Retrenchment from a Queer Ideal: Class Privilege and the Failure of Identity Politics in AIDS Activism

In the decade following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, identity politics in New York City enabled the construction of a socially and recreationally defined homogeneous gay identity. But contrary to common self-congratulatory accounts that have made their way into the social scientific literature, this gay identity was woefully unprepared to launch an effective political response to AIDS in the 1980s. The AIDS activism movement which did finally emerge in the form of ACT UP/New York was born from within the gay identity, but it embraced a more expansive coalitional politics. Its amplified vision called for a critique not only of medical research procedures and public funding initiatives but also of the larger political-economic and social structures that had translated a medical emergency into a social catastrophe. This more expansive politics gave rise to the Queer movement, premised less on essential identity than on affinity of commitment. But this political evolution was not internally uncontested: the more privileged white middle-class men within ACT UP resisted any movement away from a narrowly medical approach to AIDS for those with access. The resulting conflict eventually crippled ACT UP, perhaps irrevocably. Some gay and queer geographical theorizing has learned from the Queer movement and has embraced the politics of affinity, in that it has been willing to incorporate in its analyses an investigation of the ways in which gay identity politics is implicated in the wider systems of stratification along axes of gender, race, and class. But most gay geography remains trapped in the rather narrow vision of identity politics.