San Francisco Chronicles - Thursday, May 31, 2001
Eric Rofes

I saw few images of lesbians and gay men on television or in movie theaters.

None of my Harvard professors ever discussed homosexuality. When I informed classmates that I was gay, most were clueless about gay culture; I was often the first homosexual with whom they'd ever knowingly conversed.

Fast forward 25 years.

I am a professor of education at a rural state university 300 miles north of San Francisco. I teach one "queer studies" course, but policy matters related to the rights of lesbians and gay men emerge in all of my classes. For the most part, my students are unfazed, often nonchalant about these matters. Even in Humboldt County, most have gay friends or relatives; all have lived through the cultural transformation ignited by Ellen DeGeneres' coming out on national TV as a lesbian and the gays-in-the-military era.

"If AIDS hadn't happened, gay people would still be in the closet with no civil rights protections and zero public credibility," one of my students told me recently.

I'm not so sure.

While conventional wisdom attributes the transformation of cultural attitudes toward homosexuality to AIDS activism, for me, a more complex picture emerges.

No one can deny that the nation's attitudes have been transformed during the past two decades: What was once seen as a marginal radical movement of gender heretics and sexual deviants has now become broadly accepted as a liberal civil rights cause.

Yet, attributing this transformation primarily to AIDS, misses the mark for two reasons:

First, the epidemic provided lesbian and gay leaders with public visibility, access to the media and new-found resources for building a social movement. At the same time, however, it reintroduced a destructive link between homosexuality and disease. It also took the lives of a huge number of gay male leaders, and forced the remaining lesbian and gay activists to shift a large part of their efforts from gay liberation to AIDS activism.

Nowhere is that trade-off more apparent than in San Francisco.

Two decades into AIDS, we have dozens of solid, well-funded AIDS organizations, some with multimillion-dollar budgets. Most surviving lesbian and gay groups limp along, inadequately funded, underdeveloped and without broad constituencies. We have ambitious community-based planning to combat AIDS, yet there is no similarly ambitious plan promoting the overall health of the city's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations.

Crediting the transformation of our nation's understanding of homosexuality to AIDS misses the mark for another reason: An activist gay movement existed before AIDS and continued during two decades of AIDS organizing. Social movements in the United States typically move from the margin to the center of the culture after 20 or 30 years of activism. In this century, this has been true of the women's movement, the disability rights movement and Chicano/Latino community organizing.

We'll never know what the path would have looked like absent AIDS. But to attribute all the progress to AIDS rather than to gay community organizing, seems deeply misguided.

Individuals and organizations who have spent two decades marshaling gay political power, fighting homophobia in the military and in public schools and advocating for change within religious denominations may have been the primary forces igniting this transformation.

When I attend my 25th college reunion next week, I want my classmates to understand the value of my work on gay liberation as well as my efforts to fight AIDS. And I want them to understand that, while the two have been closely linked, each is a distinct and noble cause.

As we face the third decade of AIDS in the United States, I also hope the world will come to understand that we need parallel efforts: One fighting HIV, the other continuing to eradicate homophobia.
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