Description
Book SynopsisThe AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease. Before AIDS explores this heretofore unrecognized story, chronicling the development of a national gay health network by highlighting the origins of longstanding gay health institutions in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, placing them in a larger political co
Trade Review
"[A] highly compelling, important book . . . Katie Batza's Before AIDS dramatically expands our portrait of the gay 1970s and of the relationships between gay liberation, the US state, and the politics of health. Through three case studies and a tightly argued, absorbingly written analysis, Batza shows that health activism was central to gay politics well before the beginning of the AIDS epidemic." * Journal of the History of Sexuality *
"Before AIDS is the first book to chart the development of a national gay health network in the 1970s. Katie Batza's insightful and compelling analysis makes valuable contributions to the history of sexuality, LGBTQ studies, the history of medicine, and American political history." * Tamar Carroll, Rochester Institute of Technology *
"Well-conceived, deftly argued, and based on an impressive range of primary materials, oral interviews, and a good command of the secondary literature, Before AIDS brings fresh light and perspective to the wider field of the history of sexuality in the United States." * Jonathan Bell, University College London *
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction. Fighting Epidemics and Ignorance
Chapter 1. Reimagining Gay Liberation
Chapter 2. Beyond Gay Liberation
Chapter 3. Gay Health Harnesses the State
Chapter 4. Redefining Gay Health
Chapter 5. The Gay Health Network Meets AIDS
Epilogue. AIDS and the State Enmeshed
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
