When I was a child, needles terrified me, especially if they were used for blood draws. Every time my blood was drawn, a nightmarish scene would occur in the doctor’s office, which involved screaming, crying, and passing out. But when I started high school this changed. We began to have blood drives, and as soon… Read more →
Tag: HIV/AIDS
Deconstructing HIV and AIDS on Designing Women
Before protease inhibitors radically improved the lives of many people living with HIV in the mid-1990s, numerous sitcoms from Mr. Belvedere in 1986 to Grace Under Fire in 1996 fought ignorance and prejudice with more care and passion than many who had been elected to public office. For example, in 2018 on Nursing Clio, Claire… Read more →
America Responds to Monkeypox: Learning from the History of HIV/AIDS
As known cases of monkeypox in the United States, the vast majority of which are among gay and bisexual men, continue to increase, an argument is raging – in the news media and on Twitter – over how to talk to the public about the disease. Some want to emphasize that “everyone is at risk,”… Read more →
“The Club of the Four Hs”: HIV/AIDS, Race, and Neoliberalism in Argentina
During my childhood in Buenos Aires, adults usually told us to be careful while using telephones and cinema seats because people diagnosed with HIV could hide infected syringes in these “dark spots” to spread the virus. Generally portraying people with HIV as resentful and dangerous, popular representations activated historical racial and sexual boundaries that legitimated… Read more →
Review of To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS by Dan Royles
As we approach the eleventh month of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death rates for Black, Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately high and rising daily. The national response to the virus echoes the long-term HIV/AIDS pandemic that continues today to rattle the Black world. Dan Royle’s monumental new book, To Make the Wounded Whole:… Read more →
Signing for Life: Deaf Gay Activists Navigate the AIDS Epidemic, 1986–1991
Before a small crowd of journalists at San Diego’s Point Loma Hospital, through sign language and their interpreters, John Canady’s partner J.T. Tupper, and sister, Mary Noble, recounted the ordeal their loved one endured prior to his dying of AIDS at the age of 37.[1] On March 18, 1986, Canady, a deaf postal worker, had… Read more →
Just Being There: The AIDS Crisis and the Shanti Project’s Hospital Counselor Program
When Ward 5B premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the nurses of the first AIDS inpatient unit in the United States walked down the red carpet with movie stars Julianne Moore and Halle Berry. Garnering critical and popular praise as well as Oscar buzz, Ward 5B explores the famed AIDS unit from the time it… Read more →
The Queer Truth: Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble
For years, when I would tell stories of my time in 1980s San Francisco to friends or students, some of my listeners would say, “It sounds kind of like Rent.” “No,” I would say, “It’s more like Sarah Schulman’s novel People in Trouble, but San Francisco rather than New York.”1 The friends and students to… Read more →
For Keeps: Teenage Girls and Anxiety around Sex during the 1990s
In 1995, I was sixteen and experiencing the excitement of my first real love. As if out of a 1990s teen rom-com, my boyfriend asked me to “go with him” by drawing a picture of roses and placing them in our shared locker. Once, when we were shamelessly making out in the band room between… Read more →
Deconstructing HIV and AIDS on The Golden Girls
In 1990, the much-beloved sitcom, The Golden Girls — a show about four older women, Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia, living together in Miami, Florida — was in its fifth season. On February 17, the “72 Hours” episode aired. In it, Rose receives a letter from the hospital where she had gallbladder surgery notifying her… Read more →