The aesthetics and language of disability are particularly important for understanding how the disabled body and the HIV/AIDS-afflicted body were culturally framed because the stylization of the body itself was fundamental to the politics of sexual liberation and the formulation of visible gay male communities.įirst and foremost, the HIV-affected gay male body was almost ubiquitously presented in TBP as white, ignoring the ravaging effects of the disease particularly for African Americans and Canadians. TBP reveals the establishment of similar "stylistic" expectations for how diseased and disabled bodies ought to perform within what we now call the queer community, as well as how community members-both able-bodied and disabled-responded during an epidemic that plagued North America more broadly. More importantly, the narratives around disease and disability in TBP demonstrate how perceptions of bodily "failure" transferred from the disabled body onto the diseased body during the formative years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through imagery and text. Use of such language perpetuated the perception that the HIV/AIDS-affected body transformed into something comparable to the physically disabled body-unable to perform gender or sexuality in a desirable or "normative" manner. The newspaper also featured numerous reports and articles from 1982 onward describing the "debilitating" and "disabling" effects of HIV/AIDS. The collective offset narratives of gay men as victims of disease by buttressing (desirable) gay male masculinity as active, virile, and healthy. In the many discussions around AIDS and its preliminary stage, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), TBP's editorial collective disentangled gay men's sexuality, masculinity, and bodies from disease.
As a result, discussions of disability and disease in TBP intersected at the site of the gay male body, whereby issues of frailty and undesirability were shaped by pre-existing perceptions around disability. Over the course of the 1980s, two seemingly separate issues of disability and disease were woven together, establishing a dichotomy between the unhealthy and healthy, afflicted and non-afflicted, disabled and non-disabled, which was marked by tension and, at times, hostility.
3 This article examines narratives of disease and disability in The Body Politic (1971-1987), referred to hereafter as TBP, in order to demonstrate how gay male masculinity developed within a gay ableist culture deeply affected by HIV/AIDS.
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When in hospital for treatment, Fred's mother, Selma noted that her son "persisted in calling his illness 'Kaposi's,' which to her was his way of saying to everyone he was gay." 2 KS was not only a highly visible skin disease-forming lesions on the skin of its victims-but it became synonymous with gay men and gay promiscuity when it was discovered to be a common secondary disease of AIDS. Writing in November 1982, Michael Lynch-then an editor at Canada's longest running gay and lesbian newspaper, The Body Politic-described his New York City friend, Larry's (a pseudonym for a man later identified as Fred) long battle with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), an AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome)-related cancer. The aesthetics and language of disability are particularly important for understanding how the disabled body and the HIV/AIDS-afflicted body were culturally framed because the stylization of the body itself was fundamental to the politics of sexual liberation and the formulation of visible lesbian and gay communities. Narratives around disease and disability demonstrate how perceptions of bodily "failure" transferred from the disabled body onto the diseased body during the formative years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through imagery and text. As a result, two seemingly different discussions of disability and disease in The Body Politic intersected at the site of the gay male body, whereby issues of frailty and undesirability were shaped by pre-existing perceptions around disability. Over the course of the 1980s, two seemingly separate issues of disability and disease were woven together, establishing a dichotomy between the unhealthy and healthy, afflicted and non-afflicted, disabled and non-disabled body, which was marked by tension and, at times, hostility. This article examines narratives of disease and disability in Canada's gay and lesbian newspaper, The Body Politic (1971-1987), in order to demonstrate how gay male masculinity developed within a gay ableist culture deeply affected by HIV/AIDS.