ABSTRACT
The gay and lesbian communities rejected both these characterizations: as statistical risk group and as population of disease carriers. These communities had a recently formed, self-conscious sense of their social and political identity, forged in part out of a successful struggle with the medical establishment over the psychiatric definition of homosexuality as a pathological disorder. The epidemiologists’ apparently neutral categories were perceived as an attempt to resurrect the earlier biomedical construction of homosexuality as a sickness. For injection drug users, clean needles were the public health equivalent of condoms. Prevention methods to curtail blood transmission were similarly framed in individualistic terms. In the United States in the late 1980s, several factors contributed to shifting the framework for understanding Acquired Imnnune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) from a plague to a chronic disease model. AIDS activists increasingly became concerned about access to health care and the development of new and experimental treatments.
