When global health agencies develop HIV interventions with the assumption that women lack control over their sexu-ality, the result is that women are less often given the information and resources they need.

HIV prevention messages never reached her. Belén reported that prior to her diagnosis, she knew little about the risks, although she now blames her-self for this.

Belén’s narrative also exposes the dangers of assuming that women lack agency in regard to their sexuality. Assumptions that women are “pure and vir-ginal”

when contradictory assumptions surrounding women’s sexuality in relation to HIV exist, this creates an innocent victim and stigmatized/promiscuous woman dichotomy. When women do not identify with the “innocent victim” category, this can increase the degree of stigma they feel in relation to having HIV.

Thus the “innocent victim” discourse that per-meates global and local portrayals of women and HIV is not representative of the dominant trend I found or trends that researchers have noted in other con-texts.

Despite this finding, perceptions per-sist within global health agencies that men are the source of HIV infection within relationships

found that among these couples, women were equally as likely as men to be the partner with HIV

In other words, the experiences of roughly only a quarter of the women fell in line with the stereotypical portrayal of women as passive subjects, victims of men’s actions

Although Belén blamed herself for what happened and for exposing her husband to HIV, his tests had come back negative, and he was understanding of the fact that she had engaged in another relationship while they were separated

There is an expectation that men are to blame, and with this, there is an expectation that women will forgive men for their shortcomings. Women, on the other hand, do not expect forgiveness from men, although some women, like Belén, do receive forgiveness

While self-blame character-izes the experiences of many men and women, this blame unfolds in gendered ways.

Several men also expressed extreme levels of self-blame upon discover-ing that they had contracted HIV and exposed their long-term female partners to the virus.

he felt as though she only had herself to blame for what happened to her

Both local gen-der ideologies and global health bodies reinforce the assumption that men bring HIV into a relationship. When that is not the case, a woman’s feelings of guilt and blame may intensify.

The shame and guilt that Belén felt in relation to her diagnosis contributed to her desire to die and her falling out of care multiple times.

When

The fact that her husband had tested nega-tive struck me as potentially significant in how Belén had internalized her own diagnosis

As Belén continued her narrative, self-blame and references to wanting to die filled her story.

I don’t have the energy like before

I wanted to kill myself at first. I almost died. I weighed 43 kilos [95 pounds] and could not get out of bed. Before, I weighed 75 kilos [165 pounds] . . . I couldn’t suf-fer the loneliness and the shame of waking up and being scared of what was going to happen to me

your response

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how do these responses connect to the history of AIDS art and activism?

This year, the hopes of many in the AIDS communities have reached a low ebb. It is clear to all that anti-HIV agents such as AZT, ddC, and ddI will not, in any conceivable combination, stop the progres-sion of HIV infection—at most, for those who are lucky, they will signifi -cantly slow it”

Despair’s Temporalities

Brown captures the way that hope tantalizes; surely someone will get better, will beat this horror, surely someone will survive. But they all eventually died, and the hope that your client, friend, lover, or comrade might be able to hang on for a little longer, until the next medical “mir-acle” was available, became more diffi cult to hold onto. We became in-creasingly tired of false hopes, indeed, exhausted by them. Any hopes we might have had were demolished

he news [in the fall of 1991] that this second gener-ation of drugs had failed was nothing short of shattering. So many hopes had been pinned to their effectiveness”

Rather, it was desperation in the sense of being driven to consider unexplored paths, new modes of political activism, different tactics for confronting power, alternative ways of putting one’s body on the line.

talking about what would be our next strategy, and someone brought up the idea about how we, as people with AIDS, owed it to the rest of the community to make change happen faster. And this is really true, this really did happen, people actually talked about assassination

Meanwhile, a somewhat parallel discussion was occurring within ACT UP as some members began to voice frustration with what they saw as the growing ineffectiveness of the AIDS movement’s nonviolent tactics

The discussion about taking up guns frequently gestured toward the horrors of the AIDS epidemic to explain the call for gays to bash back, and even to justify it. In their manifesto, “Should Queers Shoot Back?”

An eruption of talk about turning to violent tactics revealed a growing desperation in lesbian and gay communities.

activists were oscillating between optimism and pes-simism

(quoted

AIDS is not a manageable disease, and there is nothing at present that makes me think that it is going to be a manageable disease in my lifetime or the lifetime of the other 20 million HIV infected. ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU OTHERWISE IS A LIA

Even the victories following the NIH demonstration could not counter the growing sense that a cure for AIDS would not be found in the lifetime of people currently infected with HIV.

