Katie Batza, "Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 197s "
English | ISBN: 0812250133 | 2018 | 192 pages | PDF | 6 MB
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so-an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease.