The AIDS Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s did not miss conservative Texas and its major cities Dallas and Houston. From prominent anti-gay sentiment, a silent Reagan administration, the Catholic church refusing to speak on HIV/AIDS prevention, to the racial and socioeconomic disparities between those infected by the virus, there did not seem to be much hope. At the time of the AIDS crisis, Homosexual behavior and sexual intercourse remained illegal in the United States until 2003 with the ruling of Lawrence v. Texas. Gay and other LGBT Black and Hispanic men have become greatly and disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. When the virus first started making its way through America’s gay communities in the 1980s, white gay men were the majority. Over time as treatments became more accessible to those with healthcare and money, the percentage of white gay males with the virus decreased and people of color’s numbers increased. These patients were and are members of multiple marginalized groups, ultimately placing them at a low socio-economic standing, and with an inadequate Texas health care system, treatment was difficult to obtain. The obstacles discrimination created for AIDS patients to receive sufficient care were access to insurance and affordable treatment, lack of equal and compassionate care, religious influences, and rhetoric that dominated the conversation that this was a “gay disease” to punish the sexually promiscuous. The AIDS crisis in Houston and Dallas, particularly in their gay neighborhoods, or gayborhoods, or Montrose and Oak Lawn, took hold of these cities and their communities. With a history of police harassment and discrimination in present memory, people in the LGBT community continued to feel unsafe in their own communities. Events in LGBT history helped prepare gay communities to become their own activists. After the Stonewall Riots in New York, a nationwide movement for LGBT rights was sparked leading to “an era of relative openness within the gay rights movement.”[1] The AIDS epidemic forced these communities to put aside any difference because their lives depended on it. LGBT people were forced to become their own activists and caregivers in their communities, creating bonds and strong neighborhoods that still exist today. This paper is to contribute to the growing study of LGBT history by analyzing how the AIDS crisis transformed the gay community in Texas, a state that is often overlooked in the context of the gay rights movement and the AIDS crisis. By examining the obstacles LGBT people and AIDS activists faced in major Texas cities, this paper argues how the AIDS epidemic helped build strong gay communities and helped bring LGBT into the mainstream.
Historical Context and the AIDS Virus
The first reports of what would later be labeled AIDS by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were issued in 1981. These reports focused on previously healthy young gay men who had contracted a rare form of pneumonia (pneumocystis pneumonia) that typically occurred in immune-compromised individuals. Next were reports of the appearance of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), a highly rare form of skin cancer. The CDC officials were looking for an underlying agent causing what seems to be targeting predominantly white gay males. soon the CDC documented cases where both pneumonia and KS. The epidemic of this infection and cancer duo became known as gay-related immune deficiency or GRID around August 1981. With more cases across the country, a more inclusive name was created for the new disease in the summer of 1982: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.[2]The most common transmissions of the virus are among men who have sex with men (MSM), injection drug users (IDU), and persons exposed through heterosexual contact. “The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses ruled that the virus itself should be referred to as HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which can progress into AIDS.”[3]When more people who had blood transfusions because they have hemophilia and female spouses of gay men who contracted AIDS were diagnosed, the face of the virus began to change from being a “gay disease.”
Between confusion in the medical community over what this disease was, how and if it could be treated, and how it is transmitted, the AIDS epidemic got a lot worse before it was better. The number of persons with AIDS reported to the CDC in 1981-1987 was 46,251. By 1993-1995, this number more than quadrupled to 211,909 before decreasing at the close of the decade.[4] The first demographic most affected were white gay males, usually in the middle or upper-level class. First, the white gay community was affected the most in the 80s, with 59.7% of cases in 1981-1987 and continued to drop to 42.4% in 1993-1995. Percentages of people of color affected by the virus continued to increase throughout the decades with cases of Black people with the virus consisting from 25.5% in 1981-1987 to 38% in 1993-1995. The Hispanics and Latino communities also follow this trend, rising from 14% to 18.4% in the same respective time frames. The South, unlike other regions in the United States, had an increase in cases and in the percentage of the national whole. Starting with 25.7% in the first timeframe and rising to 34.8% in the 1993-1995 timeframe.[5]To compare, the Northeast, which includes New York, went down from 38.9% of cases to 30.3%. With Southern and the Texas local governments dragging their feet to address the AIDS crisis correctly through education and treatment, the disease was able to spread more quickly.
