S+T ILLUSTRATION GEMMA BRAND-WOLF TEXT EVAN LINCOLN DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS
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In June of 1988 during the height of the AIDS epidemic, famed gay playwright and HIV/AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote an open letter to American National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, telling him, quite bluntly, “you are a murderer.” Kramer did not mince words in calling him a “despicable Reagan-era holdover” and a “drug company mouthpiece” due toin the fact that Dr. Fauci oversaw clinical trials of HIV/ AIDS treatments that did not appear to be making much forward progress. For Kramer and many HIV/AIDS activists alike, Dr. Fauci had blood on his hands in his apprehensive and sluggish response to the epidemic. “The fact that your clinical trials aren’’t meant to save our lives is no secret,” Kramer stated, signaling that underneath the empirical face of state clinical trials were politically-motivated delays that were actively causingleading to death— violence in the name of science. Today, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci is a hero. For many Americans, Fauci provided psychological relief with his level-headed, science-backed public health information campaign against an ill-prepared White House. But for Kramer in the eighties, Fauci’s appeals to scientific truths—that appease the public today—were back then a destructive deflection, a state -method of calling upon the objectivity of science to avoid accountability for thousands of lost lives. The mass deaths in the AIDS epidemic and the COVID pandemic can be attributed to governmental failures. Yet, governments seem to be so astute at convincing the public to point the finger elsewhere. The AIDS crisis was easily blamed on the sexual practices of gay men—from condomless sex to bathhouses, gay sex was readily moralized to be socially-harmful in its opposition to marital, reproductive heterosexual sex. In the case of Fauci, state negligence could be rationalized in the form of lengthy and ineffective ‘clinical trials.’ Both public health crises—COVID and HIV/AIDS—demonstrate that governments are quick to place the burden of viral spread onto individuals, especially the society’s most vulnerable, and the public takes on this state disciplinary power through the policing of others. Such is the case for the HIV-prevention
PLAYING THE BLAME GAME pill PrEP, a potentially-life saving drug whose reluctant rollout can be tied back to state-inspired moral policing. +++ In October 2020, the National Health Service of England made PrEP publically available, a stark development for communities vulnerable to HIV transmission. But the NHS’s rollout was originally announced to be in March 2020, with plans to begin the rollout a month later, but according to the NHS, COVID put a hamper on things. Those waiting for the release of PrEP in England were quite familiar with delay—instead of making PrEP available immediately upon its release, NHS England instituted (questionably) a three-year clinical trial to determine the logistics of the rollout. Four years of waiting for communities vulnerable to HIV, and the NHS did not appear to mind. PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, is an HIV-prevention pill that, if taken once -daily, can prevent sexual transmission of HIV at a rate of over 99 percent. Upon its discovery in 2016, PrEP marked a specific breakthrough for gay men and trans people, whose communities had been devasted during the AIDS crisis as a result of a negligent
and phobic public health response. Chiefly, the pill proposed the possibility for the elimination of HIV-transmission fears in gay sexual subjectivity. More specifically, PrEP not only allowed for sex without HIV contraction but also permitted sex without the need for a condom, the original (but slightly less effective) HIV-prevention tool. Despite the fact that PrEP had a transformative potential for LGBTQ+ health, it was not immediately welcomed with open arms in queer communities. This was because condoms were instead viewed as an object of salvation against HIV—their physical barrier came to serve as a psychological barrier against HIV/AIDS. In the United States, those who took PrEP were initially dubbed “Truvada whores” (named after the market version of the pill, Truvada), in that taking the pill allowed them to engage in what was viewed as the gravest gay sin: condomless sex. PrEP and condoms can be used together to prevent both HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections, but PrEP’s potentiality for condomless ‘risky’ sex was enough for it to feel like a moral danger. These discourses trickled into the British public. In the Daily Mail in 2016, PrEP was framed as a ‘promiscuity pill’ whose users participated in risky, devious sex practices. PrEP, in this way, was
