Opting Out: Aging Gays, HIV/AIDS and the Bio-Politics of Queer Viral Time

ABSTRACT

This paper expands the scope of inquiry into HIV and aging through an ethnographic exploration of a small group of older, long-term (20 or more years) HIV+ gay white men in Toronto who meet fortnightly to discuss and reflect on everyday challenges of living with HIV but do not want to be affiliated with existing HIV/AIDS support organizations. Their discussions reveal a critique of professionalization and biomedical bias in contemporary mainstream Canadian HIV/AIDS discourses and support services, reflecting their shared experiences and memories of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada over many decades. I argue that their frustration with and disengagement from contemporary mainstream HIV/AIDS discourses and support services, based on shared experiences and memories, produces a particular form of “queer viral time,” developed through the intersectional dynamics of epidemiological time, gender, age, race and sexual orientation. Queer viral time draws attention to the temporal dimensions of socio-sexual subject formations, social inequalities, and health governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay men
• HIV/AIDS
• aging
• time and temporality

Acknowledgments

This project was funded through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank the members of the group that I worked with for their support and feedback. I would also like to thank Alison Crosby and Tiffany Pollock, the Director and Coordinator of the Centre For Feminist Research at York University, Toronto, for their ongoing administrative support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.unaids.org/en/topic/treatment Accessed October 16, 2019

2. “AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 55% since the peak in 2004. In 2018, around 770 000 [570 000–1.1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.7 million [1.3 million–2.4 million] in 2004 and 1.2 million [860 000–1.6 million] in 2010.” UNAIDS. https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet . Accessed October 16, 2019.

3. PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and is an HIV prevention method in which people who don’t have HIV take HIV medicine daily to reduce their risk of getting HIV if they are exposed to the virus. See below for further explanation of this group’s perspectives on PrEP.

4. At my first group meeting, I informed members that I was conducting research on the topic of long-term PLHIV experiences of Toronto HASOs and sought permission to take notes on group meetings. Members provided their permission for note-taking as long as principles of confidentiality and anonymity were respected. Therefore, all names and any identifying features of participants mentioned in this article have been changed.

5. Age and racial identification are based on my observations, so perceptive bias may be an issue. HIV status and sexual orientation were self-declared by group members in various discussions and comments.

6. This group’s perception of Toronto HASOs as increasingly bureaucratic and professionalized institutions echoes the findings of Cain et al’s research focusing on challenges to the involvement of people living with HIV in community-based HIV/AIDS organizations in Ontario, Canada (2014).

7. See, for example, the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange: https://www.catie.ca/en/fact-sheets/prevention/pre-exposure-prophylaxis-prep (accessed December 4, 2019).

8. Azidothymidine or AZT was one of the first medications found to be somewhat effective in controlling HIV, and was approved by the Federal Drug Administration for distribution in 1987. However, AZT had severe side effects, and was considered by some HIV activists to be more toxic than the virus itself. After the advent of more effective ART medications in the mid-1990s, reliance on AZT dropped substantially. https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/(accessed December 4, 2019).

9. It should be noted that current research on PrEP indicates there are few long-term side-effects, and that PrEP is therefore much less toxic than earlier generations of HIV medications like AZT. https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/what-are-side-effects-truvada-used-prep accessed November 11, 2020.

10. See footnote 9 above.

11. See Marshall, Aggleton, Cover, Rasmussen, and Hegarty (2019) for a discussion of “queer generations” that similarly challenges the temporal assumptions of normative generational frameworks.