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History of AIDS
image from the University of Minnesota AIDS Poster Collection
Selector: Alexandra Sarkozy
As the AIDS pandemic enters its 40th year, and the COVID-19 pandemic finishes its second, it can be useful to look historically at the trajectory of one pandemic for lessons for the second. What we find is that epidemics are not defined by viruses alone, but rather vary locally due to historically-created social and political conditions, and in many regions, post-colonial legacies. This guide presents ebooks, websites, primary source collections, and articles from the WSU Libraries collections and the open web about the history of HIV and AIDS. While it's tempting to think that in the age of HAART HIV and AIDS are no longer major killers, but the fact is we have not yet emerged from the AIDS pandemic. Detroit as a city has four times the infection rate of HIV than the state average. Understanding AIDS from a historical perspective provides insights into the disease process that elude biomedical research methods alone.
AIDS was first documented in the United States in June 1981. The AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s confronted several decades of loosening sexual conservatism in the United States with the limitations of a sexually transmitted, life-threatening disease for which there was no prevention or cure. Because news coverage initially disproportionately represented AIDS sufferers as almost exclusively from historically marginalized populations, including gay men, Black men, and intravenous drug users, the history of AIDS is one with grassroots activism, racial discrimination, and contested sexualities at its core. In the wake of political and social fear, stigmatization of AIDS sufferers, and indifference to the increasing death counts, AIDS activists forced political and scientific establishments to take notice and to fund AIDS prevention and research. AIDS activism also broke boundaries and pushed forward the conversation about gay recognition and gay rights in America. As the AIDS pandemic spread around the globe, especially to the African subcontinent and later Russia, the AIDS epidemic was shaped by memories of previous epidemics and their handling by colonial regimes.
With new treatments like AZT and HAART, AIDS has transitioned from an epidemic infectious disease to a chronic disease managed by pharmaceutical interventions. While social attitudes about HIV and AIDS have changed in the last 40 years, it is instructive to look at historical interpretations of the origins, spread, social contexts, and historical contingencies that informed individual, cultural, and policy responses to the spread of the virus. Studying the history of the AIDS pandemic can help us better understand the dynamics of the COVID pandemic, and to hopefully limit the devastation and loss of life exacerbated by our social and political responses to both.
Videos, December 2021
United in Anger: a History of ACT UP (Kanopy Streaming Video)
"An inspiring documentary about the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic. Utilizing oral histories of members of ACT UP, as well as rare archival footage, the film depicts the efforts of ACT UP as it battles corporate greed, social indifference, and government neglect. The film takes the viewer through the planning and execution of a half dozen exhilarating major actions including Seize Control of the FDA, Stop the Church, and Day of Desperation, with a timeline of many of the other actions that forced the U.S. government and mainstream media to deal with the AIDS crisis. UNITED IN ANGER reveals the group's complex culture - meetings, affinity groups, and approaches to civil disobedience mingle with profound grief, sexiness, and the incredible energy of ACT UP."
How to Survive a Plague (DVD, request from storage)
"In dramatic fashion, we witness the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), and the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) AZT. We watch as these activists learn to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians, establishing their own newspapers, research journals, and laboratories, and as they go on to force reform in the nation’s disease-fighting agencies. With his unparalleled access to this community David France illuminates the lives of extraordinary characters, including the closeted Wall Street trader-turned-activist, the high school dropout who found purpose battling pharmaceutical giants in New York, the South African physician who helped establish the first officially recognized buyers’ club at the height of the epidemic, and the public relations executive fighting to save his own life for the sake of his young daughter."
The Age of AIDS (PBS Frontline Streaming Media, 2006)
"FRONTLINE examines one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known in "The Age of AIDS." After a quarter century of political denial and social stigma, of stunning scientific breakthroughs, bitter policy battles and inadequate prevention campaigns, HIV/AIDS continues to spread rapidly throughout much of the world, particularly in developing nations. In Part One's two-hour broadcast, "The Age of AIDS" begins with the medical and scientific mystery that emerged in 1981 when five gay men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with a new disease. The film documents the frantic search by American and European scientists and epidemiologists to find the source of the deadly infection as they tracked its spread among gay men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs, and then into the general population. The trail led them back in time, from major American and European cities to Haiti and finally to the Congo. The story then moves from the mysterious virus to the fear, stigma and political controversies during the Reagan administration. Attempts to prevent the spread of the disease, most prevalent among gay men and intravenous drug users at the time, sparked furious public debate. As the film tracks HIV's devastating spread around the world, it documents how some countries-in Europe, Africa and Asia-found tools to slow its progress, including needle-exchange programs and massive condom distribution campaigns. Part Two of "The Age of AIDS" begins by exploring the chasm that emerged between rich and poor following the development of the miraculous "triple cocktail" HIV treatment. In the mid-1990s, when doctors discovered the cocktail, it seemed to signal a new era in which AIDS was no longer a fatal disease. But the high price of the drugs meant they were unaffordable to patients in developing nations. "The Age of AIDS" tracks the political struggle to lower those prices, in countries like Brazil, and documents the South African government's tragic failure to battle the epidemic that was overwhelming its country. The film also examines the next wave of the AIDS epidemic in some of the most populous and strategically important nations in the world, including Russia, India and China, and tracks the same pattern of official denial and political indifference that characterized the epidemic in so many other countries."