There was an unwillingness by those in power to respond appropriately to the AIDS epidemic. The Reagan administration stayed almost silent on the epidemic and slashed the CDC’s budget, crippling research progress. American blood bankers pulled potentially tainted blood supplies, resulting in the deaths of nearly an entire generation of hemophiliacs.[6]In 1983, “President Ronald Reagan’s senior advisor Pat Buchanan published an opinion piece in the New York Post about AIDS, wherein Buchanan wrote, “The poor homosexuals, they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”[7] Conservative political leaders in Texas also contributed to the blatant negligence of the spreading AIDS crisis, with some holding similar views to Buchanan. “A 1984 letter to the editor appearing in the Dallas Morning News held the gay community responsible for infecting the nation’s blood banks with HIV and condemned “this particular perverse segment of our society” with death.”[8]Some even argued that allocating federal or state funds to AIDS research and treatment would be “promoting a homosexual agenda.”[9] This belief and rhetoric that people with AIDS were being punished for their sexual deviance and promiscuity dominated most of the mainstream discourse on AIDS.
The rapid spread of the disease meant a rise in the demand for specified medical and hospice care for AIDS patients. “Houston’s doctors began treating patients with GRID only five months following the CDC’s initial report of the disease, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston saw its first AIDS patient in November 1981.”[10]After the period of the sexual liberation movement, gay sexual promiscuity was high with their newfound safety in nightclubs and bathhouses being a safe place to look for sexual partners. Antibiotics for other STDs helped solve the consequences of unprotected sex for males; the disease did not seem to mitigate the newfound sexual freedom among the gay community. AIDS was a complicated new disease that science lacked solid answers to, and people with AIDS often struggle for access to the potentially life-prolonging treatments available. Houston possessed both the largest medical center and the first AIDS-specific hospital in the country but was unable to secure drug trials and decrease AIDS death rates in the city. “Similarly, Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, the county’s only public hospital, remained overcrowded, leaving people with AIDS waiting for experimental treatments, sometimes for the rest of their short lives.”[11]The AIDS of the 1980s was not something that could be managed by the strict drug regimens that are available today.
Texas did not have a debate on how much funding should be allocated to help fight this disease and find a cure. There was a debate in Texas about “whether or not the state’s public health officials should quarantine people with HIV” as the social perception crafted by popular media left policymakers and normal people ignorant to the fact the disease could not be transmitted as casually as they feared.[12]The debate began in October 1985 after a Houston man who contracted AIDS told his doctor he would continue working as a prostitute despite the diagnosis. Houston’s Health Director James Haughton responded by threatening to place him under psychiatric evaluation if he was caught having sex. This received criticism from both the Dallas and Houston Gay Political Caucuses, but Haughton stated that he had “never worried about setting precedents if I thought they were justified…I don’t think it’s a civil rights issue.”[13] Prominent Austin gay activist and former representative in the Texas legislature Glen Maxey reported in a 2011 interview that “the state’s quarantine law held that if a public health authority suspected an individual had a certain disease, he or she could arrest and detain that person until they were no longer infectious.”[14]Maxey reiterated this point during his visit hosted by the Baylor Democrats to Baylor University on November 19, 2019. Despite a lack of government support and comprehension of the best ways to deal with AIDS, scientists, and members of the medical community honed on finding a treatment. The most effective treatment against AIDS, Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) would not be created until 1996. This treatment essentially attacks the virus was a “triple cocktail” of drugs to lower patients’ viral counts to undetectable numbers.[15]The 90s in general brought relief to those with AIDS in Texas with different acts of legislation to protect those diagnosed with AIDS from job termination and to increase federal spending for ASOs.
Houston’s hospital M.D. Anderson was the only hospital willing to accept and treat AIDS patients for a period of time in 1981-82. At the head was Charles “Mickey” LeMaistre, a specialist in pulmonary medicine and no stranger to medical mysteries. In 1978, LeMaistre hired Guy Newell to direct the cancer prevention program at M.D. Anderson in Houston, and brought Peter W. Mansell, an oncologist, and epidemiologist, over as well.[16]Mansell became the point man to the gay community in Houston along with Sue Cooper, an M.D. Anderson social worker. They established connections with gay leaders and handed out literature about AIDS symptoms, transmission, and prevention around the gay bar scene. Mansell helped found the Houston AIDS Foundation to raise money for research, the first ASO in Texas. After fighting with the Board of Regents who was trying to protect the University of Texas’ image by not focusing on AIDS patients, LeMaistre decided M.D. Anderson would no longer treat AIDS patients in general. Medical professionals and volunteers needed to fight against time, a lack of government support, and a warped public perception of this disease in order to care for patients. Under the Reagan administration, the LGBT community and those affected by AIDS were told through inaction the federal government did not care for them. Gay men were the most affected with 90% of Texas’ 748 AIDS cases by the end of 1985.[17]There were no drugs in 1985 to treat AIDS, nor were there effective AIDS management treatments. A shadow of uneasiness came down on the state’s gay communities, which had already suffered a history of police harassment and discrimination.
