The AIDS Movement: A Working Metaphor

Though the plague years of the HIV/AIDS crisis have passed, their legacy lingers in our writing, art, music, and activism. Academics study the actions of the AIDS movement, spearheaded by groups such as ACT-UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment and Data Group), and the way these groups harnessed the power of metaphor to prove their points. In her book AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag discusses metaphor and its impact upon illnesses such as AIDS, examples of which can be found in the David France documentary How to Survive a Plague. Sontag’s argument is augmented by scholar Douglas Crimp’s paper on “Mourning and Militancy.” Ultimately, the power of metaphor as seen during the HIV/AIDS crisis is unquestionable, due to the fact that metaphors are subjective and as such, do not have the same barriers to entry as other forms of rhetoric, thus creating a consistent narrative for following the HIV/AIDS crisis and changing public perception of the plague into something more favorable.

What Is a Metaphor?

Sontag explains:

“By metaphor I meant nothing more or less than the earliest and most succinct definition I know, which is Aristotle’s, in his Poetics (1457b). ‘Metaphor,’ Aristotle wrote, ‘consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to someone else.’ Saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as philosophy and poetry, and the spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding, and expressiveness.” (Sontag 93)

Both the method by which the AIDS movement utilized metaphor and the methods by which the disease and movement were described follow this older, broader definition. It is important to note that metaphor itself is neither negative nor positive—it is a tool. During the AIDS movement, metaphor was wielded both by the government and many right-wing politicians (such as Senator Jesse Helms) to ostracize the queer community and by activists within the queer community to fight for change in the government’s response to AIDS.

The Metaphorical Status of AIDS

The status of AIDS as a plague is one way in which metaphor is important to understand the true impact of the disease. In How to Survive a Plague, activist Larry Kramer shouts “PLAGUE!” as he explains that AIDS is not just a disease in the queer community, but that they are in fact in the midst of a plague (France). Sontag explains that “Plagues are invariably regarded as judgements on society, and the metaphoric inflation of AIDS into such a judgment also accustoms people to the inevitability of global spread. This is a traditional use of sexually transmitted diseases: to be described as punishments not just of individuals but of a group” (Sontag 142). AIDS is not a plague just because it kills, but because of the social status it had even before being branded a plague. People living with AIDS were stigmatized and avoided—before being named AIDS it was known as GRID for “gay-related immune deficiency,” or a “gay disease”—and the disease brought homophobia to the surface. This metaphorical status increased fear and stigmatization of AIDS, so much so that these responses linger in the American public today. Sontag continues, “that it is a punishment for deviant behavior and that it threatens the innocent—these two notions about AIDS are hardly in contradiction. Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) everyone’s disease” (Sontag 152). This particular juxtaposition comes in how the media depicted AIDS patients. Crimp writes that “despite great achievements in so short a time and under such adversity, the dominant still pictures us only as wasting deathbed victims” (Crimp 16). As a plague, the metaphor implied that those living with it were victims of their own life choices—something that everyone could catch, if only they did the wrong thing. This metaphor furthermore generalized the consequence of queerness as AIDS, and “showed” that homosexuality itself could be caught if one fell in with the wrong crowd. In general media, the usage of plague and the depiction of AIDS patients as weak victims only heightened the related stigma. Homophobes leveraged that fear, but AIDS also became something to pity, an emotion that the queer community drew upon. Vulnerability as a concept is subjective, but when embodied by the typical image of a patient, generally an originally attractive white man, wasting away in bed, it turned into a metaphor that most people could pity. It created a more appealing narrative for understanding the disease.

It is important to note that Sontag’s paper, in which she dives into the meaning of metaphor and its application to AIDS, is not for everybody. She focuses entirely on theoretical work as to what metaphor means and its impact on the epidemic. Readers are not meant to interpret Sontag’s work like they are How to Survive a Plague, but rather focus on using Sontag to enhance their understanding of other pieces of media. The pairing of intense academic scrutiny with the emotional spur of crisis can enhance one another, as seen in Crimp’s

“Mourning and Militancy.” Crimp focuses on both humanity in terms of his own experiences with the AIDS movement and grief, but also on the psychology behind the movement in an intensely academic method. He draws upon his own queer experiences during the AIDS epidemic in his paper, and brings a poignant, human touch to the piece. Even in this paper, human examples from How to Survive a Plague are needed to truly understand how Sontag’s paper on metaphor applies to the real world. In this way, Crimp brings a more human perspective to an academic field on his own, without needing to combine pieces such as Sontag’s book and France’s documentary to bring the best parts to the forefront.

