“This is a Black epidemic for all practical purposes. This state right now is investing very little into saving the lives of African-Americans impacted by HIV/AIDS. And so, if you’re waiting on the cavalry to come, if you’re waiting on someone else to come and save us, if you think the government coming, if you think help’s coming, just think about Katrina: They ain’t coming.”
–Vivian Clark-Armstead, Wilhelmina’s War
The opening scene of June Cross’s 2015 documentary,1 Wilhelmina’s War shows activist Vivian Clark-Armstead, program coordinator at the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council, discussing the impact of AIDS on black communities in a small African American church in the state. After Clark-Armstead speaks, Wilhelmina Dixon steps to the podium and thanks the congregation for allowing her to speak about AIDS, mentioning that other churches would not allow her to speak about the topic. Churches in the black rural south are important sites of convening for black people, and thus a critical space for collective mobilization to address this crisis confronting the community.
The documentary follows Dixon—an elderly black woman, who is part of this community and resides in a rural county in South Carolina. Dixon is fighting to save the lives of her drug-dependent daughter, Toni, and granddaughter Dayshal, who contracted HIV disease from her mother. Wilhelmina works multiple jobs to support her family, all the while educating herself and others about HIV/AIDS and navigating state programs and health care systems. At this moment in which antiretrovirals exist to prevent HIV disease from becoming AIDS, Wilhemina’s story is an example of the integral role that structural vulnerabilities play in shaping her community’s relationship to the epidemic. This is a much-needed critical analysis of AIDS in black communities.
Much of the discursive focus on HIV/AIDS has been on urban geographies throughout the nation, and only until recently has there been a spotlight cast on the impact of the epidemic on the U.S. rural south. Wilhelmina’s War illustrates in vivid detail the deleterious material effects that structural vulnerabilities cause for black people in the rural south, as well as black people throughout the country. According to Sonja Mackenzie, structural vulnerabilities are the medical, economic, legal, and social forms of discrimination and overall social inequalities that produce the disproportionate impact of epidemics.2 Mackenzie further argues that structural vulnerabilities account for health disparities that determine who and how one lives and dies from HIV/AIDS.3 Thus, for Wilhelmina, poverty, housing inequality, conservative state policies, cultural stigma, the lack of access to quality health care, prevention, and treatment, and the cutting of funding for HIV/AIDS services under increasing privatization have made her family and community vulnerable to AIDS, which eventually claims her daughter Toni’s life. This kind of premature end to Toni’s life due to complications from AIDS is all too common for black people nationwide.
While public health research and interventions for HIV/AIDS continue to emphasize individual behaviors, Wihelmina’s War makes clear that state abandonment and structural inequality are two of many factors that shape black people’s experiences with HIV/AIDS. As Wilhelmina fights to defend the lives of her family members in the context of state abandonment and social inequality, these structural conditions have turned a supposedly manageable chronic illness into a death sentence in rural, poor black communities. The metaphor of Hurricane Katrina that Clark- Armstead uses illustrates how state neglect has turned a health crisis into a racialized, gendered, sexualized, and economic disaster in black communities.
This special issue on the “The Black AIDS Epidemic” makes three major interventions.
First, it exemplifies an intersectional approach, demonstrating how overlapping structural vulnerabilities create a perfect storm for black people’s disproportionate representation in the epidemic; second, it emphasizes a dialogic relationship between cultural, intellectual, political approaches to HIV/AIDS, representing an interdisciplinary collection of contributors including artistic, scholarly, and activist approaches as equally beneficial and insightful; this mobilization of radically interdisciplinary and overlapping sites of knowledge production is critical to addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in black communities in the U.S; finally, this special issue privileges de-pathologization in the study of HIV/AIDS by interrogating how dominant frameworks of treatment and prevention can perpetuate narratives of deviance that have been historically attached to black culture (codifying axes of power as cultural and genetic risk factors), even as it shows how multiple forms of marginalization within black communities have stigmatized those most impacted by HIV/AIDS.
