Stigma For Homosexual Men

Beginning in the mid-1980’s, a number of efforts were initiated to bring awareness and enlightenment to the actual tragedy of AIDS. Two films that evolved out of these awareness campaigns were the documentaries “Paris Is Burning” and “How to Survive a Plague” . Both films, although in significantly diverse ways, provide a window into the alternative lifestyles of LGBT people of the times and the problems and issues they faced. A comparison of these two documentaries demonstrates the initial fears of the public and affected people and the beginnings of acceptance or at least tolerance of these alternative lifestyles.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

With headlines in the news such as The Sun dubbing AIDS as the ‘gay plague’ it was an irresistible red rag to the bull for the media, even though in Africa other populations were infected right from the beginning. (Dowsett, W, Gary. 2009) In an excerpt from Simon Garfield’s The end of Innocence Britain in the time of AIDS, Roy Greensdale the assistant editor of the Sun from 1981 to 1986 recalls that ‘AIDS appeared to be just desserts for being involved in deviant sexual behaviour. It was quickly realized that it came about due to anal sex, and heterosexual executives on the Sun thus fed in the fact that it was a gay plague. AIDS tended to suggest that it might stop all that kind of behaviour, and might lead to fewer gays being about.’ The gay community has always been an easy target for hostility throughout history and when the controversy surrounding the AIDS panic began to surface it became another way in which to ostracise them for their ‘wages of sin’. (The Daily Telegraph). 1983).

African American young men are infected with HIV at an alarmingly high rate in comparison to other races. The negative stigmas that is attached to having HIV in the black community, especially for men can be extremely detrimental and harmful to their overall health. One stigma that was attached to having HIV was death, death was at one time believed to be imminent, and now HIV is about restructuring their lives to face the future (Buseh, Kelber, Stevens & Park, 2008, p.409), yet they still battle other stigmas surrounded around HIV.

Thirty years ago, many believed that only gay people contracted the HIV virus, however, such speculation was disregarded once millions of people were infected. Humans were afraid to be infected, thus they stereotyped those who were infected in order to protect themselves, but the reality is that no one was safe from the HIV virus. Mary Fisher was one of few individuals that accepted the cruelty of the virus, but only by accepting what HIV is, she was able to challenge the virus. In order to awaken the society about the reality of AIDS, Mary Fisher’s speech, “A Whisper of AIDS” would send a message of challenge towards the virus and unite the humans to fight against AIDS. By balancing three different persuasive appeals; ethos, logos, and

The dawn of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980’s prompted delayed waves of responses sweeping out across America. First impacting a scattering of gay men in San Francisco, the disease gained the stigma of being a “gay disease” that fascinated the nation as health systems and communities struggled to cope with its rapid spread. However, one man, seemingly unaffected by the mix of panic and curiosity, did not react. The Ronald Reagan administration has historically been criticized for its lack of response to the AIDS crisis. Many different aspects of society were instead forced to step up and carry the burden of slowing and responding to the crisis, in a reactionary shift. The Reagan administration’s lackluster response to the AIDS crisis of the

The poem “Faith”, written by Mark Doty in 1995, works to destigmatize Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) through his relationship with his partner, Wally. Since this poem was written in the mid-1990s, it is a progressive piece that focuses on normalizing homosexuality and raising awareness for AIDS. His writing focuses on combatting the largely-held belief that AIDS only affects homosexual men. There was also the idea that there were “good gays” and “bad gays”. “Bad gays” were the ones who had the misfortune to contract HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and “good gays” did not contract HIV. Additionally, he describes the profound effect that a terminal disease can have on a relationship. Doty’s poem represents the idea that true love provides mankind with the ability to conquer fears. The main purpose of his poem is to show his love for his significant other and show the effect that AIDS had on their relationship, strengthening it, while making it more fragile at the same time. Doty’s poem is important because it opens up a non-judgmental conversation about AIDS, which was unique for that time.