CBS News Special: AIDS Hits Home – CBS (10/22/1986) (YouTube)
CBS News special from 1986 that highlights how AIDS was framed in United States media coverage. The rampant homophobia and anti-sex attitudes, prejudice against drug users, and stigma associated with the disease are only questioned, and the disease taken seriously, when the disease begins to spread among heterosexuals.
1982 - 1992 News Clips On HIV/AIDS (YouTube)
These news clips also give a powerful sense of how AIDS was framed and discussed during the first ten years of the epidemic. Fear, stigma, homophobia, and anti-drug sentiment surround the AIDS narrative of the time, and contributed to the stigmatizing of AIDS victims and the resistance to public funding of the prevention and treatment of AIDS.
Those People: AIDS in the Public Mind (KQED Current Affairs Department, 1987) (National Library of Medicine YouTube)
"Documents the lives of a number of San Franciscans living with AIDS/ARC who have tried to face society's terror and paranoia. Shows the efforts of friends and families of AIDS victims who steadfastly support their loved ones, the efforts of the Shanti Project to provide physical and psychological services to AIDS/ARC victims, and the personal efforts of Bobby Reynolds who has confronted society's fears through his writings and speeches. Learn more about the National Library of Medicine's historical audiovisuals program at: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/films.html"
Websites, December 2021
Self-portrait of David Wojnarowicz, from the Whitney Museum of Art
An upcoming open access digital collection from Reveal Media that documents the response of the artistic community to the ongoing AIDS epidemic. "HIV, AIDS & the Arts will aim to preserve approximately 75,000 pages and items of primary sources in all art forms whenever possible: Sheet music, manuscripts, playbills and production notes, and all manner of visual art, as well as the personal papers of lesser known artists of all types. By no means comprehensive, the collection acknowledges the impossibility of representing all forms or artists, as the artistic production in response to the epidemic is ongoing. By focusing on breadth rather than depth, Reveal Digital seeks to offer pathways for viewers to discover voices and seek further unknowns. The absences in this collection will be as important as what is included. In its incomplete nature, the collection invites question and critique of what is included, towards recognizing the work of artists that remains to be discovered."
Surviving & Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture
National Library of Medicine History of Medicine exhibit on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Images, sound recordings, and media from the past 40 years highlight the major inflection points of the AIDS epidemic in America in this online website. The site also includes educational materials for high school students as well as higher education, links to current HIV resources from the National Library of Medicine, and a digital gallery for more information.
I'm Still Surviving: A Women's History of HIV
"“I’m Still Surviving” is an oral and public history and design project that documents, interprets, and presents women’s experiences in the history of HIV/AIDS in the United States. Led by historian Jennifer Brier at the University of Illinois at Chicago and designer Matthew Wizinsky at the University of Cincinnati as a part of the History Moves initiative, the “I’m Still Surviving” project is an innovative partnership with women living with HIV/AIDS in Brooklyn, NY, Chicago, IL and Raleigh-Durham, NC. Almost all of these women have been a part of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS)—a longitudinal medical research project established in 1993. With “I’m Still Surviving,” the women become the researchers. Together with their university-based partners, they collect and analyze oral history interviews to produce books and travelling exhibitions on their experiences as women living with HIV. Through this collaborative work, “I’m Still Surviving” is broadening historical understanding of HIV/AIDS and breaking new ground in oral and public history practice." (more here)
"ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. It radically altered the medical research and drug approval processes in the United States, and the doctor/patient relationship, while its 4-year campaign to change the CDC definition of AIDS to include opportunistic infections affecting women and injection drug users saved millions of lives across the world. The Latina/o Caucus fostered not only AIDS Activism, but also jump started LGBT activism in Puerto Rico. For that reason and many others, we’re delighted that we could include the Latina/o Caucus Archive, a mixed media archive developed by Julián de Mayo and sourced largely from the personal collections of surviving members of the LC."
History of AIDS in Detroit: Primary Sources, December 2021
Toni Swanger Papers at Reuther Library
Toni Swanger was a Detroit journalist who wrote and produced for WDET and Metro Times. She was a staunch advocate of women's rights. Several articles in her digitized personal papers show her interest in HIV/AIDS and its impact on women during the 1980s and 90s.