These three interventions are interrelated. Though public health has taken up intersectional frameworks since at least 2005, researchers have deployed intersectionality in ways that view interlocking systems of oppression such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, region, and nation as compounding risk factors. This approach operates in the service of perfecting surveillance technologies for treatment and prevention and can collude with racialized technologies of policing and criminalization. A depathologizing approach is necessary for reading multiply marginalized people as more than multivalent vectors of disease, a designation that risks compounding already existing narratives of stigma. Moreover, interdisciplinary work on AIDS like Wilhelmina’s War and the work included in this special issue can provide for more complex representations of black people in the midst of an epidemic. This work also brings into focus the impact of the various systems and institutions through which HIV/AIDS is experienced by black people. And rather than approach black culture as a barrier to treatment and prevention, the contributions to this special issue demonstrate how black vernacular epistemologies,4 cultural production, and activism have operated and continue to operate as what scholar Marlon M. Bailey has called “intravention,” to emphasize what those who exist “outside the moral and economic parameters of the general society” have done “to contest, to reduce, and to withstand HIV in their communities based on their own knowledge and ingenuity”.5
Though Cathy Cohen placed Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) at the center of black studies 20 years ago, it remains a marginal topic in black studies. What Cohen termed ‘secondary marginalization’ continues to hamper the interdisciplinary field of black studies’ ability to center the knowledge of multiply marginalized communities when addressing social problems impacting black people, particularly problems impacting black LGBT populations. Secondary marginalization still permeates black communities more broadly. For instance, in their assessment of data from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), political scientists Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith highlight the persistent apathy in black communities concerning the needs of black LGBT individuals, suggesting that those most impacted by the epidemic continue to be secondarily marginalized.6
This special issue aims to, once again, move AIDS to the center of black studies to both acknowledge the ongoing, devasting impact of a health crisis on black communities in the U.S., and across the globe, and to demonstrate how centering AIDS might challenge current frameworks, theories, and methods in black studies, which could also offer insight into structural vulnerabilities and disparities impacting black people in general. Therefore, the essays, interviews, forum, and creative work in this volume ask: How does blackness transform AIDS discourses emerging from dominant institutions and minoritized communities? And conversely, how has/does AIDS—as an “epidemic of signification”7—transform/ed the meaning of blackness, including black art, theory, and activism? Though we assert the importance and specificity of black people’s lived experiences of HIV/AIDS, we also attend to how the disproportionate representation of HIV/AIDS cases among blacks also has transformed what Fred Moten calls “the case of blackness’.8
The stigma faced by black people living with HIV/AIDS requires a broader analysis of the stigmatized position of blackness in global culture, politics, and society more broadly. The shift in the racialization of HIV/AIDS from a “white gay disease” to a “black disease” raises questions about whether HIV/AIDS stigma extends to black culture in general, given that pathological discourses of race, gender, and sexuality have permeated scientific, media, and state-based discourses of AIDS circulating in both mainstream and marginalized communities. As Fred Moten argues, “The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take place. Its manifestations have changed over the years, though it has always been poised between the realms of the pseudo-social scientific, the birth of new sciences, and the normative impulse that is at the heart of—but that strains against—the black radicalism that strains against it.”9 Thinking the case of AIDS in relation to the case of blackness suggests that the ongoing AIDS epidemic has constituted a background against which pathological representation of black people and blackness take place, and demonstrates how institutional discourses of AIDS (especially public health and media discourses) have aided in constructions of black culture as “inherently different” and black people as “behav[ing] differently.”10
Centering AIDS in black studies also requires bringing into focus the ways that colonial modernity and racial capitalism have positioned black people as perpetually on the bottom of the social hierarchy (and in the order of Man), and how the anti-blackness that is central to our current human-world organization makes black people more vulnerable to illness and death.11 Moreover, the overdetermination of blackness within colonial modernity has marked the black AIDS epidemic as the natural outcome of black sexual difference, and black health crises and premature death as normative and unremarkable. As Adam Geary argues, “the primary structuring factor that has determined risk of HIV infection has been state intimacy, or the violent intimacy of the racist state. From structured impoverishment to racial segregation, from mass incarceration to ‘political death’ meted out to former prisoners, the state has structured the ways in which black Americans have been made vulnerable to HIV exposure and infection far beyond the capacity of any individual or community mitigation or control”.12 Geary points to the ways that state intimacies—marked by histories of enslavement, colonization, racial capitalism, segregation, and ghettoization—have been elided by the focus on so-called risk behaviors of individual black people or the deviance of black culture. He shows how the focus on individual transmission ignores the fact that diseases are only transferred in welcoming sociobiological conditions, and that advances in public health over the 20th century have been made through investments in social welfare. State neglect, economic underdevelopment, and medical apartheid have created the welcoming sociobiological conditions for HIV/AIDS transmission in black communities, and have often deprived black communities from advancements in public health.13 Thus, accounting for the racial blackness of the U.S. epidemic means contextualizing the epidemic amid the deliberate practices of anti-black, state violence, including overlapping and ongoing forms of colonial, racial, sexual, and economic domination.
