Part 1: HIV as 'The Line in the Sand'

• Published in: Journal of homosexuality 2000-01, Vol.38 (4), p.39-76
• Main Author: Botnick, Michael R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; AIDS; Discrimination; Gay men; Gays & lesbians; Group Identity; HIV; HIV/AIDS; Homosexuality; Homosexuals; Human immunodeficiency virus; Human Service Organizations; Males; Men; Polarization; Political Culture; Relationship; serostatus; social movement sus-tainability; Social Movements; Sociology; Stigma; Sustainability
• ISSN: 0091-8369; 1540-3602
• DOI: 10.1300/J082v38n04_03

There is a growing rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, which finds expression in social, economic, structural and political divisiveness that, if not resolved, may 'kill' the "gay liberation movement". While disasters generally tend to create organizational solidarity, the AIDS crisis has operated in reverse, spawning a variety of competitive AIDS service organizations, alienating seropositive gays from the mainstream gay community, and in turn disenfranchising sero-negative gay men as human and financial resources are redirected toward persons living with HIV and AIDS. Serostatus has become a social marker of societal status, operating in a bimodal discriminatory manner. Seronegative gay men experience discrimination from within the gay community as funding for and services to this sector diminish. Seropositive gay men (and the organizations that provide for some of their needs) have culturally, economically and socially dismissed the socio/psychological needs of seronegative gay men (survivor guilt, safer sex education, etc.) in favour of providing social and resource-based services to seropositive gay men. As the disparities in service and advocacy increase, the social distance between the gay movement and the AIDS movement correspondingly increases. If this trend continues, the social gap will serve further to push HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men into polarized camps, resulting in a wider separation of the gay movement and the AIDS movement. The stigmatization of HIV-positive people will subsequently increase both within and outside the gay movement, and any ability to present a unified Gay Liberation front will correspondingly diminish. Additionally, the emergent notion within and without the gay communities that to be gay is to be HIV-positive will solidify. This will (a) further stigmatize all gay men in the eyes of the non-gay population, and (b) exacerbate the rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men within the gay community, reversing the stigma of HIV such that to be HIV-negative will be a marker of non-gay identity. In short, seropositivity will become the defining element of gayness.