LGBT Detroit Records at Reuther Library
LGBT Detroit started as Kick Publishing Company in 1994. Based in Detroit, Kick was the third Black American LGBT media company created in the United States. Distributed nationally, Kick Magazine provided the LGBT community with information, awareness, and a way to organize. In 2003, Kick Publishing Company was revitalized into the non-profit organization: KICK- The Agency for LGBT African Americans. KICK focused on health, education, employment, and social justice for the African American LGBT community in the Detroit area.
United Community Services Research Department: Studies and Reports at Reuther Library
Numerous other collections in Reuther also contain material related to HIV/AIDS, including the documents of several national labor unions and other groups to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s. Contact the Reuther to find out how to access these materials.
Notable AIDS activist Dr. Lawrence Crane is a WSU Medical School professor, practitioner, and leader. From his WSU alumni page:
"In the early 1980s, Dr. Crane changed the lives of thousands living with HIV when he decided to provide medical care to those with Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, later renamed AIDS. His leadership later made the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Adult HIV program Michigan’s largest provider of medical care for those living with HIV. Dr. Crane led the development of clinical care, student and trainee education, and clinical research for men and women with HIV. His coordination with other departments contributed to making the school the leader in Michigan for care and research of children, adolescents and pregnant women with HIV."
The Bentley Historical Library houses many collections with material related to the history of HIV/AIDS in Michigan, including the James W. Toy Papers and the AIDS Partnership Michigan Records: 1983-2005.
Journal Articles, December 2021
Madievsky, Anna. "AIDS in History is a Remedy." Harper's Bazaar, Dec 2021. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Rosenberg, Charles E. "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 94 no. 4, 2020, p. 563-577. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bhm.2020.0082. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Parry, Manon S. "Public Health Heritage and Policy: HIV and AIDS in Museums and Archives." História, Ciências, Saúde--Manguinhos, vol. 27, no. suppl 1, 2020, pp. 253-262. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
“Interchange: HIV/AIDS and U.S. History.” Journal of American History, vol. 104, no. 2, Sept. 2017, pp. 431–460. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/jahist/jax176. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Padamsee, Tasleem J. "Fighting an epidemic in political context: thirty-five years of HIV/AIDS policy making in the United States." Social History of Medicine 33.3 (2020): 1001-1028. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Vider, Stephen. "Public Disclosures of Private Realities: HIV/AIDS and the Domestic Archive." The Public Historian, vol. 41, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-189. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Brier, Jennifer. ""I'm Still Surviving": Oral Histories of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago." The Oral History Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 68-83. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Doyle, Shane. "Chronology and Causality in Africa’s HIV Pandemic: The Production of History between the Laboratory and the Archive." Past & Present, vol. 252, no. 1, 2021, pp. 249-290. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Luker, Vicki. "The Lessons of Leprosy? Reflections on Hansen's Disease in the Response to HIV and AIDS in the Pacific." The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 52, no. 3, 2017, pp. 385-406. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
Doyle, Shane. "Pandemics and Soft Power: HIV/AIDS and Uganda on the Global Stage." Journal of Global History, vol. 15, no. 3, 2020, pp. 478-492. FULLTEXT@WAYNE
eBooks, December 2021
Infectious Ideas by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780807833148Publication Date: 2009-11-01Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Jennifer Brier provides rich, new understandings of the United States' complex social and political trends in the post-1960s era. Brier describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy, even in the face of the expansion of the New Right. Infectious Ideas places recent social, cultural, and political events in a new light, making an important contribution to our understanding of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
Mobilizing New York by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781469619880Publication Date: 2015-04-20Examining three interconnected case studies, Tamar Carroll powerfully demonstrates the ability of grassroots community activism to bridge racial and cultural differences and effect social change. Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post-World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.
To Make the Wounded Whole by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781469659503Publication Date: 2020-09-14In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.
Moving Politics by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780226305295Publication Date: 2009-12-15In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more--even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.
Sustaining Life by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780812296853Publication Date: 2020-02-21An ethnographic account of the South African AIDS movement and activists From the historical roots of AIDS activism in the struggle for African liberation to the everyday work of community education in Khayelitsha, Sustaining Life tells the story of how the rights-based South African AIDS movement successfully transformed public health institutions, enabled access to HIV/AIDS treatment, and sustained the lives of people living with the disease. Typical accounts of the South African epidemic have focused on the political conflict surrounding it, Theodore Powers observes, but have yet to examine the process by which the national HIV/AIDS treatment program achieved near-universal access. In Sustaining Life, Powers demonstrates the ways in which non-state actors, from caregivers to activists, worked within the state to transform policy and state-based institutions in order to improve health-based outcomes. He shows how advocates in the South African AIDS movement channeled the everyday experiences of poor and working-class people living with HIV/AIDS into tangible policy changes at varying institutional levels, revealing the primacy of local action for expanding treatment access. In his analysis of the transformation of the state health system, Powers addresses three key questions: How were the activists of the movement able to overcome an AIDS-dissident faction that was backed by government power? How were state health institutions and HIV/AIDS policy transformed to increase public sector access to treatment? Finally, how should the South African campaign for treatment access inform academic debates on social movements, transnationalism, and the state? Based on extended participant observation and in-depth interviews with members of the South African AIDS movement, Sustaining Life traces how the political principles of the anti-apartheid movement were leveraged to build a broad coalition that changed national HIV/AIDS policy norms and highlights how changes in state-society relations can be produced by local activism.
