voluntary AIDS organisation that operated in the Republic of Ireland between 1985 and 1989. Drawing on their publications and media engagement, it argues that GHA played a significant role in educating the general public about AIDS, while this group also challenged ideas about sexual health and dispelled negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. In doing so, the activities of GHA begin to outline the initial public response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, while also contributing towards an emergent body of research on the changing nature of Irish society during the late-twentieth century. It suggests ways in which attitudes to the gay community were evolving and highlights the need for further research on AIDS, examinations of which can contribute towards the emergent histories of social change and health policy in this period.

The Limits of Family: Military Law and Sex Panics in Contemporary South Korea

This article explores the limits of family in contemporary South Korea by simultaneously examining the discourses and practices of anti-LGBT protesters and the state alongside an ethnography of queer and HIV/AIDS activism. The author argues that the limits of family in Korea ought to be conceived as a problem with sex incorporating both “substance” and the practice of having sex. He explores these limits of family through a broadening understanding of family law in Korea, focusing on the anti-sodomy clause in the Military Penal Code and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing. The author contends that to broaden the concept of family law to laws such as the anti-sodomy clause and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing demonstrates the intricate and unexplored ways the Korean family is produced through military laws and regulations. This is a recursive process, for the heteronormative expectations of family members are inscribed within military law, rhetorically casting the family as a threatened body that needs protection. However, the normative experience of the family in crisis produces violence against gender and sexual minorities. The author concludes by discussing the dangerous implications of these family laws.