The Gay Plague
Despite their efforts in creating a public stage of protest and visibility, drag queens and butch-femme lesbians would be left behind for a period. The gay rights and liberation movements as well as the lesbian coalitions that subsequently emerged via feminist activism constructed new standards of appropriate behavior for the LGBTQ community.
These new standards, rooted in middle-class respectability politics, demanded “respectable” presentation of members, which meant that mostly white gay liberation and lesbian feminist activists started to identify against and exclude people of color, those from lower (and occasionally higher) classes including working-class butches and femmes, and those like drag queens and transsexuals who transgressed gender norms. As the LGBTQ community became more visible it also became more exclusive; those who were formerly included became marginalized by many lesbians and gay men. The politics of sexuality worked both ways — to include as well as exclude — and it is important to recognize the costs of the community formation at various moments throughout the twentieth century.
At a moment when gay men and lesbians were claiming their right to freely express their sexuality, in 1981 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) quietly announced the emergence of a new and deadly disease. Because it seemed to affect mostly gay men, the disease was initially labeled “GRID”—gay-related immune deficiency. Shortly thereafter, because of protests that GRID stigmatized the gay population and the fact that the virus was also found in intravenous drug users, Haitians, and patients who had received blood transfusions, the name was changed to AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
By the end of 1981, there were 234 known cases and the numbers increased dramatically each year; by 1987 over forty thousand people had been infected.
The CDC’s announcement precipitated a general public hysteria with calls for quarantining homosexuals and IV drug users. Responses to the epidemic saw healthcare workers refuse to treat AIDS patients and first responders refuse to resuscitate men suspected of being gay. Religious evangelicals including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell characterized AIDS not as a disease caused by a virus, but rather as god’s punishment for an immoral lifestyle. They dubbed AIDS the “Gay Plague.” Moreover, the response of the federal government under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan was extraordinarily slow. Reagan did not mention AIDS until 1985 and did not hold a press conference to address it until 1987.
In response to this neglect LGBTQ people formed organizations throughout the country to combat the disease. These efforts included the formation of cooperatives to research medications and protests to pressure drug companies and the Food and Drug Administration to speed up their efforts to find effective, affordable treatments. A new type of protest began in 1987 when New York City activists founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Focused on increasing public visibility around the disease and criticizing the lack of action by the federal government to address the epidemic, ACT UP took to the streets in “dieins,” lying on the ground in t-shirts emblazoned “Silence=Death” until law enforcement removed them.
By the early 2000s, the total number of fatalities from the disease in the United States topped one-half million while globally the pandemic had claimed over six million lives and was marked by over twenty-two million infected individuals. The public panic around AIDS also led to an increase in attacks on LGBTQ people. In gay communities across the country, street patrols formed to help prevent anti-LGBTQ violence.
A composer of concert music and musical theater scores, a conductor, and a pioneer in the use of television in his role as music educator, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) was among the most well-known and influential musical figures in the second half of the 20th century. As with most things related to Bernstein, his sexuality was a complicated aspect of his life. Whether or not it influenced his work as a musician is subject to debate, though setting Walt Whitman’s poem, “To What You Said” in Songfest (1977), and featuring a gay character in his opera A Quiet Place (1983), were considered both daring and revealing when they premiered. Often outspoken on political and social issues, Bernstein used his professional influence and passion to co-produce a benefit concert for the American Foundation for AIDS Research and the first Music for Life AIDS benefit (1987). In 1989, Bernstein declined a presidential medal of honor as a protest at the National Endowment of the Arts rescinding a grant for a gay-oriented AIDS art exhibit; and in 1990 he wrote the foreword to the book, The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World. All considered brave actions at the time.
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