The AIDS epidemic has become an impacting plague that has expanded across multiple countries as well as communities. As it continues its identity as a gay mans disease, its stigma generates a negative connotation that has appealed to figures who are seen as second class individuals. In the essay “Gay Latino Histories/ Dying to be remembered: AIDS obituaries, public memory and the queer latino archive”, author Horacio Ramirez provides evidence of the difficult challenges that came across homosexual latinos as they died in silence from AIDS. His argument is established through the ideal subject of the queer latinos, as their lives went unrecognizable concerning the AIDS crisis. With the growing

My group was ambitious and were able to work well together during this project. In spite of the problems we faced, our group was successful in presenting a well executed performance of Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey. This project and course provided insight to the difficulties endured primarily by homosexual men during the AIDS epidemic, which in turn heightened my own awareness and appreciation of diversity in the world

Heric and Glunt (1988:886) explain how individuals suffering from the AIDs epidemic experienced “intensely negative public reactions” since it was found to be a “deadly disease” and the gay men it was associated with were heavily stigmatised for their sexuality. What is more, before ACTUP was established the government 's funding for AIDs was short and efforts were made to segregate AIDs inflicted people. However by 1985 gay and lesbian newspapers were bursting of reports of oppressive AIDs legislation suggesting that gay communities had taken confrontational activism years before the emergence of ACTUP, and according to Collins (2013) when ACTUP was established in 1987 “more than forty thousand people had already died in the US and five

The film Dallas Buyers Club is a biographical drama whose plot is based around the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Early in the history of the illness, cases of a rare lung infection were found in five previously healthy young men. In addition to that, the young men all suffered from various other infections which indicated that their immune systems were not functioning properly. The new illness was so aggressive that before a report by the CDC could be published, two of the five men had succumbed to the illness. Besides the similar rare cases of lung infection amongst the five, there was one other shared characteristic; they were all gay men. By years’ end, there were 270 reported cases in gay men with the same disease; of that 270 however, 121 of those individuals had passed (Timeline of HIV/AIDS,2011). It was now clear that there was a new threat to gay men besides social ostracizing; HIV/AIDS had made its presence known.

Something that will never be forgotten and still haunts gay men to this day is the gay stigma behind the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Yes, it is fact that majority of gay men are HIV-infected but, it was said that to have AIDS was only a “gay thing” back in the 1980’s, which it is not. To this day, it influences many of our elders or parents that lived during the 1980’s that witnessed the huge outbreak. If we look at the show called Empire created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong in the episode called “The Creative Dilemma” we will find it to be a stigma referring back to the 1980’s HIV and AIDS epidemic. In this episode, Lucious Lyon, portrayed by Terrence Howard, is arguing with his gay son Jamal Lyon, portrayed by Jussie Smollett. In this intense argument, Lucious tells Jamal, “The day you die from AIDS is the day I’m gonna’ celebrate.” The fact that they had this in his dialogue, it is putting this out there since it is a public television show, it is recycling the information from the past. Recycling information that people feed back into from what they once knew. They made it seem that the way a gay man is supposed to die is from AIDS. From the chapter, “‘Whose Pussy Is This?’: A Feminist Comment” from the book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black she states her perspective of the film, She’s Gotta Have It, stating that films like this “exposed grave ignorance about feminist political movement, revealing the extent to which shallows notions of feminist struggle

When HIV/AIDS was first known in the United States, people who were affected were dying at a rapid rate as the disease was new to the medical community. There was no treatment and because of that the disease became highly publicized. At the time there were hatred for those who were considered gay. Those who came out and spoke openly about their HIV and AIDS were often being victimized. With the fear and homophobia from society, gay men and women took to the street to demand a government response to AIDS and were influenced to create a national movement.

It is burdened by significant stigma, primarily from outside of the LGBTQ+ sphere, yet it is free of a death sentence; free of AIDS. Surely, a majority of MSM of any generation are aware of the existence of HIV and generally how one contracts it. However, AIDS is widely but a memory in the Western queer journey. Now while a separation of HIV from AIDS on pharmaceutical, cultural, and ontological fronts furthers the newfangled idea that we are post-AIDS, maintaining HIVs place in without the virus losing a foothold in public health, media, and education. This paper looks not to buck that demarcation but rather work within it to find further, potential separations to create a space for the next generation queers to receive prudent education while maintaining a lack fear of HIV—without resorting to new or preexisting risk-inducing

Prior, unashamed of his sexuality, is looked down upon by the world firstly for being unashamedly gay and secondly for having contracted AIDs. Prior’s own boyfriend of four and a half years,Louis, looks down on him as a burden. One of the only glimpses into the couple’s home life is a conversation about death and the after life, fueled by Louis’s guilt