Lesbian Volunteerism in the AIDS Epidemic: A Story We Almost Lost

When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, and very often holding them as they died, were lesbians. They organized. They protested. They gave blood. They emptied bedpans and changed sheets and sat through long nights in hospital rooms that nurses were afraid to enter. To some people listening it may seem only natural that lesbians stood in solidarity with gay men but to historians of queer history, this turn of events is surprising; these were, in many cases, women who had spent the entire previous decade in open political conflict with gay men. The 1970s gay and lesbian movement was not one big happy family. It was torn by a deep and sometimes bitter rift between gay men and lesbian feminists. And yet, when the crisis came, the women showed up. As part of our 2026 Women series, and in honor of Pride month, we’re going to tell their stories.

Transcript for Lesbian Volunteerism in the AIDS Epidemic: A Story We Almost Lost

Written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD

Recorded by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Marissa: I want to begin this episode with an image (which will be in our blog). Picture a community blood center in Garden Grove, California, in December of 1985. There are folding tables, the smell of rubbing alcohol, a line of people with their sleeves rolled up. But look closer at who is in that line. They are women— almost entirely women— and many of them are lesbians. They have driven in from across Orange County and beyond. They are donating blood not for themselves, not for their own families in the ordinary sense, but for gay men they may never have met, men who are dying of a disease that the country’s own president will not say out loud, men whose own blood the federal government has just declared unwelcome.

Sarah: That blood drive, as we’ll see, was canceled at the last minute by a frightened administrator. But the women in that line, and thousands like them across the country, did not go home and forget about it. They kept rolling up their sleeves. It is one of the most quietly heroic chapters in American history, and it is also one of the most overlooked. When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, and very often holding them as they died, were lesbians. They organized. They protested. They gave blood. They emptied bedpans and changed sheets and sat through long nights in hospital rooms that nurses were afraid to enter.

Marissa: To some people listening it may seem only natural that lesbians stood in solidarity with gay men but to historians of queer history, this turn of events is surprising; these were, in many cases, women who had spent the entire previous decade in open political conflict with gay men. The 1970s gay and lesbian movement was not one big happy family. It was torn by a deep and sometimes bitter rift between gay men and lesbian feminists. And yet, when the crisis came, the women showed up. As part of our 2026 Women series, and in honor of Pride month, we’re going to tell their stories.

I’m Marissa

And I’m Sarah

Marissa: And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.

Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Joey, Susan, Colin, Lauren, Edward, Denise, Maria, Megan, Jessy, Karen, Lisa, Alissa, and Ben! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Marissa: In this episode I want to do three things. First, I want to give you a short history of that rift— why gay men and lesbians were so often at odds before AIDS. Second, I want to walk you through what lesbians actually did during the epidemic: the direct action and political activism, the blood drives, and the intimate, exhausting work of caregiving. And third, I want to show you how that work of solidarity helped heal a wound in the queer community— and, importantly, I want to complicate that story a little, because the easy version of “lesbians swooped in as the selfless nurses” actually erases some of the most interesting things these women were thinking and doing.

Along the way I want to give you something the usual telling leaves out: the research. Because, beginning in the late 1980s, social scientists started studying these volunteers systematically— asking who they were, why they kept showing up, and what the work did to them. That research, as we’ll see, both confirms the heroic picture and complicates the comfortable one. It turns out solidarity was not one simple thing, and it did not always hold.

But first a note on sources: As always, we are merely synthesizing here and we owe a debt to not only queer scholars but, perhaps most importantly for this episode, to the victims of the AIDS epidemic, their allies, and the art and literature they left behind. There is also a rich tradition of scholar-activism in this field so there is often overlap between academic scholarship and advocacy. I, of course, drew from academics like historian Jennifer Brier, and psychologist/public health activist Cynthia A. Gómez among others who will be cited in the show notes. But I also drew from artistic, literary, and heritage projects created for and by AIDS epidemic victims such as Yale University’s Online Exhibitions. And, lastly, I drew from activist and public health projects: activists like public health researcher Nils Clausson, and organizations like YouthCO and ACTUP, for an inside look into AIDS activism..

And a note on terminology: Throughout this episode, I’ve used the word “lesbian” the way the women of the period used it and the way the scholar Cynthia Gómez defines it: broadly, to include women who self-identify as lesbian, women who have sex with both women and men, and women who have had a sexual experience with another woman without claiming any particular sexual-identity label. As Gómez and the historian Jennifer Brier both stress, sexual identity and sexual behavior are not the same thing— a distinction that turned out to be a matter of life and death in the AIDS epidemic. I’ve also used “gay and lesbian” to describe the movement of the 1970s and 1980s because that is the language people used at the time; the broader umbrella of “LGBTQ+” is a later and more inclusive development.

Sarah: Let’s begin where the rift began. To understand the magnitude of what lesbians did in the 1980s, you have to understand that gay men and lesbians were not, in any simple sense, natural allies. They shared a label— “homosexual,” and later “gay”— and they shared a common enemy in a homophobic society. But their day-to-day lives, their politics, and their priorities often pulled them apart.

In the years after the Stonewall uprising of 1969, gay liberation exploded into the open. For many gay men, liberation was bound up with sexual freedom— the right to have sex with whomever they chose, as often as they chose, free from shame and from the police. Gay neighborhoods sprang up in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. As one popular history of the period puts it, all across America people were “coming out about parts of themselves long repressed and living out and proud for the first time in their lives.”^[1] Bathhouses, bars, and a booming commercial scene became, for many men, the very symbols of having arrived.

