Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives

“Every Generation Has Its War”: Representations of Gay Men with Aids and Their Parents in the United States, 1983–1993

“Every Generation Has Its War”: Representations of Gay Men with Aids and Their Parents in the United States, 1983–1993 Heather Murray W hen the AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) staged street theatre-oriented protests in the late 1980s, one of its iconographic Ronald Reagan posters asked the question: “What If Your Son Gets Sick?”(fig. 1).1 The question was deliberately provocative, of course, part of the ongoing needling about the president’s son’s sexuality that was present in both gay activist and gay humour sources, but it also had a more sombre underlying intention: gay men dying with AIDS were indeed sons who would be mourned by their parents, even in traditional families.2 In a society that increasingly reinforced polarities between the so-called innocent victims of the disease and the presumably immoral ones, the simple idea that those dying with AIDS were family members was a poignant one. When AIDS first became known in the early 1980s, it was deemed purely a gay disease. Doctors at the UCLA Medical Center and in New York City were puzzled that young gay men in their twenties and thirties were dying with pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), an infection normally only seen in transplant or cancer patients. Some were suffering with a particularly virulent strain of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a disfiguring skin cancer characterized by purple and brown lesions, previously only seen in aging Mediterranean men and even then considered not to be life threatening.3 These patients all showed a lowering of their immune function, their bodies unable to ward off even typically harmless infections. Doctors first referred to these symptoms as GRID,or gay-related immune disorder,and only called the condition AIDS,or 237 Popular Representations of the Body in Sickness and Health 238 acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, after the Centers for Disease Control renamed the epidemic in 1982.Before human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission became understood in 1984, early theories about the disease suggested that gay men contracted it through an immune overload that was the consequence of spending sleepless nights at gay bars and discotheques, inhaling poppers, and having promiscuous sex.4 Early media reports followed suit by calling the disease the “gay plague.”5 AIDS casualties multiplied rapidly throughout the 1980s: in 1981 the number of AIDS-related deaths was 225, jumping to 1,400 by 1983, 15,000 by 1985, 40,000 by 1987, and more than 100,000 by 1990.6 The great majority of these deaths were young men between twenty-five and forty-four.7 The disease spread rapidly within urban centres, most notably New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. By the mid-1980s, however, the disease had made its way to other North American cities and rural areas.8 Throughout the 1980s, AIDS became a potent part of the politics and sensibility of the culture wars, the acrimonious divisions between social conservatives and traditionalists, on the one hand, and social liberals and pluralists, on the other, in late-twentieth-century United States. The body was often the site of these conflicts; controversy surrounded not just gay sexuality, Figure 1 AIDS activists demonstrate in front of the White House, June 1, 1987, at the time of the Third International Conference on AIDS. Photo by Jane Rosett, from Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 153. Reprinted courtesy of The MIT Press. “Every Generation Has Its War” Heather Murray 239 but also abortion, pornography, and sex education.9 Within the public imagination,AIDS added the dimension of a frightening, visible disease to an already entrenched New Right notion that homosexuality was unnatural.10 As the Reagan-era Surgeon General C. Everett Koop noted, the disease was marked by mystery, fear, and the unknown. Those gay men who contracted it, especially during the early part of the decade, were seen as abstract or alien figures who suffered,as a 1985 Newsweek article suggested,“Miles from Home with No Place to Die.”11 In fact, many social observers, including American health care workers, harboured a notion of orphanhood when they conceived of gay men with AIDS, as though every AIDS sufferer had necessarily faced family excommunication.12 Many observers of the AIDS epidemic have thus characterized the disease as one that united gay men and lesbians as peers within volunteer care networks, bringing the notion of chosen families...