Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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VD testing.
In Los Angeles, a small group of gay men cast the gay health services they sought to offer in a different political light, that of gay survival of what they termed oppression sickness. Infusing gay liberation politics with the political rhetoric of many radical political movements in Los Angeles, veteran activists Don Kilhefner, Morris Kight, and John Platania understood the political, physical, mental, financial, and chemical struggles of gay community members as all symptoms of the same illness—oppression sickness. Oppression sickness was a broad concept that encapsulated any of the negative personal experiences that could be traced back to oppression or discrimination. The Gay Community Services Center Kilhefner, Kight, and Platania founded to address these symptoms and battle the larger societal illness of oppression offered a wide range of services from VD testing to support groups and from job training programs to drug rehabilitation. Oppression sickness infected the gay community, but these founders saw the larger society as the carrier of the disease and positioned the Gay Community Services Center as a service provider for the gay community as well as an idealistic catalyst for inoculating the larger society by fighting homophobia and structural forms of oppression. Each of the center’s offerings placed gay identity and politics at its core. This political framing resonated with many local gay communities but had to be bridled and recast in order to garner the state funding and tax status the founders deemed imperative for the center’s long-term success.
If Boston’s clinic emerged out of a neighborhood threatened and Los Angeles’ clinic grew from gay liberation politics applied to health disparities, Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic can be traced back to gay doctors’ frustration over incomplete medical training. As a medical student at the University of Chicago, David Ostrow realized that none of his medical training prepared him for the medical needs he saw in the gay bars and social gatherings he visited in his downtime. In response, he started a group to provide a supportive community for gay medical students who encountered homophobia in their classes and medical training. Ostrow envisioned that these medical students could offer emotional support to one another as well as academic and scientific collaboration as they sought to supplement their formal education by identifying and addressing the medical needs of the gay community. After an autumn 1973 ad in the Gay Crusader, the local gay newspaper, instructed those interested in joining the group to call, the rotary phone in Ostrow’s small one-bedroom apartment rang off the hook.21 Surprised, he found himself discussing with callers needs much more numerous and complicated than those of gay medical students simply needing social support. He realized that a large portion of the gay community, far larger than just gay medical students, was hungry for medical services and information. Ostrow described in an interview the scores of calls he received: “A third were from gay medical students … another equally large group of calls were people wanting to know where they could go to get good, respectful, nonjudgmental medical care for gay related health issues … and a third of these calls were from people who wanted to have sex with the gay medical students and they usually started out, ‘Hello, are you a gay medical student?’ and it went downhill from there.”22 As he took each call, answering questions in his native New Jersey accent, the need for gay health services became more and more apparent. Ostrow relayed the situation to other group members in meetings held at bars, businesses, and members’ homes over the course of several weeks. As the long Chicago winter began to thaw into spring in 1974, the group began expanding their mission to include services beyond solely providing social support for medical students and professionals. By decade’s end, the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic was the leading national research institution on gay health, serving thousands of clients annually through both in-clinic and outreach services.
Just as each of these clinics had a different political origin, they each presented their own research challenges. Boston proved the most difficult, as most of the organization’s archives from the 1970s were discarded during a move to a new facility in the early 1980s. With only a thin file of organizational archives to work from, I took full advantage of the neighborhood newspaper, the Fenway News, as well as one of its founding editors, Stephen Brophy, to chart the history of the growing health clinic and identify the names of key figures in its development. I also contacted the existing Fenway Clinic, asking for any historical documents they still had as well as the names of any longstanding staff members. Fortunately, they had just commissioned a history of the organization and had contact information for a handful of clinic veterans from the 1970s willing to meet with me.23 Combining these sources, I was able to piece together a fairly complete timeline of the clinic’s development and conduct a dozen interviews (both on and off the record) that then pointed me to other sources, such as granting agencies and state records. In comparison, both Los Angeles and Chicago were far easier, as each clinic’s records from the 1970s resided in community archives, though unprocessed when I went through them.24 Even in their slightly jumbled state, these archives were extensive and made obvious the names of collaborative agencies and important figures that I pursued for interviews. I also sought out opportunities to present my research in public settings and would often have audience members come forward afterward with recollections or suggestions for additional sources. I then layered these individual clinic archives that I had compiled on top of deep readings of local newspapers, state archives, proceedings of medical and public health conferences, medical journals, and a broader national political context gleaned from national newspapers.
Interviews and individuals made this history possible to tell. I formally interviewed over twenty activists, doctors, and patients, most of them multiple times and over a series of years. The majority of these interviews were conducted in person in people’s homes, offices, local coffee shops, or nearby parks, though some were via phone. They were difficult to set up, as many potential interview subjects were impossible to find after forty years, or they had passed away, many from AIDS. Some of those who remained saw their work in the clinics as tangential to their lives (then or now) and not worthy of my time or theirs despite my assurances to the contrary. Many argued that they hadn’t really “done anything important.” Another portion of those who refused to be interviewed suggested that the real story was AIDS or that the seriousness of AIDS made their contributions in the 1970s less significant. A handful refused to talk with me because the memories were too painful, as AIDS had claimed so many of their friends or coworkers. Even though I asked specifically about events and issues that predated AIDS, the epidemic cast a shadow over all the interviews, resulting in much emotional labor for both the interview subjects and me as well as posing a real challenge in reconciling recollections with historical timelines. Thankfully, I quickly learned to come equipped with tissues and deploy the gay community press and newspapers that abound in each of these cities to spark memories and serve as cross-references. Those I interviewed often suggested others to interview, occasionally even providing contact information or introductions. For every person that agreed to be recorded and quoted, there were others who kindly refused while also sharing their memories in short introductory conversations. I sometimes used these informal interviews as opportunities to clarify an event or issue that I didn’t fully understand or simply to get a better sense of the clinics. Many of those I interviewed, even those who did not want to be quoted or recorded, opened their basements, closets, and attics to reveal their personal records and ephemera from the clinics, sometimes simply handing them over to me. These dust-covered binders, boxes, envelopes, and folders contained much of the archival treasure that undergirds this book.
The 1970s offered a brief historical moment during which four major social and political factors converged to create and nurture gay health activism: gay liberation, the questioning of medical authority by various marginalized groups, the continuation of 1960s radicalism, and Great Society–era government policies that encouraged community health efforts. The confluence of these four forces allowed for gay health activism to take many forms in the period before the AIDS crisis, including community clinics, outreach programs, and research collaborations. Gay health activism in the 1980s responded to the AIDS crisis and a much more hostile fiscal and political environment by relying on and adding to the strong gay medical infrastructure laid by activists in the previous decade under much easier and more politically supportive circumstances.
The 1970s witnessed a militant shift in the political organizing of gay and lesbian communities that translated into proud declarations of homosexuality and an unprecedented number of services, commercial businesses, and organizations