2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

June 2017 will mark 36 years since the first reported cases of AIDS among “41 (white) homosexual men.” We now know, in part from the work of all the people on this roundtable—activists, service providers, historians—that not only were those cases much more diverse than first reported, but as importantly that lesbians and gay men of color demanded, and actualized, an expansive response to AIDS that grew out of diverse activism over the course of four decades. This session features activists and historians in extended conversation and aims to record activists’ histories of HIV/AIDS activism and service that are included in neither queer narratives of AIDS nor straight versions of the recent past. We ask how collaborative projects between scholars and activists might trouble contemporary forms of queer liberalism, often devoid of conversations about racial and economic justice, and queer the history of AIDS.

This roundtable contextualizes our contemporary moment in the HIV/AIDS epidemic by emphasizing the ongoing crisis, its shifting demographic and what we can learn from the early epidemic to inform current debates about PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), and TasP (treatment as prevention). Throughout, we attend to the experiences of WSW (women who have sex with women) to resist narratives that emphasize lesbians support for gay men.

Finally, we expand the “pre-history” of AIDS activism and push against its purported “end” by posing questions about activists’ history in other social movements, past and present, including building lesbian of color feminism, Central American solidarity, queer economic justice and prison abolition.