Marissa: Lesbians in the same era were often somewhere else entirely— politically and physically. Many lesbians of the 1970s came to their identity through feminism. To be a lesbian, for a significant number of these women, was not only a matter of desire but a radical political choice: the choice, as the poet Adrienne Rich famously argued, to step outside what she called “compulsory heterosexuality”^[2]— the social machinery that pushed all women toward men. Lesbian feminists built their own institutions: women’s bookstores, music festivals, health collectives, separatist communes. Their world was organized around women, and a strand of it was organized around being apart from men— sometimes including gay men. (Portlandia reference?)

The tensions were real and they were specific. Let’s name a few. There was a conflict over sexism. Many lesbians experienced gay male spaces and gay male organizations as boys’ clubs— places where women’s concerns were an afterthought and where the casual misogyny of the wider culture went unexamined. Why, lesbians asked, should we pour our energy into a “gay” movement that is really a gay men’s movement?

Sarah: There was a conflict over sex itself. Lesbian feminism, especially in its more separatist forms, was often suspicious of the very thing many gay men celebrated: anonymous, recreational, commercialized sex. Where gay male liberationists saw freedom, some lesbian feminists saw objectification— sex drained of intimacy and turned into a kind of consumer product.

And there was a conflict over priorities and resources. Lesbians frequently felt that they had to choose. As one retrospective account of the era describes it, many queer women felt “forced to choose” among several competing causes: “the enduring quest for their sexual freedoms”—what were then called gay rights—on one side, and on the other, “women’s rights and the freedom of gender expression,” along with the fight against racial and sexual violence.^[3] A movement has only so much money, so many volunteers, so much attention. Whose agenda gets to be THE agenda?

Marissa: You could see the rift even at the leadership level. By the late 1970s, the two co-executive directors of the National Gay Task Force— the major national organization— were a gay man, Charlie Brydon, and a lesbian, Lucia Valeska, and the two were openly at odds. Valeska, in one striking example of the friction, reportedly told gay men, in effect, to keep it in their pants— arguing that highly visible gay public sex was undermining the broader fight for civil rights.

So this is the landscape on the eve of the epidemic: two communities sharing a banner but living in different worlds, with a history of grievance between them. Keep that picture in your mind, because it is the backdrop against which everything that follows becomes extraordinary.

Sarah: We should add one careful caveat, and it’s a theme we’ll return to. The picture we’ve just painted— lesbians on one side, gay men on the other— is itself a simplification, and the historian Jennifer Brier has shown that it was never fully true. Even in the early years, lesbians and gay men were talking to each other, working together, and thinking together about sex and health. But the perception of a rift was powerful and widely felt, and the reconciliation we’ll discuss was experienced by people who lived through it as a genuine coming-together. Both things are true: the divide was real, and it was always more porous than the legend suggests.

Marissa: Let me set the scene of the epidemic itself, briefly, because the scale of official neglect is the thing that makes the lesbian response so necessary. In 1981, doctors began noticing something terrifying. A Centers for Disease Control newsletter reported that five gay men in Los Angeles had contracted an unusual pneumonia normally seen only in people with collapsed immune systems. Soon after, The New York Times reported on a rare and aggressive cancer striking dozens of previously healthy gay men. The mortality rate among those first patients was 100%.^[4]

In those earliest days the disease did not even have a stable name. For a period it was called GRID— Gay-Related Immune Deficiency— a label that hard-wired the disease to gay male sexuality in the public mind, even though, as observers noted at the time, other groups were already affected. On March 19, 1982, the CDC reported 285 cases of what was then still called GRID; half of those cases were in New York City.

Sarah: The government’s response was, to put it plainly, silence. For the first five years of the epidemic, President Ronald Reagan said essentially nothing in public about it. According to one widely cited figure, despite more than 16,000 Americans dying of AIDS-related complications between 1981 and 1986, Reagan did not say the word “AIDS” in public during that period. When he finally addressed the issue at the Third International Conference on AIDS in 1987— after his friend, the actor Rock Hudson, had died— the death toll was already staggering. One account notes that by the time Reagan spoke, over 20,000 of the roughly 36,000 Americans diagnosed had already died.

Meanwhile, religious and political figures poured gasoline on the fire. The Reverend Jerry Falwell told his followers that “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.”^[5] The politician Lyndon LaRouche pushed to quarantine people with HIV. And the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan— who would become Reagan’s communications director— wrote that AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.”^[6]

Marissa: Into this vacuum of official care, ordinary people stepped up. As the activist and writer’s record of the period shows, gay men founded their own institutions to save their own lives— Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York in 1982, the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985. But these institutions could not have functioned without the people who staffed them, gave to them, and built them. And a remarkable number of those people were women.

Let me start with the most concrete, the most physical form of solidarity: blood. Here is the cruel logic that set the stage. As the epidemic spread, the nation became frightened about its blood supply. In early March 1985, Margaret Heckler, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that the FDA had approved a test to screen blood for HIV antibodies. As one history of the period explains, the test “could not be used to diagnose AIDS, but it could detect the presence of antibodies… to HIV in a person’s bloodstream.”^[7] Up to that point, 177 people with AIDS— including the teenager Ryan White— had contracted the virus from blood transfusions or blood products.

Sarah: Then, six months later, the FDA took a further step. It “issued guidelines calling for blood banks to refuse donations from men who had sex with men within the last eight years.” Think about the bind this created. Gay men were now banned from donating blood. But gay men with AIDS desperately needed blood. People with HIV were often anemic; they needed frequent transfusions, especially as they underwent tests and experimental treatments. So you had a population in acute need of a resource that its own members were forbidden to supply. The result, as one Yale exhibit on lesbians in AIDS activism puts it bluntly, was “a critical shortage of blood.”^[8]

Lesbians filled the gap. And the most famous of these efforts began even before the formal ban, with a group in San Diego called the Blood Sisters. In 1983— two years into the crisis— a woman named Barbara Vick co-founded the Blood Sisters, a group of lesbian women in San Diego who, as one account describes, “designated their blood donations for local gay men.”^[9] The idea spread. As other Blood Sister groups emerged, they donated blood to the general supply as well.

