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AIDS



  • Tracing AIDS-Driven Cultural Production Across Generations

    by Mackenzie Lukenbill

    The collected papers of AIDS educator and activist Chloe Dzubilo stand as a "counter-archive," which does not just preserve a record of the past but makes it a trigger for thought and action in the present. 



  • Monkeypox is a Failure to Learn from HIV-AIDS Activists

    by Dan Royles

    Attention to messaging – efforts to advise communities of gay men at risk of infection without stigma – has hidden a deeper message of AIDS activism in the 1980s: demands for an equitable and affordable health care system. 



  • The Agency of the Irresponsible

    by Sarah Swedberg

    When universities bend to political pressure and adopt "personal responsibility" policies for vaccination, masking, and social distancing they give agency to the irresponsible and take it away from those who are actively working to protect public health. 



  • AIDS Disappeared from Public View Without Ending. Will Covid-19 do the Same?

    by Dan Royles

    AIDS activism shifted from framing the epidemic as a political crisis to a medical problem, allowing the ongoing vulnerability of the poor to fade from view as pharmaceutical advances have helped control the spread and impact of HIV among the affluent. 



  • In Fury We Trust (Review of Sarah Shulman)

    Sarah Shulman's book seeks to recover the histories of AIDS activists beyond white gay men, using two decades of oral history work to show the breadth of a coalition including women, lesbians, people of color, drug users, and the incarcerated, who all experienced the stakes of AIDS differently. 


  • Nancy Reagan’s Real Role in the AIDS Crisis

    Washington journalist Karen Tumulty writes that Nancy Reagan worked against the demands of social conservatives to ask her husband's administration to pay attention to the AIDS crisis, but her efforts weren't enough. 



  • National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Reminds Us of the Deep Costs of Inequality

    by Dan Royles

    "This history shows us that biomedical interventions such as antiretrovirals to treat HIV or the vaccine against the coronavirus yield some progress in the fight against epidemic disease, but do little to alter the underlying inequities that make some communities more vulnerable to illness in the first place."



  • The Epidemics America Got Wrong

    by Jim Downs

    Government inaction or delay have shaped the course of many infectious disease outbreaks in our country, argues history professor Jim Downs.