Organising care and community in the era of the ‘gay disease’: Gay community responses to HIV/AIDS and the production of differentiated care geographies in Vancouver

Abstract

Scholarship on the place of the HIV/AIDS crisis in urban geographies of sexual minority activism has powerfully insisted on the importance of community organising as a response to state and societal failures and to their homophobic, AIDS phobic and morally conservative underpinnings. This paper extends this scholarship by examining the urban social geographies of exclusion produced by such community organising efforts. It draws on the perspectives of long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS (LTS) in Vancouver to highlight the differentiated care geographies of HIV/AIDS that resulted from the racialised, classed and gendered politics and urban imaginations enacted by gay and allied HIV/AIDS organising. Though LTS networks, spaces and politics of care and community were more extended than Vancouver’s gay community during the 1980s and 1990s, the centring of the West End gay village in many community-led responses to HIV/AIDS resulted in LTS geographies outside the West End being excluded from important systems of care and community. LTS narratives of the city at the time of the ‘gay disease’ thus tell an urban politics of sexual and health activisms as shaped not only by processes of heteronormativity and homophobia but also of racially, colonially and class-inflected homonormative urban imaginaries.

Norwegian Data on Prevalence, Sexual Risk Behaviors, Sexual Problems, and Sexual Satisfaction in Men Who Have Sex Exclusively with Women, Men Who Have Sex Exclusively with Men, and Men Who Have Sex with Men and Women

“…Given that concealment of sexual identity is linked to poor mental health, it can reasonably also be assumed that it will be related to various aspects of sexual health. HIV/AIDS has often been referred to as a ‘gay disease’ (Catungal et al., 2021 ), indicating that sexual identity or sexual orientation has to do with the disease. However, HIV/AIDS is the result of individuals’ sexual behavior, and not of sexual identity or orientation.…”

Factors Associated With HIV-Related Stigma Among Indonesian Healthcare Workers: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey

“…Furthermore, programs that address HIV-related stigma in healthcare settings should be holistic and include comprehensive knowledge about HIV, addressing the emotional and social factors that shape stigmatizing attitudes and practices. For example, previous studies have found that people associate HIV disease with being gay (Arscott et al, 2020; Catungal et al, 2021; Logie et al, 2020) and with activities considered to be immoral (Letamo, 2019; Seid & Ahmed, 2020). Thus, antistigma education is needed to address such beliefs and should include the historical aspects of HIV transmission, which indicate that no particular social group should be blamed or held morally responsible for spreading HIV.…”

Imaginaries of patienthood: Constructions of HIV patients by HIV specialist health professionals

“…An imagined topography of risk characterised the accounts of MSM in Denson et al's (2021) study of Black men in the US deep south. Imaginaries of treatment resources were said to characterise representations of the geographies of care among gay men in Vancouver, as shown by Catungal et al (2021), and Hassan and Tucker (2021) describe the construction of imagined communities around the risks faced by MSM in South Africa. The idea of imaginaries has been attractive because it permits a collective and politically nuanced account of how groups and individuals represent, discuss and act upon their social worlds and make topographies of risk, embodiment and community actionable.…”