Marissa: Why does this matter so much? Because, as the Yale Library exhibit notes, these blood drives are a central reason “why lesbians are frequently figured as the caretakers of the AIDS pandemic: when doctors and scientists refused to care for HIV patients, lesbians stepped in.”The women worked directly with local blood banks “to ensure that their donations went directly to HIV/AIDS patients.”^[10] Blood was something the men could not give. It was something these women could.

But I promised you the story of Garden Grove, and it’s worth telling in full because it shows the headwinds these women faced. In December 1985, the Blood Sisters asked the Orange County chapter of the American Red Cross to collect blood at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Garden Grove, California. The local chapter was, at the time, experiencing a blood shortage— so it agreed. The Blood Sisters threw themselves into publicizing the drive, distributing, by one account, 500 flyers and sending press releases to local gay and general-interest newspapers. Everything was set.

Sarah: And then Dr. Benjamin Spindler, who directed blood services for the Orange County Red Cross chapter, read about the event in his local newspaper and grew alarmed. He canceled it. When the Los Angeles Times asked him why, he said, “We felt that the public was concerned that we might be collecting from gay men, and that is not true.”^[11] Think about that [read the quote again]. He canceled a lesbian blood drive because he was afraid the public would think the blood was coming from gay men. In other words, he canceled it because of optics— because of the stigma— even though, as critics immediately pointed out, the new blood test could screen for the virus and the chapter could simply have followed the FDA guidelines.

The reaction was fierce. Dr. Brad Truax, a friend of the Blood Sisters in San Diego, said Spindler’s decision to cancel was “based on blatant homophobia,” an “irrational fear of gay and lesbian people.” A leader at the Gay and Lesbian Center named Stuart Smith weighed in too. Spindler tried to defend himself by saying his hands were tied: “It is discrimination,” he reportedly admitted, “but there are no laws to prevent this kind of thing.”^[12] And he was right about that— there were no laws in Orange County prohibiting him from discriminating against lesbian women who simply wanted to contribute to local blood supplies. Spindler refused to change his mind. The blood bank, as the account dryly notes, “continued to suffer.” And the Blood Sisters? They “moved on, still ready and willing to roll up their sleeves and donate their life-saving blood.”^[13]

Marissa: That, to me, is the heart of the matter. They were turned away on the basis of prejudice— and they kept going. It’s worth pausing to note how long the shadow of that ban stretched. The policy barring men who have sex with men from donating blood was not a brief panic of the mid-1980s; it endured, in the form of a lifetime ban, for more than thirty years. Not until December 2015 did the Food and Drug Administration finally lift it— and even then, with a catch. The lifetime ban was replaced by a rule that still barred any man who had had sex with another man in the previous twelve months. The FDA framed this as bringing gay and bisexual men in line with other donors at elevated risk, and noted that the risk of contracting HIV from a transfusion in the United States had fallen to roughly one in 1.47 million. Advocates were unimpressed. One group that had organized gay blood drives called the revised policy “still discriminatory,” arguing that it would let some gay and bisexual men donate while countless others remained banned, as they put it, solely on the basis of sexual orientation and without sound medical or scientific reasoning.^[14]

I mention this not to wander away from our story but to close the loop on it. The Blood Sisters of 1983 were fighting a stigma that would outlast nearly all of them as a formal federal policy. The thing they understood in their bodies— that fear and prejudice were being dressed up as caution— took the official institutions another three decades even to begin to concede.

Sarah: Blood drives are caregiving made physical. But lesbians were not only caregivers in the AIDS crisis. They were fighters. And I want to be insistent on this point, because the “caretaker” image, as moving as it is, can flatten women into nurses and erase them as political actors. Lesbians were strategists, organizers, theorists, and street activists.

When we think of AIDS direct action, we think of ACT UP— the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power— founded in New York City in 1987 and quickly spreading to Los Angeles and other cities. ACT UP staged protests and “die-ins” in the streets in front of drug makers, demanding faster research and access to treatment. Its members stormed the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. In one legendary action, ACT UP draped the suburban Virginia home of the fiercely anti-gay North Carolina senator Jesse Helms in an enormous canvas condom reading “Helms Is Deadlier Than A Virus.”^[15]

Marissa: Lesbians were central to these groups. As one retrospective notes, the aging ACT UP veterans of today are teaching a new generation “using ACT UP, Queer Nation, and Lesbian Avengers style tactics”— and the Lesbian Avengers were, of course, a lesbian direct-action group born directly out of this culture of confrontation.^[16]

Crucially, lesbian activists also forced the movement to see women. One of the great scandals of the early epidemic was that the CDC’s very definition of AIDS was built around symptoms common in men, which meant women with HIV were often not diagnosed, not counted, and not eligible for benefits or trials. As the Yale exhibit documents, activists mounted campaigns to change the AIDS definition to include women. A stark 1990 ACT UP poster urged people to show up at a demonstration at the Atlanta CDC under a blunt banner: “THE CDC AIDS DEFINITION KILLS WOMEN.”^[17] This was lesbian and feminist activism in its sharpest form— using the political skills these women had honed in the women’s health movement to fight a bureaucracy that was literally erasing women from a plague.