AIDS and People of Color
Research and publications tend to leave out crucial points of LGBT persons’ intersectionality with other marginalized groups by labeling AIDS a “gay man’s” issue in the community. However, gay men and transsexual people of color were disproportionately affected by the AIDS epidemic, with the Black and Latino communities being highly affected during the latter part of this era’s AIDS crisis. “In the early 1980s, most AIDS cases occurred among whites. However, cases among blacks increased steadily and by 1996, more cases occurred among blacks than any other racial/ethnic population. Cases among Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaska Natives have increased also.”[18] The mainstream response to the AIDS epidemic was focused on white gay males, leading the Latino community, particularly in Dallas, to remain unaware of their vulnerability to the infection, believing “that AIDS only strikes the Anglo gay man.”[19]The fallacy that AIDS was for the white gay man put communities of color at risk and when the AIDS epidemic shifted to ravage those communities as well it became vastly overlooked.
The LGBT community has its own issues with racism with white straight-passing gay males dominating the conversation. Members of Texas’ LGBT population who were active in the gay community were mostly white, gay men, in their twenties and thirties, well educated, and middle-class. Even for somewhere as socially and culturally diverse as Houston, race and class discrimination were still sensitive issues for the city’s gay community. The challenge of reconciling the gayborhoods with southern conservatism and the rising liberalism that comes with becoming more cosmopolitan kept the community’s subgroups from becoming close. Quotas were also in place at many of the more popular gay clubs, including Houston’s Old Plantation which “restricted access to those other than white, masculine-appearing homosexuals.” [20]Bars owned by heterosexuals, corporate chains, or gay businessmen who lacked a political connection to the LGBT movement were where gays of color experienced the most difficulties and discriminatory policies.[21]The internal segregation of the community and discriminatory preferences for nightclubs and bars did not keep AIDS from reaching all intersectional identities of the LGBT community.
To help these communities outside of white gay men, gender and race-specific ASOs and other AIDS organizations came into being to serve the needs of those patients. As members of already marginalized groups in society, Black and Latino gay and LGBT people did not occupy the same levels of power and privilege as their white counterparts. Between 1983 and 1989, the number of Houston AIDS cases among Latinos increased from 6 percent to 13 percent; the needs of Houston’s HIV-positive population were undoubtedly changing.[22] In Dallas, Latinos comprised only five percent of the city’s AIDS cases and a number of initiatives and organizations aimed at helping Latinos with AIDS came about in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Laura Trujillo-Koster organized Project Esperanza, or Project Hope, as a support group for Latinos with HIV. “In 1991 Project Esperanza partnered with AIDS Interfaith Network (AIN), a religiously-based Dallas organization founded in 1986. With assistance from AIN, Project Esperanza helped Latinos with HIV/AIDS work successfully with other AIDS service organizations in Dallas. Project Esperanza saw about 135 clients in 1992.”[23]Groups like Project Esperanza dealt with not only helping members of the Latino community with AIDS medically but helped Latinos with the HIV-positive status cope spiritually and emotionally through the process.
