ABSTRACT
The history of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) does not simply present itself as a chronological succession of events. Centered on the bodily experiences of illness and death, the social meaning of the history of AIDS intimately touches upon our ideas about sexuality and societal divisions, social responsibility and individual privacy, order and instability, and above all, health and the prospect of happiness. The dawning recognition of a novel disease, a “gay plague,” touched two central social ideas. Mass infectious diseases had ceased to command the attention of health policy analysts in the advanced industrial world; for the most part, they were firmly relegated to the third world as diseases of underdevelopment. The perception of AIDS as a devastating epidemic discontinuous with the immediate past fed into the millenarian tendencies of the late 20th century. The plague analogy reflected social fears and also helped fan them.