AIDS as a Weapon for Social Good

Not only is metaphor important for understanding AIDS, but also for understanding how activists fought for treatments for AIDS. Members of ACT-UP drew on the power of metaphor to get their point across and draw outrage and attention from the nation. One example is their usage of condoms as a metaphor in activism—chanting phrases like “Cardinal O’Condom” to refer to a homophobic cardinal who was against the usage of condoms, or acts such as placing a 50-foot condom on the house of homophobic Senator Jesse Helms drew both outrage and attention (France). In these scenarios, the metaphor behind associating two old, religious men with a sexual symbol drew attention. The acts were metaphors themselves—metaphors for the pride the activists took in being themselves, having sex, and enjoying life. Sex itself was a metaphor for freedom in a way; Crimp explains that one impact of the AIDS crisis was that they lost “a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes. Sex was everywhere for us, and everything we wanted to venture” (Crimp 11). Sex wasn’t just about enjoyment for the members of the queer community, it was in many ways a metaphor for freedom and individual identity. Connecting condoms to those who sought to suppress them proved that the queer community could not be suppressed. This metaphorical connection to a broadly accepted concept, freedom, helped ACT-UP connect with audiences who would generally not have been as receptive to their message. The group used the broader concept of freedom to draw similarities between the queer community and the rest of the U.S. and thus begin reversing the “othering” of the queer community.

Another important metaphor ACT-UP utilized was the AIDS quilt to evoke empathy for the grief that many of the queer community felt at the deaths of their loved ones. As a demonstration, members of ACT-UP went to Washington D.C. and laid pieces of the AIDS quilt down across the lawn, each panel honoring a different person who had died of AIDS (France). The quilt was yet another metaphor, this time for humanity. It was proof that they were not different from anyone else, that they were human beings with colorful lives and families who had died. Furthermore, it helped strengthen the image of the queer community as not just a community of “fringe gay groups—drag queens, radical fairies, pederasts, bull dykes, and other assorted scum” but also one of ordinary people who everyone could relate to (Crimp 13). There was a panel for everyone and in this way, the metaphor of humanity strengthened because it presented a different perspective of the plague than the media. Patients were not only victims wasting away; they were fully human beings being treated like trash by the government that had sworn to protect them. This metaphor grew during demonstrations such as ACT-UP’s scattering of cremation ashes on the White House lawn (France). It was not about grief, but about what the grief represented: their humanity, dead or alive. It combined mourning and militancy, as Crimp so accurately discusses in his paper, but in a public way so as to create a metaphor of their grief, to transform their grief into something beyond all of them.

While Sontag’s book AIDS and Its Metaphors and France’s How to Survive a Plague are unde- niably two separate pieces of work, from separate genres, addressing separate issues, the two have more in common than the casual viewer would realize. At its core, France’s documentary is a metaphor on its own. While it is not framed as such, so as to be more accessible to the average viewer, it is still a metaphor about humanity and struggle. What human can’t relate to struggling with the government and its decisions, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic? What person does not want their humanity recognized, and to receive basic human rights? Queer or not, most people would have a hard time recognizing that AIDS victims were many times buried in trashbags because hospitals would not put out the resources for them, and it is by being so blunt about this and focusing on personal interviews that the documentary brings these emotions—horror, grief, anger, and freedom—to the front. Without the interview-style format the documentary would not have nearly the same metaphorical impact because even though it would be about humanity and human struggles, we would not get to know any humans. Metaphor is at its best when augmented by humans who can embody the metaphor and bring its meaning to life.

Conclusion

Metaphor, ultimately, was used to create a narrative. By turning statistics into stories, and crowds into individuals, more than a decade of struggle for treatment and recognition can be turned from something incomprehensibly broad into a palatable story that evokes empathy. It turns from something broad into something pseudo-fictional, with activist interviews as stand-ins for characters with whom we cannot help but relate. Metaphor is powerful both because it creates a consistent narrative with which to follow the HIV/AIDS crisis, and because it changed how the plague was perceived. ACT-UP successfully utilized metaphors relating to humanity, grief, and sex in order to draw outrage and sympathy from across the nation and force the government to pay attention to them. This method worked because their metaphors were not clear and defined, but drew on personal experiences to tell stories. It turned one person’s grief into every person’s grief, because what human being could not empathize with loss or a longing for freedom?

Works Cited

Crimp, Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” October, vol. 51, 1989, p. 3., doi:10.2307/778889. France, David, director. How to Survive a Plague. Amazon Prime Video, 2012, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00B03D5HQ/ref=atv_yvl_list_pr_0.

Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2006.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Picador, 2006.

Nikki A., class of 2022, wrote this paper for the elective Rage, Romance, Resilience: A Cultural History of the AIDS Movement. She has a particular interest in queer history that led to her taking this class.