AIDS and Queer Criminality

Ferd Eggan

Former AIDS Coordinator for the City of Los Angeles, independent scholar

(Estados Unidos)

In the early epidemic, what was to be named AIDS was identified by connection to various behaviors that were illegal in most places, subject to criminal penalties. Homosexual intercourse was the most widely known of these illegal activities. The US CDC guessed for some time that GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency, was related to use of drugs (poppers—amyl nitrate) by gay males.. Since the next cases were among injection drug users, something about these illicit life-styles— related to drug use-- led to the recognizable symptoms. 

The high prevalence of AIDS symptoms among Haitians was an inexplicable anomaly. Epidemiologists relied on the insularity imposed by law on these sub-populations to map the progress of the AIDS epidemic, and on their already-established surveillance of gay males in particular. So the criminal connection was already established, and has continued to mark the faces of people with AIDS and eventually all those with or suspected of having HIV infection. Not until 1985 could epidemiologists confirm that AIDS was a result of infection by a a previously unknown microorganism traveling through semen and blood. In the meantime, AIDS had lodged in public consciousness as a plague visited upon social outcasts—those engaged in sinful and criminal behaviors. To be criminal—potentially subject to prosecution for personal behaviors—is, in the view of the philosopher Michel Foucault, very much like what it is to be sick. That is, both criminals and the sick are subject to classification, surveillance, possible segregation, study and attempts to change the individual and control society. Historically, quarantine has been the edict applied to prevent the spread of contagion or illness from those already marked as ‘carriers” into the “general population,” with criminal penalties for the violation of quarantine. 

In the absence of effective treatment for AIDS, many lawmakers proposed quarantining all gay men and drug users. Haitians were indeed quarantined, in a concentration camp at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. Illegality has been an essential condition of much of the life of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender, genderqueer and intersex persons. Prostitution, pornography, inter-generational sex, drug use, unsafe sex, sexual activity in public or private are “crimes” said to characterize “queer” life. This illegality has been a constituent factor in the development of new sub-cultures, economies and geographies. If they are not jailed or killed by AIDS and other diseases, queer outlaws create connections that are exploited by new entrepreneurs. A particular case in point is the adoption of methamphetamine, or crystal, by gay men. Gay men have made crystal a sex drug par excellence. Through sex lines, the internet and clubs, crystal was popularized and then distributed. It powers fashion, music and very significant revenues. It provides livelihood for legal laboratories that produce the raw materials, and for criminal drug cookers and dealers. In addition club promoters, DJs, bartenders, dancers, waiters, actors, singers, manufacturers of musical and other entertainment media, and now the drug treatment and rehabilitation industry are part of the periphery of gay crystal use. Like the solar-powered radios brought by missionaries to the Amazon jungle, crystal is a technological marvel that has a devastating impact on indigenous same-sex cultures it enters. Mexico is a particularly important victim and now participant in the lucrative cross-border trade of crystal meth.

About Ferd Eggan

Ferd Eggan is an ageing gay white man living with AIDS in Los Angeles, California, USA.  He has been involved in political work and play since 1965, when he helped with voter registration in an SCLC project in Manning, South Carolina. He was active in the Gay Liberation Front in Chicago, Join Hands and June 28th Union in San Francisco, and ACT-UP in Chicago and Los Angeles.   He has made lightshows for rock bands at the Fillmore, video with Video Free America, and published numerous journal articles, poetry and fiction, including two books: Your LIFE Story by someone else, and Pornography. He worked as Principal of the Escuela Superior Puertorriqueña Pedro Albizu Campos, Executive Director of Being Alive, consultant to RAND, and AIDS Coordinator for the City of Los Angeles until his retirement in 2001. His own struggles with queerness, AIDS and depression have led him down many paths, both light and dark, and he works now researching philosophical and neuropsychological bases for discontent and social transformation.    He has collaborated with Cranky Dalton to create the videoblog, “Communiqués from the Cranky PWA” http://www.crankypwa.blogspot.com/, and with Fantasia X. Cleaver on the website project “Revolution is an Eternal Dream” at http://www.ferdeggan.net/.   You can email ferd@ferdeggan.net to contact him.

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