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      BEFORE AIDS

      POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

      Series Editors:

      Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin,

      Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

      Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

      BEFORE AIDS

       Gay Health Politics in the 1970s

      Katie Batza

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      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Batza, Katie, author.

      Title: Before AIDS: gay health politics in the 1970s / Katie Batza.

      Other titles: Politics and culture in modern America.

      Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Politics and culture in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017036427 | ISBN 9780812250138 (hardcover: alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Gays—Medical care—United States—History—20th century. | Sexual minorities—Medical care—United States—History—20th century. | Gay liberation movement—United States—History—20th century.

      Classification: LCC RA564.9.H65 B38 2018 | DDC 362.1086/64—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036427

       To Kellie and Elliot,life’s best dance partners

      CONTENTS

       List of Abbreviations

       Preface

       Introduction. Fighting Epidemics and Ignorance

       Chapter 1. Reimagining Gay Liberation

       Chapter 2. Beyond Gay Liberation

       Chapter 3. Gay Health Harnesses the State

       Chapter 4. Redefining Gay Health

       Chapter 5. The Gay Health Network Meets AIDS

       Epilogue. AIDS and the State Enmeshed

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      ABBREVIATIONS

GCSCPGay Community Services Center Papers, ONE Archive, Los Angeles
GHGerber/Hart Library and Archives, Chicago
HPAHistory Project Archives, Boston
MAMazer Archives, Los Angeles
MKPMorris Kight Papers, 1975–1993, Department of SpecialCollections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles
OAONE Archive, Los Angeles
SLSchlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Boston
WLPCWalter Lear Personal Collection, Philadelphia

      PREFACE

      The Holiday Club’s large sign, which encased the top quarter of the building and consisted of colorful, shimmering dish-sized sequins, made the architecture of the Howard Brown Health Center, which sat across the street at the corner of Irving Park and North Sheridan, especially unremarkable. The center first came to my attention as a building (not even an organization) in 2002 with the onset of my first Chicago winter, when I realized its gray concrete and muted tile façade provided a shield from the winter wind off Lake Michigan as I walked to and from the “El” stop closest to my apartment. Having grown up in Atlanta, I had never experienced an upper midwestern winter but quickly learned that wind defense during a six-block walk warranted switching to the other side of the street. Thus I abandoned the colorful Holiday Club for the more protected, if drab, Howard Brown building. As I became better acquainted with my new city, I learned that the Howard Brown Health Center served the LGBTQ community specifically, and the building I had come to think of fondly as my personal windshield was just one of the organization’s many outposts. Curiosity piqued, I began to spend my long and solitary commutes imagining the organization’s origins and how it fit into to my growing understanding of Chicago’s LGBTQ geography and history. In this way, the breathtakingly cold and beautiful winters of Chicago combined with the sturdy impermeability of a serendipitously located health clinic to inspire what eventually became this book.

      Before conducting any research, I imagined that Howard Brown originated in the Chicago gay community’s response to the AIDS crisis. I assumed the same to be true of other well-known clinics serving the LGBTQ community around the country, including Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C., New York’s Callen-Lorde, and Boston’s Fenway. My daydreamed history charted the birth and growth of gay medical clinics and research institutions amid bleak national fiscal and political realities, a gay sexual culture that equated sexual health with sexual oppression, and one of the deadliest epidemics in history. The plot unfolded in my mind like a bizarre historian’s telenovela with conjectured tragedy and fantasized heroism, not to mention political drama and a fantastic soundtrack. It transformed my commute from an hour-long battle against motion sickness and claustrophobia into something far more interesting.

      After many weeks of crafting this surmised history during bumpy and noisy train rides without even so much as a Google search worth of research, I decided that my fascination warranted a study of how gay community health clinics factored into the early response to AIDS. In the initial stages of research, I found that many gay community clinics actually originated in the 1970s, most of them in the last few years of the decade, but some dating back as early as 1971—a full decade before the first

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