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Abstract
Why did AIDS in France become a question of official accountability, while in the U.S. a politics of rights and access to decision-making dominated debate over the disease? While French AIDS activists filed criminal charges against top officials who delayed screening the blood supply for HIV, including a former Prime Minister who was placed on trial for involuntary homicide in 1999, American AIDS activists never privileged questions of accountability for the distribution of HIV-tainted blood. Instead, Americans used the courts to fight discrimination and forced government to listen to the concerns of activists.
This project answers that question by focusing on the response of gay male AIDS activists to the experiences and concerns of hemophiliacs touched by the disease. Because of modern treatments for hemophilia, in France and the U.S. between 50 and 90 percent of hemophiliacs living in the early 1980s were infected. Yet, the emphatic association of AIDS with homosexuality and marginalization situated the disease within debates over belonging and citizenship in both France and the U.S. At the same time, the nature of homosexuality and its association with belonging differs. These differences in turn influence the strategies and choices that activists made in deciding on real, specific claims that are at the same time claims to citizenship, so that two young hemophiliac boys were given center stage in the American and French stories of AIDS.
Through extensive archival research and the testimony of surviving activists, we will see how, in each country, these boys represented the plight of many of those with AIDS. More broadly, the stories of these boys, and the role of gay AIDS activists in crafting these stories, reveal that, at its foundation, identity politics is structured through a claim to citizenship, and that such a claim is normative as it engages narratives of exclusion and inclusion. Activists from marginalized communities face the necessity of proving citizenship against the mythic stereotypes that deny belonging, and do so through “heroes” who contrast the values attached to citizenship against the failures of identifiable antagonists or “villains” in society or among state actors.
