ABSTRACT
In early 1981, scattered reports began to appear of a new “gay cancer,” a “cancer” which would eventually be named AIDS. AIDS quickly became a full-blown health crisis in the gay community and, coming on the heels of the fi rst decade of gay liberation and lesbian feminist organizing, it would have important effects on political mobilization and public policy. However, it did not have these effects unmediated. The crisis intersected with the countermobilization by the Christian Right against gay and lesbian rights, which had been underway throughout the 1970s. This countermobilization included the deployment of ballot initiatives to repeal gay rights measures, epitomized by the Anita Bryant campaign, and the rise of the Moral Majority, symbolized by the election of Ronald Reagan. While the advent of AIDS strengthened the morality framing of lesbian and gay rights in U.S. politics, it also spurred new forms of direct action in the lesbian and gay community, such as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). At the same time, gay men with HIV/AIDS suffered discrimination in employment, housing, and medical treatment and their partners and friends were sometimes denied access to, and control over medical decision-making and respect for their wills. In some cases, legally recognized biological families often took control of funeral arrangements and property, barring same-sex partners from funeral services, burials or, in some cases, even access to their own apartments and houses (Shilts 1988). Christian Right mobilization and the stigma attached to “gay rights” in the AIDS era was symbolized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers, in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s state sodomy statute.