Sarah: And— this is important— not all activism happened through protest. As the Yale exhibit insists, “Activism happened in art.”^[18] Some of the most indelible images of the epidemic came out of this fusion of art and activism. The art collective Gran Fury— which included the artist Avram Finkelstein— created the iconic “Silence = Death” image, the pink triangle on a black field that became the visual signature of the entire movement. Gran Fury also produced “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do,” a 1989 campaign that showed interracial and same-sex couples kissing, mounted, as the Yale exhibit notes, “on dozens of New York City buses.”^[19] A whole renaissance of queer art was knit into the fight: the choreographer Bill T. Jones, photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Catherine Opie and Tseng Kwong Chi, the filmmaker Marlon Riggs, the artists Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Ray Navarro.

Lesbian artists and activists used art to do something specific: to raise awareness about safer sex within the lesbian community itself. One poster from the period, produced by a switchboard service, coined a phrase that captures an entire debate in five words: “low risk isn’t no risk.”^[20] That phrase brings us to a debate that I think is the intellectual heart of today’s episode— and the place where lesbians were not just helpers but original thinkers.

Marissa: Here I want to slow down and introduce you to a scholarly debate, because it will change how you see everything else. In the early 1980s, as the CDC named its famous “risk groups”— gay men, Haitians, people with hemophilia, injection drug users— the rest of the population was, as the psychologist Cynthia Gómez writes, “reassured by the belief that they would not get AIDS if they did not belong to one of the risk groups.^[21]” Lesbians seemed, by this logic, about as safe as anyone could be.

And here something striking happened. As Gómez documents, when conservative religious groups like the Moral Majority argued that HIV was “God’s way of getting rid of the undesirables— primarily gay men and intravenous drug users— the self-identified lesbian community quickly responded with the argument that if this were true, then lesbians were God’s chosen because they could not get HIV.”^[22] It was, Gómez notes, a message “perhaps cynical in its origin,” but also “extremely empowering to a community that has remained virtually invisible to the majority society.”^[23]

Sarah: But this empowering message had a dark side. It was not actually true that lesbians were invulnerable. The category “lesbian,” as Gómez carefully explains, is broad: it includes women who have sex only with women, but also women who have sex with both men and women, and women who inject drugs. And those behaviors carry risk. As Gómez puts it in her unforgettable closing line, after surveying all the evidence: “All women who share needles or engage in unprotected sex are at risk for HIV infection. Lesbians are no exception. The debate should end.”^[24]

The phrase “low risk isn’t no risk” on a lesbian safer-sex poster is exactly this insight, distilled. The lesbians who made it were refusing a comforting myth— even a myth that flattered them— in order to tell their own community the harder truth. This is where the historian Jennifer Brier comes in, and where the whole familiar story gets turned on its head.

Marissa: The standard account, Brier writes, goes like this: “lesbians were largely absent from nascent political conversations about the epidemic, and instead helped lead caretaking efforts for gay men suffering with AIDS.”^[25] In that account, lesbians appear only in a “support role”— organizing blood drives, serving as “buddies”— and, in the realm of ideas, only “as model serial monogamists, the ultimate alternative to gay male promiscuity.” The selfless nurse and the chaste good example. ^[26]That’s the box.

Brier blows the box open. Drawing on the pages of the gay press— especially Boston’s Gay Community News— she shows that lesbians “not only theorized and wrote about how sexuality would change in the age of AIDS, but also worked with gay men to chart an alternative response to the emerging AIDS epidemic.”^[27]

Sarah: Her central figure is Cindy Patton, in 1983 the managing editor of Gay Community News and later a major theorist of AIDS. In a published 1983 conversation, Patton made an argument that took the famous feminist slogan “the personal is political” and flipped it. The problem in the gay community right then, she said, was a feeling that “It’s not political until it’s personal.” Patton’s response was to insist on channeling anger outward— at government agencies and the health industry— rather than inward at one another. As she put it, in words that still land like a hammer: “Straight society has said to us, ‘You lead this terrible lifestyle and your punishment is to be sick all of the time,’ and on some level we’ve accepted that. We have to turn that around now, and say: This society is not going to kill us any more.”^[28]

Marissa: Patton brought a specifically feminist analysis to AIDS. In her 1984 article “Illness as a Weapon,” she pointed out that the very language of safer sex was tangled up with gender. When you ask gay men to shift to “safe sex”— touching, hugging, less genital contact— Patton argued, “you are in essence asking them to have sex like women, to be ‘passive.’” And because our culture codes “passive” as feminine and lesser, this came to many men “as a profound sense of loss.”^[29] Patton’s radical suggestion was that this was precisely where lesbians could help— not as nurses, but as teachers. Lesbians, she wrote, could help men “think about alternative ways of having sex that would not be emasculating.” “This is an excellent time,” she urged, “for lesbians and gay men to talk with one another about sex.”^[30]

Sarah: This is a lesbian feminist using the AIDS crisis to argue for a coalition between gay men and women— and to argue that the experience of the women’s health movement was exactly the resource the moment demanded. “As women,” Patton wrote, “we are acutely aware of the failing of health care in this country, it has been acted out on our bodies since we were born.” Her vision was explicitly hopeful: “If we can translate our fight to survive AIDS into a political agenda of cultural health, of a coalition of parts working together, then the lesbian and gay liberation movement may prove to be the driving force of the ’80s.”^[31]

Marissa: She was not alone. Brier introduces us to others. There was Amy Hoffman, a former editor of Gay Community News, who in 1983 stood before an estimated twenty thousand people at the Boston Lesbian and Gay Pride March and said something I find genuinely beautiful. She named what she, “as a lesbian,” had learned from gay men— “the exploration of the experience and meaning of gay sex and pleasure and love”— and then warned against letting AIDS poison that gift. “We must resist the feeling that AIDS means that this exploration, this path to liberation, was wrong, and we now have to abandon it. This feeling comes from homophobia.”^[32] There was Marie Goodwin, a Gay Community News reader, who wrote: “Whatever changes we make, we must make for reasons of health, not morality… We may have at times been careless, but we were never immoral.” And there was Sue Hyde, later of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who insisted that decisions about regulating the community’s sexual practices belonged to “our community,” not to outside authorities.^[33]

Sarah:; Why does Brier’s argument matter for our story? Because it rescues these women from being only kind and self-sacrificing and it restores them as intellectuals. The blood drives and the bedside vigils were real and they were heroic. But if that is all we remember, we accept the very box— woman as helper, woman as nurse— that the lesbian feminists of the 1970s had spent a decade fighting to escape. Brier’s lesbians were doing both at once: caring and theorizing, holding the dying and rewriting the politics of the epidemic.

