ABSTRACT
There was a joke common in gay circles in the early days of the current health crisis: “What’s the hardest part about having AIDS? Convincing your parents that you’re Haitian.” The humor is not racially sensitive. Only recently have gay white men begun to address the need for a fuller sympathy with those “other” groups threatened with infection, or even to recognize the racial, ethnic, and class diversity of a sexual preference too often glossed as exclusively WASP and middle-class. Yet as one of the few instances of AIDS humor generated from within the community, the joke does highlight some fundamental issues underlying gay men’s experience of AIDS—especially the problematic visibility that accompanies both specific manifestations of and general interest in the disease.
