The last fifteen years have yielded a wave of historical scholarship on HIV/AIDS in the United States. However, despite the fact that the epidemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and the poor since doctors first recognized the new disease in the early 1980s, our understanding of the history of HIV/AIDS in the United States remains largely rooted in the experiences and responses of middle-class white gay men. We need a much more diverse set of histories if we are to understand the ways that the epidemic has shaped the last four decades of U.S. history, and to draw out lessons for how to mitigate racial and economic disparities in public health crises going forward.

The papers that will make up this panel represent a collective attempt to trace a more varied and complex history of HIV/AIDS. They will tell stories of activism in places that are left out of most overarching narratives of the epidemic: in the shadow of the Bay Area tech economy, along the U.S.-Mexican border, in the burgeoning prison system, and in Black churches in the U.S. South. In doing so, they will invite us to look for histories of health and medicine well beyond the hospital or the laboratory, and point to ways that the places of everyday life shape and produce our understandings of health and illness.

Bringing these stories into the larger narrative of AIDS history is about more than just piecing together a more complete picture of responses to the epidemic over the last forty years. These papers document the creative work that people do to keep one another safe in communities that are often written off as passive or powerless. But those who do that work often have their shortcomings, and these papers will also draw out lessons from failures in the fight against AIDS in minoritized communities.

At the same time, these papers will all engage the ways that grassroots actors grappled with larger systems—changing regional, national, and global economies; state and federal budgets that prioritize mass incarceration over healthcare; and the respectability politics that weave through struggles for racial justice. In this way, these papers will connect histories of the fight against HIV/AIDS to a much larger set of political, economic, and social contexts.

The papers in this panel will point to a diverse, multivocal history of HIV/AIDS in the United States, at the same time that they connect the vulnerability of communities of color and poor people in the epidemic to much larger historical contexts. In this way, they will invite us to reconsider not just the history of one epidemic, but that ways that we think about illness and public health more broadly.