These victories helped to prolong people’s lives and gave us a strong sense of the importance and value of our work

and consult with people with AIDS and their ad-vocates when designing clinical trials.

I remember marveling at the instant effec-tiveness of our activism, feeling like we really might be able to save lives. I was hooked on direct action.

In a moment all-too-rare in activism, we could declare victory im-mediately following the protest: after months of inaction, Cook County Hospital opened its AIDS ward to women one day after the demonstra-tion

ACT UP’s critique of both the private insurance in-dustry as well as the faltering public health system

t is easy to presume that despair and its companion affective states (e.g., desperation, despondency, depression) hold no political potential, that they necessarily destroy movements, but that is not always the case

Deaths in 1991 piled onto the deaths from 1990, and on and on it went. The deaths of our own were simply unrelenting in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, . . . even as our activism achieved enormous victories. There were times during the early 1990s when memorial services for ACT UP members were more frequent than ACT UP actions.

People have been dying and suffering of all kinds of things for some time. I guess ’mjust a part of history. Until now, youth and ignorance have af- forded me a kind of arrogance. I thought I was unique, my suffering was different, my misery was a new kind of misery. What's new about it is the way we speak about it, the meanings we make about it. What's not so new is the misery. Can one become resigned to the fact of misery with- out losing one’s hope? I guess what’s unique about my pain is that it’s mine, mine to feel and mine to represent, mine to overcome, mine to re- sign to, mine. At first, owning it, acknowledging it, seemed like a revolu- tionary act. Now, accepting the fact of my own mortality has become the hardest thing I’m facing, and I have to do it. The task has appeared to me with great force, with urgency. It grabbed me and shook me. It won't let go.

hat is necessary now is the self-representation of our demoralization. We urgently need resources to help us cope with , the consequences of losing hope for a cure for AIDS, of dealing withloss | upon loss, with so much hatred directed at us, and with the simple and horrible fact, very rarely given voice, that all of us will almost certainly | live with AIDS for the remainder of our lives,

Thus the moralizing rhetoric of “re- oe lapse,” “irresponsibility, n« selfishness,” and “compulsivity”; and sadly, the moralizing is not limited to our declared enemies.

Testing the Limits and Voices from the Frontis a dif- ference betweena moment of optimism at the founding of a movement and a later moment when such optimism has become hollow and there- fore false)

Another way to characterize this difference is to return to what I said at the beginning of this essay—that objective information is everywhere and always also subjective.

the burnt out, the broken hearted, and ... the profoundly confused.”

But those of us whose own activism is represented by the video often feel violated, as once again the complexities of our lives are oversimplified—and this time not by the mass media but by our own activist artists

Even a work like Gran Fury’s famous bloody hand print with the headline “The government has blood on its hands” had to be revised to remain rele- vant. The text along the bottom of the poster that originally stated “One AIDS death every half hour” had to be changed just a few years later to “One AIDS death every twelve minutes.”

n the beginning, when we were shooting [video] at various protests, there was a kind of energy that was amazing. It was the energy of people really coming together, really speaking out and thinking of new and cre- ative ways [to fight AIDS]. As time went on, it became sadder and sadder to sit in an editing room with this material, because as you would look at the material youd start to think, “Oh, well, he’s gone... he’s gone...,” and it became almost your only chance to see people who you hadn't seen in a long time, or a chance to see someone who looked a lot healthier at that particular time. And it really became more and more a record of loss. In that way, the material that once had been so energizing starts to be- come almost a burden, difficult to watch. Because of that, it completely changed its meaning.”

And in the time that has passed between the tape’s release and today, many more people in the video have died.

But art about AIDS has also attempted to combat the epidemic directly——to teach safe sex practices, inform people about their risks, fight discrimination, expose the lies of governments and media, arouse affected groups to anger and activism.

be ill, to care for those who are ill, to face death, to mourn, to be outraged, to be defeated.

But you also run a terrible risk: In saying, “Yes, AIDS is our problem,” you allow others to go on saying, “AIDS is not my problem, it’s your problem.

And that is the ter- rifying moral of this story: if we wait until AIDS affects us directly, until friends or lovers or family members or we ourselves are infected, it is too late.

But somehow, by some form of magical think- ing—this is the force of the unconscious——I exempted myself from the category of “those guys,” the others, the ones who get AIDS.

Most people don't say, outright, “AIDS is not my problem.” Rather they translate that statement into some version of “AIDS is the problem of others.”