With organizations particularly focusing on the needs and preferences of the Hispanic community popping up in the early 90s, it was not long before the Black community needed the same specialized services. Cases of Houston’s black population with AIDS had jumped from 12 percent in 1983 to 20 percent in 1989.[24] In 1995, more Black people than Caucasians had been diagnosed with AIDS in Houston, comprising 44 percent of cases that year. Both men and women, straight and LGBT were at risk for infection, and in the 1990s, Black women with AIDS were a major concern. A Texas Department of Health study in 1993 stated that Black/African American teenage mothers were at the most risk for HIV/AIDS infection, who had likely been infected through unprotected sex and risked passing the virus to their children.[25]Before the AIDS crisis became this prevalent of an issue in the Black community across all sexualities, Houston’s Black population continued to try and separate themselves from the issue. Members of the medical community began planning to make an old hospital in north Houston into an AIDS hospital, and LeMaistre, the head at M.D. Anderson was receiving political pressure from the community and the medical board at his hospital. The Southwest Institute for Immunological and Infectious Diseases, this new AIDS hospital, “encountered a different type of opposition from the black community in north Houston, who wanted nothing to do with SIIID, not because they worried about isolating the gay community but because the institute would bring gays into their neighborhood.”[26]This quickly spread beyond the black community in north Houston, and the constituents wrote state senators to take action. Black men who have sex with men experienced great health care disparities because of the multiple marginalized groups they represented: Black, LGBT, and often AIDS diagnosed. This issue was constant across the country and continues to be an issue today as the disease dominates this subgroup disproportionately to the national population.
Even into the 21stcentury, Black/African American people are infected with HIV, a trend consistent with all reports on the AIDS epidemic starting in 1981. In 1990, Black/African Americans represented 13 percent of Dallas’s AIDS cases and again, race-specific organizations popped up to help the community. Members of the black community formed a nonprofit organization called Renaissance III Inc. in response to the AIDS epidemic’s impact on their friends and loved ones in 1993. “Their goal was to extend the reach of support to African Americans with AIDS in culturally sensitive ways. By creating services that were more tuned into the particular needs of the black community, Renaissance III Inc.’s leadership hoped to lower that community’s viral load.”[27] ASOs that had formed in the 1980s set the standard for AIDS services and advocacy, but it was focused on the gay white male population that the disease first plagued. As the 20th century was coming to a close, the ASOs needed to adapt their efforts to help other demographics. Communities of color to this day are afflicted by the AIDS crisis because of stigma, poverty, racial inequality, and a lack of access to health care.
AIDS in Texas’s Gayborhoods
Houston and Dallas saw the greatest number of AIDS cases in Texas, and the cities and their gay communities were drawn together by tragedy and against common enemies of disease, discrimination, and equitable access to health care. “By October 1983, the state of Texas had sixty-nine reported cases of AIDS, including thirty-seven in the Houston area and eighteen in Dallas County, and thirty-four had died.”[28]with 97% involving gay or bisexual men. Gay neighborhoods in these cities grew in population and size during the 1970s. In Texas the popular gay neighborhoods, or “gayborhoods”, were the Montrose District in Houston, Oak Lawn District in Dallas, Midtown in San Antonio, and Travis Heights in Austin. Austin does not have a historic gay neighborhood of the same significance as say Montrose and Oak Lawn, but that is only because Austin has been considerably more open to sexual expression. In these gayborhoods, gay men could make up for decades of sexual repression that they underwent in their formative years whilst in the closet. With rich culture and interpersonal connection available to people in the LGBT, gayborhoods and their key leaders started to combat the AIDS crisis in their own ways. Parades and flamboyant fundraisers to both express sexual freedom while advocating for AIDS awareness and funding took place across the country. Dallas’s first gay organizations were typically started as social initiatives to build a community outside of the bars and nightclubs. They tended to shield away from political gestures, until the summer of 1972 when the Circle of Friends organized the city’s first Gay Freedom Parade. “Gay Pride marchers in Houston joined thousands across the country Sunday in parades ending a week of activities designed to raise awareness and money for AIDS victims.”[29] Organizers urged participants to spend their money on local organizations that offer counseling, education, and service for AIDS victims. In the 70s, Gay Rights groups in Texas were fighting against legislation that criminalized same-sex sexual behavior, which was added with a revision to Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code in 1973.[30] In 1975, state representative Craig Washington of Houston led an effort to repeal the law. Gay communities in both Houston and Dallas had grown tremendously in only a few decades before the AIDS epidemic began devastating the communities in 1981. However, these safe spaces were mostly gay bars, clubs, and bathhouses with sometimes-risky sexual behavior, contributing to the spread of the AIDS virus through gay communities around the country, including Houston and Dallas.
