Social movement sustainability : an analysis of the rift between HIV positive and HIV negative gay men and its impact on the gay liberation movement

• Main Author: Botnick, Michael R.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4022

There is a growing rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, manifested in social, economic, structural and political divisiveness which, if not resolved may 'kill' the gay liberation movement. While disasters generally create organizational solidarity, AIDS has operated in reverse, spawning a variety of competitive AIDS service organizations, alienating seropositive gays from the mainstream gay community, and disenfranchising seronegative gay men as human and financial resources are redirected towards persons living with HIV and AIDS. Serostatus has become a social marker of societal status, operating in a bimodal discriminatory manner. Seronegative gay men experience discrimination within the gay community as funding for and services to this sector diminish. Seropositive gay men (and the organizations which provide for some of their needs) have culturally, economically and socially dismissed the needs of seronegative gay men (survivor guilt, safer sex education, etc) in favour of providing social and resource based services to seropositive gay men. The social distance between the gay movement and the AIDS movement has correspondingly increased. If this trend continues, it will serve to further push HIVpositive and HIV-negative gay men into polarized camps, resulting in a wider separation of the gay movement from the AIDS movement. The stigmatization of HIV-positive people will subsequently increase both within and outside of the gay movement, and any ability to present a unified Gay Liberation front will correspondingly diminish. Additionally, the emergent notion that to be gay is to be HIV-positive will solidify. This will a) further stigmatize all gay men in the eyes of the non-gay population, and b) exacerbate the rift between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men within the gay community, reversing the stigma of HIV such that to be HIV-negative will be a marker of non-gay identity. In short, seropositivity will become the defining element of gayness. In order to avert further divisiveness, and minimization of the gay movement, an effort must be made towards reestablishing the original ideology of cooperation, which was the hallmark of the earlier days of AIDS activism. This will require a debureaucratization of AIDS service organizations; coalition building among AIDS service organizations and gay liberation organizations; and personal attitudinal and behaviour changes on the part of both seropositive and seronegative gays regarding HIV status as a medical, rather than social phenomenon. === Arts, Faculty of === Sociology, Department of === Graduate