We have chosen to name this special issue “The Black AIDS Epidemic” for multiple reasons. After almost 40 years of the epidemic, black people remain disproportionately impacted by HIV and AIDS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) shift in language from “AIDS” to “HIV disease” hides this disparity. This title represents an urgent call for recognition of the crisis confronting black people in general, and black women, same gender-desiring black men, and black transgender women in particular.
We have chosen to use “AIDS” rather than “HIV disease” to draw attention to the political stakes of biomedical discourse as it intersects with blackness. Historian of science Evelynn Hammonds argues that the political dimension of AIDS lies in the power to define it: “The power to define disease and normality makes AIDS a political issue”.14 Since the early era of AIDS, scientific and medical discourses of AIDS have been entangled with blackness, from epidemiological studies that located its origins in Haiti and Africa to the discoveries of heterosexual and perinatal transmission that shifted the epidemiological and media focus to African Americans.15 The 1996 invention of protease inhibitors has shifted U.S. discourse to the “end-of-AIDS” and “Not-About-AIDS” discourses that have relegated its deadly effects and epidemic proportions to the past and occurring “elsewhere”.16 But as Phillip Brian Harper notes in his critique of white gay activist Andrew Sullivan’s 1996 pronouncement of the “end” of the plague in New York Times magazine, “Sullivan registers the vulnerability of U.S. citizens in highly specific terms, noting not only that ‘many Americans…will still die,’ but this group comprises ‘especially blacks and Latinos,’ the parenthetical cast of the latter phrase indicating grammatically the populations’ necessarily marginal status in the narrative Sullivan wants to propagate”.17 If AIDS has been racialized from its appearance in the U.S. through scientific discourse, Harper points out how the deaths of black and brown people fail to signify as a cause to extend the spatiotemporal designation of AIDS as a plague in American cultural discourse.
Even though for many communities in the U.S., HIV is a manageable chronic disease that does not advance to an AIDS diagnosis, for many black people who are disproportionately impacted by the epidemic, due to structural vulnerabilities, an AIDS diagnosis and death due to AIDS complications are realities. Thus, defining HIV disease as a manageable chronic illness that can be controlled by the state through treatment and prevention denies the fact that black people continue to die from the disease in disproportionate numbers. 3,379 African Americans died from HIV disease in 2015, accounting for 52% of total deaths attributed to the disease that year. Our use of the language of AIDS is meant to signal the not-yet-past of AIDS as a “death sentence”—to show how the enmeshment of HIV/AIDS with other death-dealing epistemes circumscribing blackness render black bodies more vulnerable to illness and death. By retaining the language of AIDS, we also aim to show how histories of medical apartheid, the neoliberal interests of science and medicine, and punitive turn in dominant public health institutions18 challenge their central roles in the fight to end the AIDS pandemic. Since institutions like the CDC, media, scientific, medical, and subcultural communities continue to mark black culture as deviant and pathological,19 this special issue questions the authority of the state, and scientific and medical industries, in determining black futures. Our use of AIDS is a mode of refusing the temporalities of the state, temporalities constructed to erase the racial antagonisms existing in U.S. histories of science and medicine since the 19th century.20
But our focus on the not-yet-pastness of AIDS as a “death sentence” for black people does not mean it is too late for them. When Dr. Michael Gottlieb first reported the first cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in 5 previously healthy white gay men in Los Angeles, he failed to report that he also saw these symptoms in a gay African American man and Haitian man. When asked why he did not include these two cases, Gottlieb said he discovered them after the report was finalized, and “until recently I wouldn’t have thought it mattered…But in retrospect, I think it might’ve made a difference among gay black men”.21 While black people’s health concerns have often come too late for scientific and medical communities and the state and media platforms that circulate this knowledge to the public, black people have banded together to struggle against the virus in their communities.
Because AIDS emerged as a disease that disproportionately impacted the most marginalized among black communities, concerns emerged about which black lives mattered to black people. As Cathy Cohen argues in The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, the 20th anniversary of which this special issue celebrates, fault lines and cleavages within black communities rooted in urban crisis and political and cultural conservatism caused black leaders and community members to distance themselves from those dying of AIDS.22 Out of these fault lines and cleavages emerged a group of black artists and grassroots activists who refused to distance themselves from those most marginal in their communities. They created structures of community care, political advocacy, direct action, and artistic and academic responses to the epidemic that created the foundation for the ongoing movement against AIDS in black communities.