Hold onto that duality. Now let’s go to the bedside. If the blood drives were solidarity made physical and the activism was solidarity made political, then the caregiving was solidarity made personal, intimate, and frequently unbearable. To understand the caregiving, you have to understand the abandonment that made it necessary. As a YouthCO history of lesbian solidarity describes, the failures were total and layered. “Doctors and nurses refused to treat people living with HIV.” And— this is the wound underneath the wound— “many families of origin abandoned positive gay men, leaving them financially, socially, and emotionally vulnerable.”^[34] Men were thrown out of hospitals, out of apartments by their landlords, out of jobs, and out of their own families’ lives, all at the moment they were sickest and most afraid.

Marissa: “When many turned their backs on gay men,” YouthCO says simply, “lesbians stepped in to advocate and provide care.”^[35] Much of this care was organized through what came to be called the buddy program— a model pioneered by Gay Men’s Health Crisis and adopted by hundreds of AIDS organizations across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. As the activist and Canadian public health researcher Nils Clausson described it in 1989, the buddy program was “a cornerstone of community support services.” “Trained volunteers,” he wrote, “provide companionship, support and advocacy, and assist with day-to-day tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, shopping and transportation. Buddies have improved the quality of life of hundreds of people with AIDS.”^[36]

Sarah: Really think about that list of tasks, because it is easy to skim past: cooking, cleaning, shopping, transportation. This is not glamorous work. This is the work of keeping a dying person fed and clean and connected to the world when everyone else has fled. And much of it was done by women— including, as Clausson notes, in a context where “more than 3,000 Canadians devoted over 240,000 hours to community AIDS organizations” in a single year, 1988.^[37]

We actually have a careful portrait of who these volunteers were, because in 1990 and 1991 the social psychologists Allen Omoto and Mark Snyder fielded a national survey of currently active AIDS volunteers— 615 of them, drawn from 26 organizations in every region of the country. The volunteers performed exactly the range of tasks we’ve been describing: serving as “buddies” or “allies” providing social contact and assistance, making educational presentations, staffing hotlines, supporting the families and friends of the infected. The majority had direct, hands-on contact with a person living with AIDS as part of their assignment, and the typical volunteer had been at it for around a year and a half. This was, in other words, sustained and demanding work, not a one-time gesture— what Omoto and Crain call “ongoing commitment and effort on behalf of an organization, person, or cause rather than a short-term, low-cost, one-time action.”^[38]

Marissa: Why did lesbians, of all people— given the rift we discussed— take on this work? The YouthCO history offers an answer that I find persuasive precisely because it refuses to make the women into saints. Their support, it argues, “went beyond shared queer identities.” Many lesbians simply “had close relationships with people living with HIV”— friends, exes, chosen family. And many of them already had exactly the right skills. “Many lesbians, including youth, had experience in grassroots advocacy, policy work, and healthcare.” Before AIDS, they had worked in “civil rights movements,” in fights for “housing equality, parental rights, and sexual and reproductive health rights,” in “anti-poverty, anti-war, and anti-nuclear power campaigns.” And— crucially— “many lesbians were also healthcare practitioners, such as nurses and social workers.”^[39]

So when the crisis came, this work “was a natural extension of their political, professional, and personal responsibilities.” Lesbian nurses, in particular, did something quietly extraordinary: “At a time when doctors and nurses often refused to treat HIV patients, lesbian nurses volunteered their time and skills to care for positive gay men.”^[40] They walked into rooms that frightened the medical establishment, and they did it on their own time. And then there was the hardest work of all: hospice. “Before the invention of HIV medications,” the YouthCO account explains, “many positive gay men were dying from AIDS-related complications. As folks were often isolated from their families, lesbians provided much-needed emotional support and companionship. This included volunteering for hospice care to ensure that gay men received dignified end-of-life care.”^[41] Dignified end-of-life care. Sit with that phrase. For a population the wider society had declared disposable— sick, sinful, getting what they deserved— the gift of dignity at the end was not a small thing. It was, in a sense, the whole thing. It was the refusal, made concrete in a darkened room at three in the morning, to accept the world’s judgment that these lives did not matter.

Sarah: The Canadian community-based model that Nils Clausson described captured the philosophy behind this work. The community response, he wrote, differed from traditional medicine in a fundamental way. In ordinary medicine, “the provider and the recipient of the service have separate roles, with the healthy provider caring for the sick recipient.” But the community-based response “recognizes the breadth of the epidemic’s impact, and thus sees AIDS as the problem of the whole of society, not just of the people who are ill and their caregivers.”^[42] The wall between the helper and the helped came down. And one of the principles Clausson lists for an effective community response speaks directly to the caregivers themselves: the need to ensure “that those providing support to the ill and worried receive support in turn.”^[43] Even then, people understood that this work could break you, and that the caregivers needed caring for too.