Houston was home to the largest gay and lesbian community in the South on the eve of the AIDS crisis. The city’s gay political community emerged in the 1970s, but the gay subculture of Houston dates back to the 1920s. “By the 1970s, Houston’s Montrose neighborhood had emerged as the city’s gay center, where local leaders lived, social functions took place, and a distinctive gay culture flourished.”[31]Houston’s nightlife had been integral to the development of a conscious gay community with dozens of bars lining the streets of Montrose. These bars included all parts of LGBT nightlife and culture: drag shows, swingers bars, and bars known for being home to particular “types” of gay men. Others soon became synonymous with danger, drugs, and hustling in and around their locations. The neighborhoods soon found political organizations to advocate on their own behalf. Houston’s Gay Political Caucus’ primary efforts were on encouraging the LGBT community and its supporters to vote in local elections and identifying candidates sympathetic to their cause. Houston’s higher levels of diversity and eclectic nature award the gay men of Houston a greater degree of social freedom than their counterparts in Dallas. However, police brutality and gay violence from homosexual perpetrators made Houston’s LGBT population remember they were far from safe. In response to the AIDS crisis, M.D. Anderson in Houston became the epicenter for responding to AIDS patients.[32]Texas’ first ASO started in Houston in 1982 under Dr. Michael McAdory and faculty members of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. This group formed the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Committee and pioneered Houston’s AIDS education efforts.[33]The committee became the KS/AIDS Foundation in May 1983 and offered people with AIDS relief from the psychosocial effects of the disease. The KS/AIDS Foundation created a network of medical professionals, support groups, volunteers, and people with AIDS to help patients “obtain financial assistance, medical referrals to local physicians, and social services, including counseling, housing help, food relief, transportation, and legal assistance.”[34]The Foundation even created a buddy system to match up people with AIDS to provide emotional support and companionship. Houstonians with AIDS learned they would not suffer alone, and an element of compassion was brought to the fight against AIDS. The KS/AIDS Foundation started the world’s first gay-community-funded AIDS resource center in October 1984 called the McAdory House to care for indigent people with AIDS. The Montrose Clinic started as a general clinic for the gay neighborhood run by volunteers who ran this donation-funded clinic in hope of helping the city’s LGBT population receive medical care without discrimination. In 1982, the Montrose Clinic evolved and began its first AIDS program called the Program for AIDS Counseling and Evaluation, or PACE. “By 1988 the clinic boasted a bilingual hotline whose staff answered questions, scheduled testing appointments, and referred callers to other medical or service agencies to suit their individual needs, treatment for pneumocystis pneumonia, and occasionally, enrollment in clinical trials.”[35] Houston’s religious groups even cooperated with the gay community to care for AIDS patients. Reverend Ralph Lasher, an Episcopal priest who himself was gay, became the director of programs at the Montrose Clinic in 1988 and familiarized himself with the gay community in order to best serve its needs.[36] Lasher hoped to provide a nurturing and spiritual atmosphere for persons living with HIV/AIDS that was often lacking in the physically and emotionally sanitized setting of hospitals and clinics. Both Houston’s Montrose Clinic and KS/AIDS Foundation were able to secure experimental drug treatments to help AIDS patients later that year.
Dallas’s more conservative atmosphere slowed the growth of a mobilized gay population and the city’s white-collar identity certainly helped mold the city’s gay organizations, which tended to be relatively low-key. Dallas’s gay men typically held a comfortable social status by passing as straight and “did not, with great frequency, identify as a minority group, making it a challenge to amass a politically motivated gay and lesbian population”[37]Dallas had few resources to rely on when the AIDS epidemic came in. A local chapter of the AIDS Action Project was established, and its co-founder Howie Daire criticized the slow pace in which government funds were moving to nonprofits. The DAAP became the mediators between those affected by AIDS and the removed government institutions. The DAAP worked with the Dallas Gay Alliance and other local ASOs to educate the public with pamphlets and public forums and later a hotline to answer AIDS-related questions.[38] The spread of AIDS in Dallas was slow and low-profile, but the clinics and ASOs knew they would soon be contending with the same level of problems as Houston. The Oak Lawn Counseling Center (OLCC) helped AIDS patients cope, financially, emotionally, and with their diagnoses. Similar to Houston’s KS/AIDS Foundation, the OLCC created a Buddy Project in 1983 and worked to expand a home care housing program.[39]
It was easy for AIDS patients in Dallas to feel that even the most basic forms of care were out of reach. The local government and the city of Dallas had spent little money on AIDS relief efforts and education, leading Dallas’s LGBT political organizations to organize AIDS relief foundations. Ultimately, it was the AIDS epidemic that bulldozed over a variety of conflicts and equalized the gay community in Dallas. Neighborhoods such as Montrose and Oak Lawn made it their mission to create support networks with AIDS service organizations, or ASOs. Just a few years prior, these neighborhoods were rallying together with Gay Political Caucuses to oppose police harassment, violence, and discrimination. Houston and Dallas were practically indistinguishable from one another as they confronted problems in state and local governments who were unwilling to work with the gay community and their ASOs for the purpose of health promotion.
