Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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CHAPTER 2
BEYOND GAY LIBERATION
The language and ideas of gay health activism were less often local expressions of gay liberation than articulations shared with various social and political movements. Indeed, the activism and politics around gay health appeared to be the products of a great political cross-pollination among groups, movements, and ideologies of the period. National debates and policies related to stemming poverty and increasing access to health care expanded into gay health clinics, far beyond the desks of politicians, bureaucrats, and urban developers. Critiques of capitalism and the state it mechanized laced the politics of those who would become gay health activists. Sexual liberation and feminism, two hallmarks of this period, laid important cultural and material groundwork as they shifted societal sexual norms and created countless new community spaces, without which gay health activism could not have blossomed. While institutions that bolstered gay liberation ideals and existed alongside many other institutions inspired by gay liberation were often the end result of this activism, the historical origins of gay health activism actually decenter gay liberation, revealing a complex and politically blended landscape that essentially reflects the history of 1970s social movements.
Money Matters
Critiques of capitalism proved a driving force in gay health activism and seeped into it through numerous movements across the social justice spectrum that linked capitalism to injustice and suffering. In Boston, gentrification and urban renewal had clear ties to capitalism, posing a threat to the Fenway neighborhood and fueling the activism that ultimately provided gay health services in the city. Fenway’s dilapidated housing stood in stark contrast to some of the city’s most important cultural landmarks. The Fens, a large park created in the late 1800s by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, lay at the heart of the area, serving as a bucolic destination on its own but also attracting other cultural landmarks to the neighborhood, including the Fenway Park baseball stadium, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Conservatory of Music, and numerous college campuses.1 The desire to capitalize on the “outstanding potential” of the neighborhood, in the words of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, translated into pressure from landlords, developers, and city officials for Fenway residents to vacate and make way for “higher-income, higher-quality housing.”2 Capitalist forces drove many in real estate, development, and local government in the 1960s and 1970s to make living in the Fenway, and in countless similar urban neighborhoods across the country, uncomfortable, unsafe, and untenable. Fenway residents experienced dozens of fires, killing five people and making hundreds more homeless, as landlords and even fire marshals attempted to cash in crumbling apartment buildings for lucrative insurance payouts and kickbacks from developers.3 Between 1969 and 1974 the neighborhood saw reports of arson increase by more than 1200 percent.4 Capitalism, with its emphasis on profits and exploitation of the poor, emerged as an obvious and galvanizing enemy as area activists banded together to repel the developers and improve their neighborhood in ways that benefited existing residents, including founding the Fenway Community Health Clinic. One Fenway resident offered a telling analogy: “In the south it was sheriffs and dogs. But you look at who was the oppressor up in this part of the world, and it was the developer.”5
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