BEFORE AIDS
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors:
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin,
Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
BEFORE AIDS
Gay Health Politics in the 1970s
Katie Batza
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Batza, Katie, author.
Title: Before AIDS: gay health politics in the 1970s / Katie Batza.
Other titles: Politics and culture in modern America.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Politics and culture in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036427 | ISBN 9780812250138 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Gays—Medical care—United States—History—20th century. | Sexual minorities—Medical care—United States—History—20th century. | Gay liberation movement—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC RA564.9.H65 B38 2018 | DDC 362.1086/64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036427
To Kellie and Elliot,life’s best dance partners
CONTENTS
Introduction. Fighting Epidemics and Ignorance
Chapter 1. Reimagining Gay Liberation
Chapter 2. Beyond Gay Liberation
Chapter 3. Gay Health Harnesses the State
Chapter 4. Redefining Gay Health
Chapter 5. The Gay Health Network Meets AIDS
Epilogue. AIDS and the State Enmeshed
ABBREVIATIONS
| GCSCP | Gay Community Services Center Papers, ONE Archive, Los Angeles |
| GH | Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, Chicago |
| HPA | History Project Archives, Boston |
| MA | Mazer Archives, Los Angeles |
| MKP | Morris Kight Papers, 1975–1993, Department of SpecialCollections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles |
| OA | ONE Archive, Los Angeles |
| SL | Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Boston |
| WLPC | Walter Lear Personal Collection, Philadelphia |
PREFACE
The Holiday Club’s large sign, which encased the top quarter of the building and consisted of colorful, shimmering dish-sized sequins, made the architecture of the Howard Brown Health Center, which sat across the street at the corner of Irving Park and North Sheridan, especially unremarkable. The center first came to my attention as a building (not even an organization) in 2002 with the onset of my first Chicago winter, when I realized its gray concrete and muted tile façade provided a shield from the winter wind off Lake Michigan as I walked to and from the “El” stop closest to my apartment. Having grown up in Atlanta, I had never experienced an upper midwestern winter but quickly learned that wind defense during a six-block walk warranted switching to the other side of the street. Thus I abandoned the colorful Holiday Club for the more protected, if drab, Howard Brown building. As I became better acquainted with my new city, I learned that the Howard Brown Health Center served the LGBTQ community specifically, and the building I had come to think of fondly as my personal windshield was just one of the organization’s many outposts. Curiosity piqued, I began to spend my long and solitary commutes imagining the organization’s origins and how it fit into to my growing understanding of Chicago’s LGBTQ geography and history. In this way, the breathtakingly cold and beautiful winters of Chicago combined with the sturdy impermeability of a serendipitously located health clinic to inspire what eventually became this book.
Before conducting any research, I imagined that Howard Brown originated in the Chicago gay community’s response to the AIDS crisis. I assumed the same to be true of other well-known clinics serving the LGBTQ community around the country, including Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C., New York’s Callen-Lorde, and Boston’s Fenway. My daydreamed history charted the birth and growth of gay medical clinics and research institutions amid bleak national fiscal and political realities, a gay sexual culture that equated sexual health with sexual oppression, and one of the deadliest epidemics in history. The plot unfolded in my mind like a bizarre historian’s telenovela with conjectured tragedy and fantasized heroism, not to mention political drama and a fantastic soundtrack. It transformed my commute from an hour-long battle against motion sickness and claustrophobia into something far more interesting.
After many weeks of crafting this surmised history during bumpy and noisy train rides without even so much as a Google search worth of research, I decided that my fascination warranted a study of how gay community health clinics factored into the early response to AIDS. In the initial stages of research, I found that many gay community clinics actually originated in the 1970s, most of them in the last few years of the decade, but some dating back as early as 1971—a full decade before the first