S+T
The moral politics of HIV-prevention during the COVID pandemic seen to be a hedonistic medium for immoral sex, rather than a public health-oriented prevention mechanism. Sex with condoms had been graced with such a virtuosity that its abandonment conjured the agony of the AIDS epidemic. This misplaced grief led prominent British AIDS charities to decry that PrEP as an HIV-prevention tool was in fact “dangerous” to queer communities. Quite bleakly, the homophobic revulsion towards “promiscous” gay sex during the AIDS crisis became subsumed into the sexual politics of gay men today. Just as the state weaponized these sexual moralizations to justify their lack of public health action during the AIDS epidemic, these gay men laid the groundwork for the British government to do just the same with PrEP. The NHS England seemed persuaded by these British AIDS charities. In the UK, new drugs, such as PrEP, must receive federal funding for the public to receive them at no cost. And the NHS
had no intention to fund PrEP. An NHS spokesperson stated that funding PrEP would hinder the development of other treatments. Despite the fact that PrEP did not necessarily prevent the funding of any other medication specifically, the spokesperson stated that PrEP could take away funding for children’s cystic fibrosis treatment, falsely pitting the purity and innocence of children against queer communities. This spokesperson’s evocation of children sharpened the contrast of the ‘promiscuity pill’ against a sexually-pure heterosexual public. Thankfully, in 2016, a British High Court ordered that the NHS England was required to fund PrEP. In their coverage of the decision, the Daily Mail was quick to point attention to the £20 million in annual ‘taxpayer money’ that was required to make PrEP available. Nevertheless, the NHS still held their ‘uncertainties’ over how to effectively roll out PrEP, prompting them to initiate the three-year long Impact Trial, leaving queer communities further in suspense. The Impact Trial, according to the NHS England, aimed to provide quantitative research to plan for an effective distribution of the drug. The trial allowed 26,000 participants who came from groups designated to be the most “at-risk” for HIV transmission: men who have sex with men, trans people, and people whose partners live with HIV. The 26,000 figure was a mere fraction of the total populations of these communities and excluded those who were not deemed to fit within these specific risk categories, leaving thousands waiting in line or excluded altogether. All in all, the Impact Trial did not seem incredibly necessary. This was certainly the position of LGBTQ+ activists, who repeatedly advocated for an immediate end to the trial. ACT UP London held a series of protests that lead with the slogan #WeWantPrEPNow, demanding for PrEP’s public availability. According to a doctor from the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, nine men contracted HIV while waiting to be placed on the trial by the time it ended in early 2020. F, and for these activists, was each was a transmission that could have been prevented. The Impact Trial vividly echoes Larry Kramer’s criticism of the American clinical trials during the AIDS crisis. The trials justify state public health apprehension both through their scientific rationalism and their mobilization of sexual moralism, reducing the state’s obligation to promptly respond to HIV/AIDS. +++ COVID became a rife cultural moment for the belief that viral transmission oughtis to be blamed on each other. New videos and images of large maskless gatherings seemed to go viral on social media each week, met with indignant responses at the perceived irresponsibility and recklessness of those not following proper public health guidelines. Anti-maskers and COVID-deniers became the premier source of condemnation for the hundreds of thousands of deaths to the virus, not the lackluster state public health response. Similarly for HIV, the transfer of state public health responsibilities to its people can be reflected today in the criminalization of individuals that do not disclose their HIV status to sexual partners. In some ways, this criminalization is the most insidious outcome of the state’s abdication of public health accountability—why are individuals transmitting the virus the criminals and not the government that fails to take necessary efforts to prevent transmission? At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in May 2020, the 56 Dean Street sexual health clinic in London (—England’s most prominent gay health organization) —proclaimed in a Guardian article that the pandemic raised their hopes at the possibility of an “end to transmission of HIV.” Implicit in their claims is the fantasy that people were going to stop hooking up with strangers during lockdown, leading to a decrease in HIV transmission rates. However, one could have easily logged -in to Grindr to realize this was not the case. But this excitement about a public that does not have sex with strangers in order to prevent HIV and COVID reflects a specific ideology that the prevention of viral transmission is somehow a completely individual responsibility. 56 Dean Street never mentions PrEP as a manner to lower HIV transmission rates, even though PrEP poses a
more convincing possibility forof an ‘end’ to HIV. In this way, the British government is readily able to evade responsibility for public HIV-prevention when the blame is placed upon sexual deviants or lockdown-defiers. Around the end of 2020, thean Instagram account named @GaysOverCovid rose to prominence through its name-and-shame style exposé of gay men engaging in parties or other large social gatherings. The account accrued such a following that it received a feature on Good Morning America, to a national heterosexual public. @GaysOverCovid was a hit because its moral project was sound: it internalized homophobic tropes of gay men as ultimately selfish in a never-ending quest to experience socially-transgressive pleasure, in other words, as moral antagonists to heterosexual society. In other words, @GaysOverCovid extendedtook the same set of morals that were used to demonize gay men during the AIDS epidemic and extended them to gay social and sexual behavior under COVID. A most gruesome but illustrative example of this moral history was displayed in the (now-deleted) Boston offshoot of @GaysOverCovid, whichwho publicly disclosed the HIV-positive status of a gay male partier. If it was not clear in their constant celebration of cops shutting down gay parties, @GaysOverCovid was fully-aligned with the state’s project of blame game-as-deflection of responsibility. As such, the same moral politics were at play during the AIDS crisis and are most likely behind NHS England’s PrEP rollout delays, as these discourses are fertile grounds to evade state accountability. If individuals are responsible for preventing HIV, the state does not have to. If gay men’s sexual and social practices are not always in-line with the state’s preventative mandates, they become antagonistic to the state. If individuals are supposedly defying the state’s public health response, the state “no longer” has to help them (when truly, they were never helped in the first place). NHS England could take the expense of delaying the PrEP rollout through the Impact Trial because they framed PrEP users as socially-irresponsible and not warranting preventative assistance from the state. NHS England could further delay the PrEP rollout during COVID because it was gay men’s interpersonal responsibility to abide by lockdown orders and not have sex with one another. Furthermore, NHS England participated in a larger phenomenon of casting queer people as immoral, socially-antagonistic others: they are supposedly separate from the “children” that need cystic fibrosis treatment and the, they are separate from “taxpayers” that are burdened in their funding of PrEP. As if all of these categories were mutually exclusive—--but homophobic moral projects need not make sense to be effective. +++ What we can and must learn from the AIDS epidemic is that moral discourses of blame and shame will always trickle down to society’’s most marginalized. People, regardless of sexual orientation, have ‘risky’ sex practices that go against public health guildelines of ‘safe’ sex. But the danger arrives when when sex becomes moralized around these binaries of risky vs. responsible, safe vs. unsafe: the sex practices that were made visible by the AIDS epidemic served to culturally associate gay men’s entire personhood with immoral, abberant sexuality. These moral legacies haunt the HIV-prevention efforts of today, where gay men still have not succesfuly eliminated HIV-stigma from the discourse of gay sexuality to the extent that a tranformative pill like PrEP could be uncontroversial. As COVID continues to disproportionately affect working-class communities of color, our shamings and call-outs do no good to vulnerable people, if not at times direct harm. They merely serve to further a state project of violence. Public health responses must be compassionate, just as we must be compassionate towards one another during epidemics and pandemics. EVAN LINCOLN B’21 thinks it’s time for you to unfollow @GaysOverCovid.
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