The shortcomings of Texas’s state health care system were revealed during the AIDS crisis. Hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare workers hesitated to provide care for those without insurance and individuals with infectious diseases. In order to survive, LGBT people had to become their own advocates and activists to raise awareness for AIDS. “The state of health insurance for the unemployed, or those unable to purchase private insurance in Texas when the AIDS epidemic hit, made affordable healthcare nearly inaccessible for persons with AIDS.”[40]Texas’ geographical and cultural position in the Bible Belt adds a religious element to the LGBT movements during the AIDS crisis. The prevalence of religion, particularly evangelicals in the south, added to the anti-gay sentiment, but “churches and local religious leaders carried some of the major local AIDS relief initiative.” This growing relationship based on compassion helped strengthen the growing gay community in Houston (Bundschuh). The religious nature of Texas created a unique alliance between gay organizations and religious institutions that continued throughout the AIDS epidemic. “Earl Shelp, the AIDS Interfaith Network, and the Bering United Methodist Church became major players in the fight against AIDS in Houston. While bars and nightclubs became a safe haven for the LGBT community and made it easier for gay men and women to find sexual partners, it made gay sex synonymous with promiscuousness in the minds of many. Still, police departments “often used their authority to extort payments from bar owners in exchange for a degree of protection from raids, a practice termed “gayola” by journalists.[41]Bolstered by over a decade of gay rights activism, LGBT people in Houston and Dallas created organizations to care for AIDS patients, they challenged discriminatory legislation that unfairly targeted LGBT people and needlessly increased the obstacles for people with AIDS, pushing for reforms in Texas’ inadequate health care system.
Public Condemnation and Obstacles
Prominent anti-gay sentiment in the United States at the time was based on religious beliefs that saw homosexuality as unnatural and against the teachings of God. Evidence of this is the Catholic church refusing to speak on ways to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. In Pope John Paul’s first speech specifically on AIDS, he “reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s position to condoms and homosexual activity.”[42]He went on to explain how seeking AIDS prevention “based on recourse to means and remedies that violate the authentic sense of human sexuality.” The United States government, an allegedly secular political body, also had a history of homophobia and discrimination proposed in legislation. “A 1950 U.S. Senate report described homosexuals as “sex perverts,” and defined “’those who engage in unnatural sexual acts’ and homosexuals [as] perverts who may be broadly defined as ‘persons of either sex who as adults engage in sexual activities with persons of the same sex.’In doing so, the federal government effectively decided that homosexual behavior was inherently deviant behavior that defied nature and decency.”[43]The basis for this was that at this time, homosexuality was deemed a mental illness in the first American Psychiatric Association’s DSM from 1952 till its removal in 1973. The inclusion, however, coupled with the US government’s legislation against homosexual behavior perpetuated this idea that gay people, and anyone in the LGBT spectrum, were inherently perverted and deviant.
Politicians labeling AIDS a plague for the sexually promiscuous and continuing the rhetoric that AIDS was their punishment made government involvement in ASOs scarce. Despite activists’ efforts in Houston, Dallas, and across the country, “segments of society continued to cling to an outdated conceptualization that viruses are capable of judgment and illness is a punishment for behavior.”[44]Attitudes that “characterize AIDS as God’s punishment of homosexuals for their sins”, such as evangelical Rev. Jerry Falwell’s opinion, “would provide fertile grounds for AIDS to take root and spread rapidly.”[45] By treating the crisis as a political issue, it ignores the fact that anyone could be afflicted by the disease. Texas politicians continued to neglect to address the epidemic. Abandoned by political institutions, “AIDS activists in Houston and Dallas battled rhetoric with the reasoning in response to the AIDS crisis.”[46]The virus spread through sexual conduct and intravenous drug use and politicians, news media, and far-right groups used this rhetoric of the plague to keep state and federal funds should not be spent on promoting a homosexual agenda. Texas’ local leadership spent a minimal amount of effort caring for the sick. “Nationally, states spent an average of $2,747 per case of AIDS to fund service organizations. Texas, however, distributed only $473”[47]This rhetoric dominated the mainstream discourse on AIDS across the country, leaving ASOs and other supporting organizations to constantly battle the rhetoric with reasoning and education to respond to the AIDS crisis.