Indeed, since the mid-1980s black feminist and queer activists like Carl Bean, Dazon Dixon Diallo, Craig G. Harris, Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer, DiAna DiAna, Bambi Sumpter, Reggie Williams, Katrina Haslip, and Jewel Thais Williams used culturally competent and politically innovative strategies and holistic approaches to combat the disproportionate effects of this health crisis in black communities. In the absence of state and community recognition and protection, they saw the elimination of structural inequalities as integral to eliminating disease transmission in black communities. Transforming institutions like the healthcare industry, churches, salons, schools, nightclubs, and prisons, these activists did not see culture as a barrier to treatment and prevention, but rather as a catalyst for black survival, support, and wellness. Extending the emphasis on culture as a site of intravention, black feminist and queer artists also contributed to the early struggles against the epidemic. Filmmakers like Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien, creative writers such as Assotto Saint, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Other Countries Collective, Samuel Delany, Sapphire, and Pearl Cleage, and performance groups like Pomo Afro Homos and Cinque, and visual artists such as Lorna Simpson and Rotimi Fani-Kayode created art that countered the stigma and exclusion of those affected by AIDS, and reimagined black life beyond state and scientific discourses that defined it solely through the lens of illness and death.23
This issue also highlights some of the current cultural work undertaken by black community-based organizations such as the Counter Narrative Project that focuses on the cultural health and well-being of black gay men, primarily, by engaging black LGBTQ creative community practices such as national film screenings of Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied; public readings of Essex Hemphill’s poetry (“love letters to Essex Hemphill”); weekly “Revolutionary Health” webcasts; and black LGBT voter and anti-HIV criminalization mobilizations. The ballroom community is another cultural formation engaged in HIV/AIDS prevention through performances at “prevention ball” which are collaborations between community-based organizations and the ballroom community.24 This special issue illustrates the possibilities what radical interdisciplinary approaches can bring to bear in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment arenas for black communities.
Overview of contributions
Because this special issue centers “intraventive” cultural practice and knowledge, we do not see artistic modes of production as separate from other modes of theorizing. The essays in this collection engage multiple fields and draw from a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives. The special issue includes poetry by Jericho Brown, short fiction by Johari Jabir, and photography by Tiona Nekkia McClodden, all of which intervene in contemporary scholarly discourses on blackness and HIV/AIDS. As works of creative nonfiction, Marlon Rachquel Moore’s “Homecomings” and Dagmawi Woubshet’s “Self-Record” blur the boundaries between creative and scholarly work. Finally, the special issue includes a forum between scholars, activists, and practitioners, a short essay by journalist and scholar Steven M. Thrasher, and interviews with the president and Chief Executive Office of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, Raniyah Copeland, and Northwestern University sociologist and author Celeste Watkins-Hayes about her seminal new book, Remaking a Life: How Women with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality.25
Jallicia Jolly’s essay, “From At-Risk to Interdependent: The Erotic Life Worlds of HIV + Women,” focuses on the lives and experiences of HIV-positive Black Jamaican women through an ethnographic exploration of the Kingston-based, HIV/AIDS activist organization, Women for Women. By exploring the strategies of collectivity and care among women in this organization, Jolly shows how the embodied knowledges of these women expand conceptions of the erotic, while challenging the pathologizing public health and academic discourses that circumscribe their lives. J.T. Roane’s piece, “Black Harm Reduction Politics in the Early Philadelphia Epidemic,” focuses on the work of African American activist Rashida Abdul-Khabeer (formerly Hassan), a nurse and infectious disease specialist who formed one of the nation’s first black AIDS organization, Black Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI) in Philadelphia in 1985. Roane demonstrates how BEBASHI combined harm reduction with a structural analysis of the conditions of urban inequality already shaping the lives of those impacted by the epidemic, thereby providing a precursor to contemporary harm reduction strategies.
Marlon Rachquel Moore’s contribution, “Homecoming: A Meditation on Military Medicine and HIV,” weaves together memories and histories of the Department of Defense’s HIV/AIDS and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies and their effects on black men. Spanning from 1985 to 2000 and detailing her own experiences as a black lesbian in the military, Moore’s meditation bears witness to the effects of these policies on the lives of her biological brother and two of her chosen military brothers, all of whom contracted the disease while serving in the U.S. Navy. Moore shows how homophobic and AIDS-phobic military policies exacerbated these men’s suffering, while at the same time revealing how military service produced communities of care and intimacy, and, for some, access to healthcare unavailable to civilians. Set in the 1980s, Johari Jabir’s fictional account, “Requiem for a Sunbeam,” tells the story of Jamel Washington, a black gay publishing executive who must return home to the rural town of Antelope, Missouri, to bury his best friend, Rufus Anderson, after he dies of AIDS. Both were members of a youth arts collective called the Sunbeams. Returning to this small community and town that has held on to sacred traditions of the ancestors, the protagonist rediscovers the power of art, community, and ritual as necessary tools in the face of an epidemic.