Marissa: We don’t have to take it on faith that this community mattered to the people receiving it. The clinical psychologists Robert Remien and Judith Rabkin spent years interviewing long-term survivors of AIDS— people who had lived three years or more after an AIDS-defining diagnosis, at a time when the median survival was around eighteen months. What they found, again and again, was that survival was bound up with connection. As one of their physicians put it in a line I can’t shake: “AIDS is not a good disease to have alone.” The survivors who did best, Remien and Rabkin concluded, were the ones with living ties— to their doctors, to their friends and family, and to what they called their “community of choice.”^[44]

And it was the gay community— including the women in it— that built that community of choice when nothing else existed. Remien and Rabkin tell the origin story of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (the oldest AIDS organization). The day after The New York Times reported a rare cancer in 41 homosexuals in 1981, a physician asked the writer and activist Larry Kramer to convene people; how a small group met in Kramer’s apartment; how, when someone said “Gay men certainly have a health crisis,” Kramer answered, “That’s our name.”^[45] From those apartment meetings grew an organization that, by January 1990, had a roster of 2,700 clients.

Sarah: What’s most moving in their research is the testimony of the women who found their way into that world. The supporters, Remien and Rabkin write, “came from the gay community, but they offered services to all who needed them, including women and drug users.”^[46] One woman, a former drug user who joined ACT-UP, described sitting in a room full of gay men she’d been raised to fear and discovering “we had something in common. Our hearts were in the same place.”^[47] Another, a lawyer who learned she was HIV-positive in 1987, said of the gay men who took her in: “I feel very indebted to the gay community because, no questions asked, they just took me right in.”^[48] A third said she went to GMHC to learn about AIDS and “learned more than that”— she learned to see past the prejudices she’d carried, watching relationships between gay people “a lot more loving and caring than what I had ever been involved with.”^[49] The HIV community, Remien and Rabkin observe, “expanded to include people from very different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”^[50] The solidarity ran in every direction at once.

Marissa: We mentioned earlier that researchers had begun to study these volunteers, and I want to discuss those findings now because they sharpen everything we’ve just said about caregiving. Omoto and Snyder, working with their colleague James Berghuis, built what they called a model of the volunteer process. The idea is that volunteering has three stages— the antecedents (who volunteers, and why), the experiences (what happens to them and the people they serve along the way), and the consequences (how it changes the volunteers, their networks, and society). When they analyzed their survey data, they found that the gay volunteers in their sample were not driven by any single motive. They isolated four distinct ones, which turned out to be remarkably stable across different samples and locations: personal values (the conviction that one ought to act on one’s beliefs), community obligation (a felt duty to the gay community), personal experience (knowing people who were sick or had died), and social network (the desire to meet people and make friends).

What strikes me about these findings is how they cut against a sentimental reading of the caregiving. Notice what was most important. The single strongest motivation, for gay and nongay volunteers alike, was not community loyalty or even personal grief— it was personal values, a general humanitarian conviction. Community obligation came second for the gay volunteers; social networking came last. In other words, much of this work flowed from exactly the kind of broad, principled commitment to social responsibility that the lesbian feminists of the 1970s had always insisted was their politics. The women— and men— who did this work were acting, the data suggest, less out of tribal duty than out of conviction about how human beings ought to treat one another.

Sarah: And there’s a finding here that bears directly on the caregiver’s wellbeing, the very thing Clausson worried about. Omoto and Snyder showed that volunteers tended to stay involved when the work actually met the needs that had brought them to it in the first place— when their specific motivation was rewarded by a corresponding change in their lives. Satisfaction, in turn, predicted whether they planned to keep going. This is the unromantic mechanics of sustained solidarity: it lasts not on sheer willpower but when it gives something back to the person offering it. The lesson the researchers drew was practical and humane— if you want people to keep doing this brutal work, you have to make sure they are getting something from it too.

Marissa: One more thing from this research deserves emphasis, because it pushes back on the very framing of “lesbians as the helpers of gay men.” Omoto and Crain’s chapter (from an edited collection called AIDS, Identity, and Community edited by Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene) is titled, pointedly, “AIDS Volunteerism: Lesbian and Gay Community-Based Responses to HIV.” Their argument is that AIDS volunteerism was, at bottom, an act of a community caring for its own— “a proactive attempt by the gay community to care for its own as well as a reaction to the silence of organized medicine and governmental units.”^[51] The organizations were, as they put it, “the result of gay initiative, inspired by gay leadership and financed by gay dollars.”^[52] When we set the lesbian caregiving inside this frame, it stops looking like charity extended from outside and starts looking like what it was: members of one battered community, women and men together, building the institutions that would keep them all alive.

Sarah: So let us return to where we began— to the rift between gay men and lesbians— and ask the question this whole episode has been building toward. What did all of this do to the relationship between these two communities? It healed it. Not perfectly, not completely, but profoundly. Listen to how one retrospective history of the period describes the transformation. After recounting the old conflicts— the Brydon-Valeska feuding, the sense that gay men’s public sexuality was hampering the cause— it pivots:

“‘The other enduring legacy that happened while hundreds of our friends and lovers were dying swiftly, was that AIDS brought men and women together.’ Even, the account continues, ‘the most militant lesbian-feminist was moved by the ‘suffering of gay men in the AIDS holocaust.’” That phrase comes from the historian Lillian Faderman. ‘Women stepped up to help care for the sick, to orchestrate social services and food banks and hospices, and to keep gay organizations afloat.’”^[53]

And then the line that I think sums up the whole emotional arc of the epidemic: “We put our differences aside and saw each other as family, dysfunctional sure, but a collectively oppressed rainbow family in which we could, in sickness and health, rely only on each other.”^[54] The YouthCO history makes the same point, and it is honest about the cost. Some lesbians, it acknowledges, “worried that these contributions might divert resources from their own community.” That was not a paranoid worry— it was the very same worry, about priorities and resources, that had fueled the rift in the 1970s. But, the account continues, “many lesbians recognized the importance of ensuring everyone had access to proper healthcare and community. Their efforts strengthened solidarity between gay men and lesbian women, building a more unified LGBTQ+ community.”^[55]

Marissa: I want to be precise about what this means, because “solidarity” can sound like a warm and automatic feeling, and it was not automatic. It was a choice— made by women who had every historical reason to keep their distance, and who chose connection instead. The lesbians who showed up for dying gay men were not erasing the legitimate grievances of the 1970s. They were deciding that, in the face of mass death and total official abandonment, those grievances would not be the last word.