Texas’ AIDS Activism, Platform, and Changes
Advocates pushed to secure the most basic levels of care. Few AIDS patients were covered by health insurance and because of the disease’s lengthy and debilitating effects, patients had been terminated from their jobs, losing all health insurance. Since people with AIDS now had pre-existing conditions, they could not get health insurance elsewhere. Unemployment was a very real threat to Texas gay men with AIDS, and with job termination comes the loss of insurance benefits. Out-of-pocket care was prohibitively expensive and health care costs in Texas had been rising. “The cost of delaying death stood at about $40,000 per year. The average median income of persons with AIDS had declined from $20,000 per year to only $6,000, with over half of respondents revealing they spent their entire savings on medical care.”[48] Note the wording “cost in delaying death.” This was not a treatment towards a cure, this disease was Death’s calling card. Government-sponsored health insurance was not available to gay men in Dallas and Houston, with “Texas ranked forty-ninth in the nation for its ratio of Medicaid recipients to persons living below the poverty level” in 1980.[49]People in the LGBT community in Houston and Dallas had to become their own caregivers and activists. Political activists who were born out of the Civil Rights Era and worked in gay rights battles in the 1960s and 1970s used the skills they had to raise awareness about AID and create institutions. They fought to protect patients with AIDS and secure their right to equal treatment. Community activists struggled to bring to light the horrors of AIDS and used their platforms to create AIDS prevention efforts and awareness campaigns, and raise money for research and experimental drugs. The gay community and their allies helped amend state law and challenged policies regarding medicine, health insurance, and employment protection. Political leaders and activists such as Glen Maxey, Bill Nelson, Terry Tebedo, William Wayborn of the Dallas Gay Alliance (DGA), and Sue Lovell and Annise Parker of the Houston Gay Political Caucus (HGPC) formed the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby of Texas in the summer of 1986.[50] Together they gathered support from legislators and began debating the contents of the quarantine statutes to protect the due process for Texas’s gay population. The LGRLT helped introduce bills to balance methods to stop the spread of disease with protecting the rights of the gay community. “One of these, HB 1206, held that HIV test results must remain confidential except when required by law to report test results to the appropriate agencies in compliance with the Communicable Disease Prevention and Control Act. By lobbying for confidentiality requirements, Maxey and the LGRL could help prevent, for instance, employers, police officers, and others in a position of relative authority from becoming aware of an individual’s HIV status, therefore removing one of many barriers that kept those at risk from getting tested.”[51]Other bills and political maneuvers by Maxey and fellow activists successfully protected the rights of the gay community as AIDS was added to the list of communicable diseases on the final day of the first 1987 session of the Texas legislature. ASOs sought to alter the discussion on AIDS by maintaining hotlines, distributing pamphlets and other reading materials about the disease to the community, and hosting lectures and informational events where people could come and learn about AIDS. State and local authorities operated out of fear of AIDS, and the state’s inaction greatly affected gay communities in Houston and Dallas. The communities continued to grow in size and in political consciousness and provided services the state did not. The efforts of organizations in the gay community are triumphs in a history based in loss and tragedy.
Conclusion
The radical gay liberation movement was picking up during the sexual revolution in the 70s and continued through the AIDS crisis despite great loss of life and tragedy. With strong communities being built out of necessity, gay neighborhoods became a place of a growing counterculture and a diverse demographic. AIDS limited the ability of certain gay men who could previously pass and live their lives in the public sphere as straight. AIDS threatened and did out gay men because of the disease’s physical effects and tolls on the body. They found themselves in a marginalized group so many of them were able to avoid for most of their lives. Members of the LGBT community had to rally together, despite skin color and AIDS diagnosis status because their lives depended on it. ASOs and political organizations had to battle persistent rhetoric that they were being punished for their sexuality. Through political organizations and movements, the gay communities were able to advocate for themselves and give themselves a voice. Through neighborhoods’ efforts to raise money and awareness for the disease, LGBT culture and popular culture started growing in these cities as well as acceptance of LGBT people in the United States, and even in Texas. Today, these cities are rich with LGBT representation and culture and continue to battle the conservative politics that come with living in the South. The AIDS crisis was a tragedy for the LGBT community, but from the ashes, the community continues to rise.
