Drag as the Politics of AIDS

I. Drag as Resistance

For the LGBTQ+ people, resistance is one of the founding factors community is based upon. The act of loving oneself while not fitting into a heterosexual and CIS gendered world is an act of defiance that people continue to fight for today. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, his conservative views that made him popular also caused him to neglect issues that affected the LGBTQ+ community. As the AIDS death rate climbed to an extreme high in 1984, the silence of the president led many straight people to feel that AIDS could not affect them. Robert D. Byrd discusses the ways in which New Orleans’ mainstream, alternative, and gay presses approached the AIDS crisis. Byrd states that it took the death of actor Rock Hudson in 1985 for people to feel they could relate and be impacted by AIDS. This instance made many straight CIS people understand the severity of AIDS. Many publications refused to address the impact of the disease in the early 1980s because they felt that it wasn’t affecting heterosexuals and their families. Lisa Altman, someone from Denver that experienced life as a trans woman in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans during the height of AIDS, explains her perspective on the way the country turned away from the LGBTQ+ community during this time.

Articles in New Orleans’ gay and lesbian magazine Impact, provide a glimpse into both the stories written during the mid-1980s, and the advertisements for bars, shows, and bathhouses. During the 1970s, bath houses were extremely popular hubs for gay men. Many lawmakers who were trying to stop the spread of AIDS shut these bathhouses down but failed to realize the social and physical impacts this had on the LGBTQ+ community. For many, partaking in natural human intimacies was not allowed in homes that were often shared with family or friends. Bathhouses provided a safe accessible way for gay people to have sex in a safe space and without judgement. Closing these bathhouses down meant that having sex, safe or not, became difficult and deprived many LGBTQ+ people of the right to be intimate in a safe way. Teryl Lynn Foxx and Lisa Altman, who both experienced sex work during this time, said that AIDS suprisingly did not deter people from seeking out sex. Epidemic or not, sex was still a necessary need of life that wasn’t lessened by the fear of contracting HIV/AIDS. Both women noted that many of the men that solicited services often contracted the illness and brought it home to their significant other. AIDS made natural acts of human intimacy far more complicated and dangerous, and caused many to associate shame and secrecy with taking part in pleasure.

Although much of the work done at Stonewall in New York was executed by transgender women, this did not cause other members of the LGBTQ+ community in New Orleans to embrace trans people. This was in part due to the fear the LGBTQ+ community felt after the UpStairs Lounge fire in June 1973. This fire trapped those who were inside the Upstairs Lounge bar, killing 32 and injuring another 15. An in depth analysis of this tragedy can be read about in Robert W. Fieseler’s book Tinderbox (2018) and Johnny Townsend’s book Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire (2011). This direct attack on the New Orleans LGBTQ+ people shocked the community in a way that would stifle forms of aggressive resistance in the years following. As the epidemic began to ravage the LGBTQ+ community, much of the efforts for organizing and fundraising for AIDS awareness and research was centered around white CIS gay men in New Orleans and the greater South, as explained by Stephen Inrig who analyzed outreach efforts in the South with specific focus on North Carolina. Though many have begun to examine the work lesbians did to support gay men who were being directly affected by HIV/AIDS, Lisa Altman mentioned that in her experience, "the Lesbians have been trying to drop the ‘T’ [as in Transgender] from LGBT for a long time". When asked to partake in the human rights campaign in New Orleans, Teryl Lynn Foxx asked if they would be addressing issues faced by trans people like her, and was told that the issues of the gay male centric community needed to be addressed before discussing issues effecting the trans community.

James Sears also references trans inclusion when he talks about how frustrating it was for trans activists in the 1970s to see that in the Pride parade centered around gay and lesbian people and excluded trans people. The trans people that sears talks to express their hurt at how the fundraising and organizing they did to help the community went unrecognized, and that trans people continued to be overlooked and undervalued. "United We Stand, Divided We Fall" describes a drag troupe in Atlanta, and provides more examples of how those at the forefront of fighting for change were only seen by others as performers who lacked any serious ability to improve the future of the LGBTQ+ community.

With the extreme threat that many in the LGBTQ+ community felt after the devastation of the UpStairs Lounge Fire in 1973, the motivation to mobilize and take action for gay rights was stifled leaving many to put the issues of equality for all members to the side. With the onslaught of AIDS hitting New Orleans hard, the beginnings of Pride made many LGBTQ+ people feel hopeful to be seen and heard for the first time. Noticeably, the threat of AIDS made the ability for gay white CIS men to have their needs met first while leaving many people in the community who were transgender and/or people of color to be without support or recognition during the height of the epidemic.

II. Education and Resources

During the years 1983-1990, the most common place to find informational pamphlets or to learn about HIV/AIDS was at medical facilities like clinics. These facilities were frequented by those in the LGBTQ+ community at the time. For organizations like ACT UP and the NO/AIDS Task Force, it was logical to center their outreach programs around places the LGBTQ+ community already frequented. When I asked my interviewees where people would come in contact with educational materials concerning AIDS, many them described bowls of condoms as well as pamphlets and posters advocating for safe sex at the local gay bars. When I asked about the effectiveness of these practices, Teryl Lynn Foxx told me that for many patrons the bars were somewhere to escape and have a good time, not where people hoped to be educated on the epidemic that they faced daily.

Impact Magazine was one of the most prominent LGBT magazines during the 1980s. An article written in the magazine in February of 1984, called "Local Gay Community Views on AIDS" discusses the resources and education surrounding AIDS at the time. The article claims that while almost everyone surveyed agreed that AIDS was a great concern, and almost half knew someone with AIDS, the majority of the people did not know that there was a service to both help those who contracted AIDS and to answer questions about the disease. This article also states that almost no one interviewed had attended an educational meeting about AIDS, but almost all participants said they would if one were available. The lack of information for certain communities is also mentioned by Stephen Inrig when he discusses the inadequate resources in many Southern black communities where the social repercussions of being outed as gay were steep and where finding care to treat or learn how to prevent HIV/AIDS was not widley available.

Lisa Altman, who experienced sex work in the mid-1980s, knew and understood what to look out for, but she remembered being approached by those from outreach organizations like NO/AIDS and felt that it would have been a great possibility that she was approached as a white person before one of the women of color she worked alongside.

Lisa Altman, who experienced sex work in the mid-1980s, knew and understood what to look out for concerning AIDS. She also remembers being approached by those from outreach organizations like NO/AIDS and felt that it was likely she was approached before the women of color she worked beside because she was white.

Though many organizations did their best, much stood in the way of providing thorough and proper information to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS in New Orleans. These obstacles include the lack of government funding for research and outreach, and the fact that many groups were very grassroots in nature. The readiness for many of these outreach groups to target their aid to people that were most commonly white, CIS, gay men also made reaching everyone who was at risk extremely hard to accomplish.