But I would be lying to you if I left it there, with everyone holding hands. The honest record shows that the very tensions over priorities and resources that had divided gay men and lesbians did not simply evaporate— they reappeared, in new forms, all through the epidemic. And here two more sources that help us unpack this: The first is a chapter by William Bailey, an AIDS activist who, as the editors note in a heartbreaking aside, died of AIDS-related complications before he could finish it; a friend completed it from his notes. Bailey wrote about what was happening as AIDS spread beyond white gay men to other groups at high risk— heterosexual people of color, drug users, women. As those communities mobilized, he observed, they “often perceive[d] the AIDS effort to be driven by a gay and lesbian agenda at their expense.”^[56]

Sarah: Instead of uniting, the groups most at risk were, in his blunt phrase, “engaged in internecine battles.” He records the painful specifics: a needle-exchange group in Boston charging that it was shunned by the city’s gay-based AIDS organization because its clients were drug users rather than homosexuals; critics arguing that early education campaigns had ignored women. Bailey’s point was that the gay community’s hard-won infrastructure and “new-found power” could, and sometimes did, get used for its own constituents at others’ expense. The rainbow family, in other words, had its own internal hierarchies and resentments.^[57]

The second source is even more sobering— a case study by James Slack of how the federal Ryan White CARE Act actually played out at the local level, in a California county he calls Kent County (this is a thinly veiled alias for Kern county). The CARE Act mandated that all relevant groups— gay people, people with HIV, women, ethnic minorities, service providers, clergy— sit together at the table and decide how to spend the money. It was, on paper, the institutionalized version of the rainbow family. And it frequently descended into what Slack calls “zero-sum politics”— a mode of conflict in which people “coalesce to compete for scarce resources” in ways that produce clear winners and losers, where, as he puts it, “suspicion breeds suspicion.” Orderly meetings “turned into shouting sessions.” Meetings got “packed with strangers” to swing crucial funding votes. The values of “legitimacy and trust were gradually being replaced by suspicion and accusation.”^[58]

Marissa: Slack reaches for an idea he calls the Herbert Thesis to explain part of this— the notion that people who are simultaneously expected to represent a special group and to act as neutral, businesslike custodians of a public process feel a genuine role conflict, and that the conflict is sharpest for those newest to the table and most personally invested in the stakes. Gay and HIV positive members, “by definition… performing the role of direct representation,” felt that strain most acutely. Two decades of fighting for their lives, Slack writes, had “produced advocates in the gay and seropositive populations with extremely high levels of anxiety and extremely low levels of patience.”^[59] That is not a criticism. It is a description of what relentless emergency does to people. But it meant that even the rooms built for cooperation could turn sulfurous.

Why am I telling you this, in an episode meant to honor these women and men? Because the dignity of what they did does not depend on pretending it was frictionless. The reconciliation between gay men and lesbians was genuine and it was profound. But the larger coalition— across race, across drug use, across gender, across HIV status— was harder, and it frayed under the pressure of scarce money and bottomless need. Both things are part of the truth. Solidarity is not a state you achieve and then possess. It is a thing you have to keep choosing, meeting after meeting, often badly, often against your own exhaustion and fear.

Sarah: And here, Brier’s scholarship adds a crucial nuance— one that prevents us from telling too neat a story. The conventional history marks ACT UP, founded in 1987, as the moment radical AIDS activism began, and credits it as “the first activists to return to the language of gay liberation.”Brier’s whole argument is that this is wrong, or at least incomplete. Years earlier— between 1981 and 1984— lesbians and gay men writing together in the gay press had already been doing this work of coalition, “in direct opposition to the homophobia and misogyny inherent in dominant institutions.”^[60] In her words, “In this very early model we find the origins of the idea that AIDS was part of a larger political project, not separate from it.”^[61]

In other words: the healing of the rift did not begin when the men got desperate and the women rode to the rescue. It began, in the pages of papers like Gay Community News, as an authentic conversation between women and men about sex, health, gender, and liberation— a conversation in which lesbians were equal authors from the start. The caregiving and blood drives of the later 1980s were not the beginning of solidarity. They were the deepening of a bond that thoughtful people on both sides had already begun to build.

Something important for us to point out because we’re historians who use documentary evidence as source material; The very documents that preserve that earlier conversation discussed by Brier are fragile and marginal: ephemeral community newspapers like Boston’s Gay Community News, fundraising programs, switchboard posters, and oral testimony rather than the institutional archives that historians most readily consult. Much of the work itself was, by design, uncredited and uncountable — the cooking, cleaning, and hospice vigils that Nils Clausson catalogued, or the buddy hours that organizations logged only in aggregate, all of it cast in a supporting role that the culture was primed to overlook precisely because it was performed by women.

Marissa: Compounding this, the epidemic killed the people best positioned to tell the story; William Bailey’s own chapter had to be completed by a friend after he died of AIDS-related complications, his intended citations forever unrecoverable. And the long stigma surrounding the disease pushed survivors and institutions alike toward anonymity, as in the long-term-survivor study where Remien and Rabkin deliberately collected no identifying information from their subjects. A history made of disposable paper, unwaged care, dead narrators, and protective silence is a history that survives only when someone goes looking for it— which is why recovering it now, from exactly these scattered and partial sources, is itself an act of preservation. (Again, not one that I’ve done myself but one I am grateful for.)