[1]Molly Ellen Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community: The Aids Crisis in Houston and Dallas, 1981-1996” (M.A., University of North Texas, 2014), accessed September 19, 2019, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1719519046/abstract/AEC241363D364118PQ/1.
[2]Ibid.25-26.
[3]Roxanna Asgarian, “Timeline: The History of HIV/AIDS in Houston,” Houstonia, March 2018, accessed December 5, 2019, https://www.houstoniamag.com/articles/2018/2/28/hiv-aids-timeline-houston.
[4]BU Records. University Committee on AIDS Records, 1980-1989, Undated (Bulk 1987-1988). (Baylor University. Committee on AIDS., 1980).
[5]Number and Percentage of Persons with AIDS, by Selected Characteristics and Period of Report – United States, 1981-2000, HIV and AIDS, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 1, 2001).
[6]Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
[7]Patrick Buchanan, “AIDS Disease: It’s Nature Striking Back,” New York Post(New York, May 24, 1983).
[8]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community,”55.
[9]Ibid.53.
[10]Ibid.26.
[11]Ibid.10.
[12]Ibid.58.
[13]Bruce Nichols, “AIDS Victim Enters Hospital after Surveillance by Police,” Dallas Morning News, October 3, 1985.
[14]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community,”62.
[15]Ibid.98.
[16]James S. Olson, “Disease, Dollars, and Death: The Rise and Fall of the Institute for Immunological and Infectious Disorders, Houston, Texas, 1984-1987.,” Journal of South Texas23 (Spring 2010): 38.
[17]Texas. Bureau of HIV and STD Prevention, Texas HIV/STD Community Resource Directory.(Austin, Tex: Texas Deptof Health, Bureau of HIV and STD Prevention, 1996).
[18]Number and Percentage of Persons with AIDS, by Selected Characteristics and Period of Report – United States, 1981-2000.
[19]Michael Quintanilla, “Informing Hispanics About AIDS,” Dallas Morning News, August 3, 1988.
[20]James Thomas Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South(Rutgers University Press, 2001), 295.
[21]Ibid.296-97.
[22]Norma Martin and Jo Ann Zuniga, “Minorities’ AIDS Fight Going Slow – Poverty, Culture Inhibit Progress,” Houston Chronicle, September 9, 1990.
[23]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”95.
[24]BU Records. University Committee on AIDS Records, 1980-1989, (Bulk 1987-1988).
[25]Joann Schulte, “Dallas County Reports 26% of Texas AIDS Cases,” Dallas Morning News, October 6, 1983.
[26]Olson, “Disease, Dollars, and Death: The Rise and Fall of the Institute for Immunological and Infectious Disorders, Houston, Texas, 1984-1987,”46.
[27]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[28]Ibid.
[29]Haswell M. “Buster” Dean, “Gay Pride Parades Focus Funds, Nation’s Attention on AIDS,” Houston Chronicle, June 29, 1987, sec. 1, accessed September 19, 2019.
[30]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[31]Ibid.
[32]Olson, “Disease, Dollars, and Death: The Rise and Fall of the Institute for Immunological and Infectious Disorders, Houston, Texas, 1984-1987.”
[33]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[34]Ibid.35.
[35]Ibid.37.
[36]Ibid.
[37]Ibid.
[38]Gregory S. Thielemann, Richard K. Scotch, and Wolfgang Bielefeld, “The Ryan White Act in Dallas,” Policy Studies JournalVol. 27, no. No. 4 (1999): 809–825.
[39]Ibid.
[40]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[41]Ibid.
[42]Bob Tutt, “Pope Calls for Global Strategy to Combat AIDS,” Houston Chronicle(Houston, November 16, 1989), sec. A, accessed December 5, 2019, https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AWNB&docref=news/0ED7AF878BA68EF0&f=basic.
[43]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[44]Olson, “Disease, Dollars, and Death: The Rise and Fall of the Institute for Immunological and Infectious Disorders, Houston, Texas, 1984-1987.”
[45]Ibid.
[46]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[47]Ibid.
[48]“Interim Report of the Insurance Committee,” Texas House of Representatives, 68thLegislature, Austin, TX, 1984, 219.
[49]Bundschuh, “Cowboys, ‘Queers,’ and Community.”
[50]Ibid.
[51]Ibid.
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BRIT LAVERGNE 