Whether the statement is enunciated by govern- ments in the form of refusals to acknowledge the risks to their popula- tions, to conduct responsible education campaigns, and to fund research, or of discriminatory practices such as exclusionary immigration and travel policies; by the blood banking, blood products, and pharmaceu- tical industries in the form of caring more for profits than for human life; by the media in the form of failures to pursue and report accurate information and to alert their audiences to the seriousness of the threat posed by AIDS; by communities in the form of scapegoating other groups and failing to acknowledge and support their own affected con- stituents; or by individuals in the form of distancing themselves from those already affected by the epidemic—the result is the same: an ever growing transmission of HIV to more and more people all over the world.

In any case, AIDS was very soon seen in people who had never engaged in homosexual sex, but the link between homosexuality and AIDS has nevertheless persisted with amazing tenacity.

(failed to account for the most crucial feature of subjectiv- ity——that governed by the unconscious, which often works against our conscious interests.\And it is this aspect of subjectivity that so often de- termines how any of us, including our often irresponsible governments, responds to AIDS.

Indeed, I submitted that it was the function of art not only to express the experiences of love and caring, loss and mourning, fear and despair, anger and outrage, but also to inform, to educate, and to en- gage in the activist struggle against the negligence of our governing in- stitutions and the falsehoods perpetrated by our media.

give AIDS a face,” we often assume that it will solicit the sympathy of those not immediately affected by the disease, thus effecting the translation of the individual situation into the shared condition.

It is usually to art that we turn, it is said, to see the “faces of AIDS”

art made in response to AIDS as having something unique to tell us about the personal, hu- man side of the epidemic.

to avoid those mistakes and thus to prevent the horrible ravages of a vast epidemic

And second, that knowledge about AIDS is always local, will always be bound by a particular time and place, which will often make knowledge gained in one place seem inappropriate or nontransferable to another.

And what Demme seems thus to be saying is that you have to dispense with what makes a queer a queer in order to get anybody else to feel sorry that he’s going to die.

The answer, of course, is that it’s the subjectivity of the spectator, constructed by Demme's film as straight and unaf- fected by AIDS.

First presented at the conference on AIDS and Activism organized by a coalition of activist groups

168after the wrath of godCathedral.” The gay and lesbian community—which “includes all sexual aberration: bestiality, pederasty, sadomasochism, necrophilia, etc.”—was “lashing out irrationally at the prelate who has done more for New York AIDS victims than any other non-governmental figure.”104 Garvey nar-rated how the service proceeded as normal until O’Connor began the homily. At that point, he wrote, “the homofascists struck, charging down the aisle shouting insults and obscenities.”105 Garvey repeated other crit-ics’ claim that seven or eight protesters had broken the host and thrown it to the floor, though the “secular media reported over and over that only one such incident occurred

They disapproved of only some of the actions that occurred inside of the cathedral that were—at least according to ACT UP—not part of the planned demonstration

According to Andrew Humm, speaking on behalf of the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, “It was horrifying. We endorsed the demonstration outside the cathedral, but the point was lost by what happened inside. We condemn the acts of people who disrupt worship services.”8

The demonstrations outside the cathedral proved “vile,” “disgusting,” and “supremely insulting,” yet “all that happened outside the Cathedral,

161

171

political reasons, as year after year passed without President Reagan speak-ing to the nation about this crisis primarily affecting gay men and intrave-nous drug users. Even the United States Surgeon General, the nation’s leading spokesperson for public health issues, was silent on AIDS until 1986. The effect of this government neglect was striking, as the number of people diagnosed with AIDS increased by the day. The number of deaths would skyrocket from 451 in 1981 to 50,628 in 1995, before the in-troduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy.14 By the mid-1980s it was already clear that the AIDS crisis demanded a greater political response

For Patton the best way to address hyper-masculinity was to include lesbians in a conversation about the relation-ship between gay liberation and gender liberation:

In our minds, men are still "active" whether fucking or being fucked; and women are still "passive" whether they engage in "vanilla" sex, or s/m, in which case the top is sick or imitating men. In this context, when you ask gay men to shift to "safe sex;' which is usually described as touching, hugging, less genital, you are in essence asking them to have sex like women, to be "passive

While they shared the desire to allow men to make their own dec1s10ns about how to have sex, as well as the idea that gay sex could and did en-compass a wide range of activities that gave men pleasure, they saw one another as ideological adversaries

Don't under-estimate the creativity of our Gay brothers. And these are times that demand creativity, rather than panic, repression, or recrimination .

