Fighting Federal Indifference: Sexuality, the State, and Social Reform during the early HIV/AIDS Crisis

Tue 18 February 2020

Churchill College

Stephen Colbrook is a PhD candidate at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making in the United States. Colbrook's presentation will use the state response to AIDS as a lens to analyse how the epidemic further politicised LGBT communities during the late twentieth century.

In July 1981, Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights, the world's first organisation for LGBT medical professionals, published a newsletter informing its readers of 'a new potentially lethal syndrome … seen among otherwise healthy young gay males in New York and California'. What was later identified as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), tore apart minority communities and redefined battles over access to health care in a period usually defined by conservative ascendancy, 'Reaganomics', and the rise of the Christian right.

Cost: Free