Darius Bost’s essay, “Black Lesbian Feminist Intellectuals and the Struggle Against AIDS,” constructs a genealogy of black lesbian feminist knowledge production about AIDS from the early years of the epidemic through an analysis of the work of three public intellectuals: historian of science Evelynn Hammonds, journalist Linda Villarosa, and political scientist Cathy Cohen. Bost demonstrates how these scholars drew from activist traditions, academic training, and community-based knowledge to produce an “integrated analysis” of the epidemic that challenged contemporaneous discourses about AIDS. Lester K. Spence’s essay, “Live and Let Die: Rethinking Secondary Marginalization in the 21st Century,” closely examines “Greater Than AIDS,” a national, multi-media campaign formed in 2011 to educate and empower black communities about HIV/AIDS. Spence examines the shift in the visibility of AIDS in black communities from a marginal or “cross-cutting” issue, as Cathy Cohen theorized it in the 1990s, to a consensus issue in the second decade of the 21st century. Spence suggests that this campaign does not necessarily mean progress, as it brings to the fore a neoliberal turn in governance in which those most vulnerable to the disease are deemed personally responsible for the prevention and treatment of their own illness. In so doing, Spence challenges us to think about how neoliberal ideologies undergirding contemporary public health and community partnerships can reproduce inequality.
Together, these essays, creative works, forum, and interviews offer a challenge to biomedical approaches to the epidemic that emphasize individual treatment and prevention. Rather they affirm a historical and ongoing tradition of “intraventive” cultural, political, and theoretical approaches that view the epidemic’s disproportionate impact on black communities as rooted in preexisting structural inequalities. Moreover, these contributions demonstrate how HIV/AIDS has transformed the meaning of blackness, while revealing how intersectional approaches to the study of HIV/AIDS contribute to the broader field of black studies.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marlon M. Bailey
Marlon M. Bailey is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013, and was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association in 2014. Marlon has published in American Quarterly, GLQ, Signs, Feminist Studies, Souls, Gender, Place, and Culture, The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, AIDS Patient Care & STDs, LGBT Health, and several book collections.
Darius Bost
Darius Bost is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. His book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago, 2018), is an interdisciplinary study of black gay art and activism during the early era of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S.
Notes
1 June Cross, Wilhelmina’s War. DVD. Directed by June Cross. (San Francisco: PBS Independent Lens, 2015).
2 Sonja Mackenzie, Structural Intimacies: Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic (New Brunswick: Rutgers Press, 2013), 6.
3 Ibid., 8.
4 Matt Richardson, The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013).
5 Marlon Bailey, “Performance as Intravention: Ballroom Culture and the Politics of HIV/AIDS in Detroit,” Souls 11, no. 3 (2009): 253–74.
6 Tanya Bunyasi, and Candis Smith, “Do All Black Lives Equally to Black People? Respectability Politics and the Limits of Linked Fate,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 4, (2019): 180–215.
7 Paula Treichler “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” October 43 (1987): 31–70.
8 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218.
9 Ibid., Criticism, 177.
10 Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Race, Sex, AIDS: The Construction of the ‘Other,” Radical America 20, no. 6 (1987): 28–83.
11 Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Sexuality, and Power in the African American Literary Imagination. (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
12 Adam Geary, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
13 Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Random House, 2006); Samuel Kelton Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
14 Hammonds, Radical America, 29.
15 Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Cohen, Cathy. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
16 Phillip Brian Harper, “Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange: Notes on the Direction of Queer Critique,” Social Text 52/53, (1997): 5–29; Román 1999
17 Ibid., 7.
18 Washington 2006; Hammonds 1987; Cohen 1999; Trevor Hoppe, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
19 Farmer 1992; Cohen 1999; Thomas Shevory, Notorious HIV: The Media Spectacle of Nushawn Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004; Steven Thrasher, “How College Wrestling Star “Tiger Mandingo” Became an HIV Scapegoat.” Buzzfeed.com, July 7, 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/steventhrasher/how-college-wrestling-star-tiger-mandingo-became-an-hiv-scap
20 Hammonds, Radical America.
21 Linda Villarosa, “America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic,” New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html
22 Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.
23 Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Seeing AIDS: Race, Gender, and Representation.” in The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women: Perspectives on the Pandemic in the United States edited by Nancy Goldstein and Jennifer L Manlowe, (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Timothy Lyle, “Tryin’ to Scrub That ‘Death Pussy’ Clean Again: The Pleasures of Domesticating HIV/AIDS in Pearl Cleage’s Fiction,” African American Review 50, no. 2 (2017): 153–68; Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Ian Bourland, Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
24 Bailey Marlon, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
25 Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).