for men not blaming one another for diseases that they had transmitted, knowingly, unknowingly, or in igno-rance of the ultimate consequences

A gay and/ or feminist moral minority is not what is needed, but rather an expansion of a continuum of many sexual styles and habits:

Our love and our sexuality are not mutually exclusive. We cannot embrace one and deny the other out of fear .... We have nothing to be sorry for. Yes, people are dying. Yes, we need to review, and in many cases change, our sexual behavior. But we must not do this out of confusion and hys-teria. Whatever changes we make, we must make for reasons of health, not morality .... We may have at times been careless, but we were never immoral:

he had to think about how his actions affected the larger gay community.

gay liberation had the potential to free society from what historians John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman f . l' "104 'T' have called "the manipulative images o consumer capita .ism.

sought to decouple gay sex from materialism and recalled the powerful rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front,

condoms and the development of eroti-cally stimulating prophylactics .... We don't have to give up sexual enjoy-ment. We do have to give up irresponsibility and the failure to understand ourselves physicallY:

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

desire to care for other gay men

Instead of simply rejecting unfettered sexuality (what they called promiscuity), Callen and Berkowitz worked to reclaim other aspects of gay liberation such as the idea that love could be fleeting and still healthful

meant the possibility of a sexual practice that was the antithesis of heterosexuality and represented complete freedom from heterosexist

change my sexual behavior because being gay means doing what I want sexually

many g~y men had no intention oflimiting their sexual contacts

Don't suck, don't fuck, don't kiss. What a relief! No crusade yet against jerking off

"The fact is that no one yet knows what causes AIDS .... It therefore seems a little premature to be calling for an end to sexual freedom in the name of physical health ....

needed defense.

We are not suggesting legislating an end to promiscuity.

But to go even further and imply that 'we' got 'it' from the Haitians is a particularly ugly example of the Western tradition of blaming calamity on the Third World. And it's bad science .... What promiscuous urban gay men, intravenous drug abusers, hem<?philiacs, and Haitians all have in common is a pattern of accumulation of risk through re-infection with common viruses:

We both came to un-derstand early in the game that it was promiscuity that made us sick and not some new mutant virus from Mars.

Rather than blaming individual gay men, a point that often followed in other attacks on promiscuity, Callen and Berkowitz reasoned that gay men had experienced the effects of multiple STDs for so long that their systems gave out and produced AIDS

both 27 years old, have both been excessively promiscuous, and are both victims of AIDs.

Gay Community News ( GCN )

"feminism and gay lib-eration were closely connected

"Gay men are quite accustomed to accepting various risks of contract-ing STDS, and to weighing them carefully against the pleasure and nour-ishment we gain from multiple sexual partners:>n

"if you know -or even suspect-that you have a Sexually Transmitted Disease, don't put other people at risk by engaging in sexual activity. Wait until you KNOW you can cum clean:

Some writer-activists cautioned against homophobic panic, seeing it as a reiteration of the pathologizing of gay desire that permeated an earlier era; others criticized "promiscuity" by name, specifically railed against the commercialization of gay life, and refused to see their position as the antithesis of advocacy of sexual fulfill-ment. Still others thought AIDS provided an opportunity to combine the struggle for sexual freedom with the struggle for gender freedom

saw its role as an advocate for sexual freedom and sexual health and re-fused the idea that gay sex was essentially dangerous

The American Association of Physicians for Human Rights (AAPHR)

Signaling its commitment to gay liberation by mentioning "gay sexual expression'' and the need for a "satisfying sexual life;' the .AAPHR's rhet-oric suggested an inclusivity not necessarily implied by earlier medical . accounts.

Many gay men heard the call to limit sexual partners as. a message in-fused with moralism

Don't have less sex -just have it with fewer people:

The debate was, in fact, multisided and involved disagreements over the meanings of words that had become part of a liberationist lexicon in the 1970s.

gay men should be more concerned with the "22 sexually transmitted diseases that exist, [and] substance abuse and alcoholism

In the article, Mass cautioned against panic, a theme he returned to again and again over the course of the next half decade as he became the Native's main medical reporter and doctor-in-residence.

Men had the power to reshape the sexual market as a healthier location without reducing the frequency of their contacts, the kinds of sex acts they preferred, or, importantly, necessarily discussing what they did with each other.

The circular pin

In March 1981 he wrote "Care for Your Rectum:' explaining that anal intercourse had the ability to produce a "bond that other sexual positions can't approach:

one of the central arguments of gay liberation, that gay sex was healthy.