After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780520295148Publication Date: 2017-11-07Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, six gay activists created one of the most iconic and lasting images that would come to symbolize a movement: a protest poster of a pink triangle with the words "Silence = Death." The graphic and the slogan still resonate today, often used--and misused--to brand the entire movement. Cofounder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art collective Gran Fury, Avram Finkelstein tells the story of how his work and other protest artwork associated with the early years of the pandemic were created. In writing about art and AIDS activism, the formation of collectives, and the political process, Finkelstein reveals a different side of the traditional HIV/AIDS history, told twenty-five years later, and offers a creative toolbox for those who want to learn how to save lives through activism and making art.
The Calendar of Loss by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781421416557Publication Date: 2015-05-15A revelatory examination of AIDS mourning at the intersection of black and queer studies. His world view colored by growing up in 1980s Ethiopia, where death governed time and temperament, Dagmawi Woubshet offers a startlingly fresh interpretation of melancholy and mourning during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in The Calendar of Loss. When society denies a patient's disease and then forbids survivors mourning rites, how does a child bear witness to a parent's death or a lover grieve for his beloved? Looking at a range of high and popular works of grief--including elegies, eulogies, epistles to the dead, funerals, and obituaries--Woubshet identifies a unique expression of mourning that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in direct response to the AIDS catastrophe. What Woubshet dubs a "poetics of compounding loss" expresses what it was like for queer mourners to grapple with the death of lovers and friends in rapid succession while also coming to terms with the fact of their own imminent mortality. The time, consolation, and closure that allow the bereaved to get through loss were for the mourners in this book painfully thwarted, since with each passing friend, and with mounting numbers of the dead, they were provided with yet more evidence of the certain fatality of the virus inside them. Ultimately, the book argues, these disprized mourners turned to their sorrow as a necessary vehicle of survival, placing open grief at the center of art and protest, insisting that lives could be saved through the very speech acts precipitated by death. An innovative and moving study, The Calendar of Loss illuminates how AIDS mourning confounds and traverses how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice.
The African AIDS Epidemic: A History by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780821416884Publication Date: 2005-02-15This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki's provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic. While Mbeki attributed the causes to poverty and exploitation, others have looked to distinctive sexual systems practiced in African cultures and communities. John Iliffe stresses historical sequence. He argues that Africa has had the worst epidemic because the disease was established in the general population before anyone knew the disease existed. HIV evolved with extraordinary speed and complexity, and because that evolution took place under the eyes of modern medical research scientists, Iliffe has been able to write a history of the virus itself that is probably unique among accounts of human epidemic diseases. In giving the African experience a historical shape, Iliffe has written one of the most important books of our time. The African experience of AIDS has taught the world much of what it knows about HIV/AIDS, and this fascinating book brings into focus many aspects of the epidemic in the longer context of massive demographic growth, urbanization, and social change in Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History is a brilliant introduction to the many aspects of the epidemic and the distinctive character of the virus.
AIDS by Call Number: ebookISBN: 0520077784Publication Date: 1991-12-02When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past: it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague. In this follow-up to AIDS: The Burdens of History, editors Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox present essays that describe how AIDS has come to be regarded as a chronic disease. Representing diverse fields and professions, the twenty-three contributors to this work use historical methods to analyze politics and public policy, human rights issues, and the changing populations with HIV infection. They examine the federal government's testing of drugs for cancer and HIV, and show how the policy makers' choice of a specific historical model (chronic disease versus plague) affected their decisions. A powerful photo essay reveals the strengths of women from various backgrounds and lifestyles who are coping with HIV. A sensitive account of the complex relationships of the gay community to AIDS is included. Finally, several contributors provide a sampling of international perspectives on the impact of AIDS in other nations.
The Gentrification of the Mind by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780520264779Publication Date: 2012-02-06In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981-1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation's imagination and the consequences of that loss.
Books in Print, December 2021
The Boundaries of Blackness by Call Number: Purdy-Kresge Library, RA644 .A25 C575 1999ISBN: 0226112888Publication Date: 1999-04-30Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained. The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates. More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues--of class, gender, and sexuality--challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness. The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community--and other marginal groups--will evolve in the twenty-first century.
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