AIDS, Culture, and Gay Men

4. Gay Men, Language, and AIDS

4 Gay Men, Language, and AIDS William L. Leap and Samuel Colón A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. Raymond Williams, 1977 People are still having sex, lust keeps on lurking Nothing makes them stop, this AIDS thing’s not working —LaTour, 1991 Studies of AIDS, culture, and gay men have not paid much attention to how gay men talk about AIDS, nor have they given much priority to languagecentered research when trying to document the effects of the AIDS pandemic on gay men’s lives.1 Granted, Caron (2001), Farmer (1990), Patton (1991), Sontag (1988), Treichler (1988), and others have shown how discussions of AIDS are always embedded within broader assumptions about marginality , risk, fear, and blame. Gay men’s discussions of the pandemic have, at times, been referenced in these works. And Adam et al. (2000), Koblin et al. (2003), Mansur and Palmer-Vanton (2001), Vinke and Bolton (1997), Vinke et al. (1992), Zia et al. (2003), and others have shown how gay men’s responses during interviews and on questionnaires provide insights into their knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) about AIDS. All of these studies are concerned with language in specific ways, yet their primary interests still lie outside of the linguistic terrain—in the first group, with the nonneutral meanings assigned to AIDS in the light of those assumptions; in the second group, with the details of AIDS-related KAP. For this reason, what gay men have to say about AIDS may be cited as anecdotal evidence supporting a project’s research claims. But how gay men talk about AIDS and the significance of those linguistic practices remain unidentified and unexplored. Gay Men, Language, and AIDS / 61 This chapter argues that these omissions are problematic when viewed in terms of the basic tenants of anthropological linguistic theory and in terms of the questions about AIDS and gay experience that research has yet to answer. Indeed, the nonneutral meanings associated with AIDS are deeply embedded within conversation and storytelling, asking questions, argumentation and debate, and verbal and nonverbal negotiation of sexual opportunity and sexual risk, and through other forms of social experience thoroughly embedded in linguistic practice. And gay men’s AIDS-related KAP are also closely tied to the workings of similar discursive practices and to their outcomes. Rather than using gay men’s remarks about AIDS simply as a source of supportive anecdote, this chapter argues in favor of a more tightly focused use of linguistic data in studies of AIDS and gay experience. After outlining assumptions about text analysis (the approach to linguistic research on which this discussion is based), the chapter describes how several studies have used gay men’s talk about AIDS to support their arguments and presents some reanalysis of textual material from some of these studies to indicate what issues could have been addressed if the focus on language in those projects had been more richly defined. Research incorporating such a richer linguistic focus is also examined to heighten these contrasts and to suggest directions that future research might follow to equally productive ends.2 Defining Text The starting point for the discussion of language of interest to this chapter is text—that is, a particular “moment” of language use by a particular group of speakers within a particular social and historical setting.3 A text can be as simple as an act of greeting or naming, but more typically text refers to a conversation, a story, a speech, or some other form of language/social interaction. Whatever its detail and function, a text is always situated and bounded. That is, because it occurs in particular contexts, a text is influenced by the backgrounds and experiences of the speakers who produce it, by the topic or topics under discussion within the textual moment, and by other social and cultural assumptions relevant to that setting. That these influences are attested in the linguistic form of the text, as well as in its content , is a central theme of this chapter, and so is the need to address issues of textual form in studying gay men’s AIDS-related language use. 62 / W. L. Leap and S. Colón Why Text Matters: Language, Text, and Gay Identity The phrase “gay men” is not without difficulty in this discussion, however. Other chapters in this volume have shown that male-centered...