I do not disagree with accounts that ultimately explain how fights for gay liberation became fights for gay marriage over the course of the 198os and 1990s, but the material cited in this chapter suggests that AIDS actually allowed liberation politics to define the gay and lesbian social movement well into the 1980s

Looking at this evolving community-based AIDS work provides an op-portunity to see beyond the unfolding of scientific events and toward the kinds of conversations made possible by the scientific unknown. In a pe-riod of medical uncertainty, there was room for a far-reaching conversa-tion among a more diverse group of people, in particular laypeople trained not in science but in the intricacies of grassroots political struggle.12 Com-munity members could talk about AIDS without being trumped by doc-tors and health professionals

This, when coupled with the legacy of the feminist health movement of the 1970s, which argued that women should participate in their own health care, produced a moment where a com-munity approach to knowledge was possible

In the process, these writers created a conversation about the possibilities for queer community and queer politics among people thinking about and studying AIDS.

Taken together, these questions signaled that writer-activists struggled with how to develop complete and long-term sexual health for gay and lesbian citizens

In this chapter I explore the arguments made by these earliest AIDS activists who used the medium of the gay press to communicate a message that AIDS provided a moment in which to return to gay liberation, not run away from it.

Lesbians not only theorized and wrote about how sexuality would change in the age of AID s, but they also worked with gay men to chart an alternative response to the emergi~g AIDS epi-demic

Patton's writing suggests the limits of all three historical claims: that lesbians did not play a role in theorizing how to contain AIDS through politics, that the gay press did nothing about AIDS, and that people who embraced the healthy potential of gay liberation just wanted an excuse to have sex in irresponsible ways.

For the past decade, spokespeople of the gay rights movement had held end-less press conferences to argue against the stereotype that gay men were sex fiends wholly preoccupied with getting their rocks off. With AID speak, however, many of these same spokespeople were now arguing that bath-houses must stay open because gay men were such sex fiends that they would be screwing behind every bush if they didn't have their sex clubs

that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death .

Patton's respons

Finally,

With the exception of the New York Native, and a few, very few, other gay publications, the gay press has been useless:'

Second

First,

understand AIDS in the broad context of gay liberation

Instead, Patton suggested that mobilizing against homophobic oppression was the only way to address the roots of the AIDS epidemic.

Patton provided an alternative to her contem -poraries who suggested that controlling AIDS required, first and foremost, individual behavior change, in the form of gay men altering the way they had sex.

imagined a response to AIDS that would reinvigorate gays and lesbians in a struggle for more systemic liberation.

echoed the language of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

"the personal is political;' a phrase that had acquired meaning in the feminist movement

First, Patton connected AIDS to feminism,

You lead this terrible lifestyle and your punishment is to be sick all of the time:'

ON JUNE 18, 1983

North American gay men were them- selves heard to echo the Haitian origins theories, and also to amplify or misconstrue the role of Haitians in the U.S.

He notes in passing, however, that the "experience of Haitians and drug users with AIDS is undoubtedly even worse.

These passages from a popular novel offer a classic example of the network of meanings evoked in the United States at the mention of Haiti

Haitian-Americans" initiated the first and (so far) only controlled study of risk factors for AIDS among Hai- tians living in the United States

When Haitian-American physicians complained that exotic the- ories were merely reflections of North American prejudices, they also added that, although Haitians could do a better job conducting such investigations, more influential North American scientists monopolized research monie

proposed that Haitians may have contracted the virus from monkeys as part of bizarre sexual practices in Haitian brothels."28 North American scientists repeatedly speculated that AIDS might be transmit- ted between Haitians by voodoo rites, the ingestion of sacrificial animal blood, the eating of cats, ritualized homosexuality, and so on-a rich panoply of exotica:

Exoticism

The fact that AIDS was found among heterosexuals in Haiti could only be evi- dence that Haiti was the source of the disease. Heterosexual transmission was labeled by investigators as a more 'primitive' or 'atavistic' stage of the develop- ment of AIDS.

They must learn to conduct or interpret the research that shows how "these people" think in different forms, act in different patterns, cling to different values, seek different goals, and learn different truths

Discovering savages, then, is an essential component of, and prerequisite to, Blaming the Victim, and the art of Savage Discovery is a core skill that must be acquired by all aspiring Victim Blamers

The epidemiology of HIV in the Caribbean might lead us to con- clude that theories proposing Haiti as the source of AIDS represented the blaming of the victims

Social scientists were equally quick to grant voodoo a role in disease transmission

magic rituals sometimes transfer blood and secretions from person to person. Women have been known to add menstrual blood to the food and drink of partners to prevent them from 'straying"'

But the popular press was in many ways upstaged by the medical-scientific community, whose members had long been the pre- ferred sources of the popular press when writing about AIDS

Unlike the ho- mosexual or drug addict, the Haitian was a highly visible victim of the epidemic who could be singled out by virtue of his ethnic and cultural features

In fact, the press drew upon readily available images of filthy squalor, voodoo, and boatloads of "disease-ridden" or "economic" refugees.

Haitian-Americans "present preexisting character- istics of an already non-normative character. They are black, tend to be poor, are recent immigrants, and the association of Haiti with cult- religious practices fuels the current tendency to see deviance in groups at-risk for AIDS."

Haitians had come to the United States to work and study, activities that had become impossible in Haiti. And AIDS-related discrimination compromised these activities more than any of the other forces that had demoralized these communities since their establi~hment.

Let's fight AIDS, not nationality

Other Caribbean countries had higher attack rates and equally complex patterns of transmission, and yet natives of these is

If effective screening devices were lacking, some queried, then why was Haiti singled out

When people donate blood they are given a list of questions on sexual activity, hemophilia, things that might lead one to be at a higher risk," explained Brad Steams of the FDA. "Those questions don't work as well where heterosexual activity is a primary means of transmission. Haitians are not a higher risk group per se, but we don't have effective screening device^.

"more than 5,000 Haitian-Americans [marched] outside an F.D.A. office in Miami last week, snarling Miami International Airport traffic. 'Racists!

ven now the CDC continues to stigmatize Haitians by pre- venting them from donating blood in the United States."

"When the CDC removed Haitians from the list of risk groups, it refused to admit it made an error,"

One might at least charge the CDC with poor judgment in treating AIDS as no more than a medical issue and ignoring its social, economic, political, moral and other dimensions. By ignoring these, health officials have seriously hurt the Haitian community.

In April 1985 the CDC at last removed, without comment, the term "Haitian" as a risk-group designation.

Moreover, the analogy with the highly contagious hepatitis B virus rein- forced the association of casual or vertical transmission

CDC

After all the wild theories of voodoo rites and ge- netic predisposition were aired and dispelled, and the slipshod scientific investigations were brought to light, the public perception of the prob- lem has remained the same-that if Haitians have AIDS, it is very simply because they are Haitians"

They inundated the editors of melcal and popular presses with letters deploring what they took to be a sci- entifically flawed argument made acceptable

I'm Haitian. And my wife and I won't speak Haitian at the laundromat because other people are afraid to use the same machine as us. We can pass as Jamaican."

Some Haitians, especially those living in the United States "illegally," were reluctant to voice anti-American sentiment

llnked the apparent unanimity to the im- pact that such discrimination had on the immigrants' ability to make a living:

The same organization also received hate mail,

suddenly unable to find job placements for a majority of its client^.

Haitian store owners have gone bankrupt as their businesses failed; and Haitian families have been evicted from their homes"

"Haitian children have been beaten up (and in at least one case, shot) in school

"Haitians = Niggers with AIDS."

A schoolteacher related that "children of Haitian ori- gin are being taunted in the school because of the connection in the scientific literature

the United States Public Health Service recommended that Haitian-Americans not donate blood, and school blood drives openly excluded Haitian adolescents

"Nowhere in the hemisphere is pov- erty so harsh," blared U.S. News and Wmld Repmton October 31, 1983. "Now the backlash of the AIDS scare is making it worse."

By 1980, tourism had become one of the country's largest sources of foreign currency, and generated employment for tens of thousands living in and around Port-au-Prince. By 1983, it had become almost nonexisten

The material effects of these social forces were apparent even to foreign observers

ere not in the mainstream of society.

popular presses

evidence of the link between Haiti and the origin of the American AIDS epidemic: three cases of transfusion-related transmission (only one of which, date un- specified, took place in Haiti

the disease was said to have comef;om Haiti

As no microbe had been isolated, risk designation was, in effect, synonymous with carrier status

The resulting conceptual round-up officially brought all Haitians together in a "risk gr~up

the Haitian immigrants denied that they had engaged in homosexual activity or intravenous drug use. Most had never had a blood transfusion. Almost all other cases of the syndrome known at the time implicated one or more of these risk factors

ournal of theAmerican Med- icalhsociatwn a

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced, in July 1982, that thirty-four "Haitians residing in the United States" had been stricken with oppor- tunistic infections