Let me bring us back to that line of women in Garden Grove, sleeves rolled up, turned away by a frightened bureaucrat, and refusing to stop. We have tried to give you a fuller picture of those women than the one we usually receive. They were caregivers— yes, and we should never stop honoring the cooking and the cleaning and the long hospice nights, the willingness to hold a dying man whom his own mother would not touch. But they were also more than caregivers. They were blood donors who beat back a homophobic medical establishment. They were street activists who hung a giant condom on a senator’s house and forced the CDC to admit that women could get AIDS too. They were artists who put two women kissing on the side of a city bus. And they were thinkers— Cindy Patton, Amy Hoffman, Sue Hyde, and many more— who used the catastrophe to ask the deepest questions about sex, gender, health, and what we owe one another.

Sarah: And in doing all of this, they healed something. Two communities that had spent a decade talking past each other learned, in the worst circumstances imaginable, to see each other as family. As that one writer put it— a dysfunctional family, sure, but a collectively oppressed rainbow family that could rely, in sickness and in health, only on each other. There is a temptation, when we tell this story, to make it too clean: the noble lesbians, the grateful gay men, the rift dissolved in a glow of mutual love. The truth is grittier and, I think, more inspiring. The rift was real. The grievances were legitimate. The fear of being turned into nurses and helpers was well-founded— and it partly came true, in the way history has remembered these women too narrowly ever since. The broader coalition, too, was fragile: as the funding flowed and the affected communities multiplied, the old fights over scarce resources flared again, in church basements and consortium meetings that turned, in one researcher’s word, sulfurous. And even so, they showed up. They chose solidarity not because the differences had vanished, but in spite of the fact that they hadn’t.

Marissa: That, finally, is what I want you to carry away from this episode today. Solidarity is not the absence of conflict. It is what you do across conflict, when someone you have every reason to keep at arm’s length is dying, and you decide— against history, against stigma, against your own grievances— to roll up your sleeves.

Sarah: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org. Thanks for listening.

Bibliography

Andrews, Bob, and Cindy Patton. 1983. “Talking About AIDS.” Gay Community News, June 18.

Artavia, David, and Diane Anderson-Minshall. 2017. “Art, Activism & AIDS: These Decades Were Filled with LGBT Change, but the Impact of AIDS Was the Biggest.” The Advocate, no. 1091 (June/July): 87–88.

Bailey, William A. 1995. “The Importance of HIV Prevention Programming to the Lesbian and Gay Community.” In AIDS, Identity, and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Gay Men, edited by Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene, 210–225. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Brier, Jennifer. 2007. “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses to AIDS, 1982–1984.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer): 234–248.

Callen, Michael, and Richard Berkowitz. 1982. “We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity.” New York Native, November 8.

———. 1983. How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. New York: Tower Press.

Clausson, Nils I. 1989. “AIDS: The Community-based Response.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 80, Special Supplement on AIDS (May/June): S18–S20.

Gómez, Cynthia A. 1995. “Lesbians at Risk for HIV: The Unresolved Debate.” In AIDS, Identity, and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Gay Men, edited by Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene, 19–31. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Goodwin, Marie. 1983. “AIDS and the New Morality.” Gay Community News, August 13.

Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoffman, Amy. 1983. “Gay Liberation: The Spirit of Stonewall.” Gay Community News, July 2.

Hyde, Sue. 1984. “AIDS Quarantines, the Government and Us.” Gay Community News, March 24.

“Lesbian AIDS Activism.” n.d. We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive. Online exhibit. Yale University Library.

“Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic.” 2024. Lesbians, HIV, and the Power of Community Care series. YouthCO, April 23.

Omoto, Allen M., and A. Lauren Crain. 1995. “AIDS Volunteerism: Lesbian and Gay Community-Based Responses to HIV.” In AIDS, Identity, and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Gay Men, edited by Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene, 187–209. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Painter, Kim. 2015. “There’s a Catch as Ban Ends for Gay Male Blood Donors.” Des Moines Register (Gannett), December 22, B.3.

Patton, Cindy. 1983. “Taking Control: Women, Sex, and AIDS.” Gay Community News, September 17.

———. 1984. “Illness as a Weapon.” Gay Community News, June 30.

Pomerleau, Clark A. n.d. “Responding to AIDS.” In LGBTQ+ Studies: An Open Textbook. SUNY/Lumen Learning.

Remien, Robert H., and Judith G. Rabkin. 1995. “Long-Term Survival With AIDS and the Role of Community.” In AIDS, Identity, and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Gay Men, edited by Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene, 169–186. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Slack, James. 2001. “Zero-Sum Politics, the Herbert Thesis, and the Ryan White CARE Act: Lessons Learned from the Local Side of AIDS.” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 24, no. 1 (Summer): 80–102.

Notes

^[1] Clark A. Pomerleau, “Responding to AIDS,” in LGBTQ+ Studies: An Open Textbook (SUNY/Lumen Learning), “Gay Liberation” section.

^[2] Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–660; concept as discussed in Pomerleau, “Responding to AIDS.”

^[3] David Artavia and Diane Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” The Advocate, no. 1091 (June/July 2017): 87.

^[4] Pomerleau, “Responding to AIDS,” “The Epidemic Begins” section.

^[5] Jerry Falwell, quoted in Artavia and Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” 87.

^[6] Patrick Buchanan, quoted in Artavia and Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” 87.

^[7] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive (online exhibit), Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[8] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[9] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[10] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[11] Benjamin Spindler, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, as recounted in “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[12] Brad Truax and Benjamin Spindler, quoted in “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[13] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Blood Tests, Blood Sisters” section.

^[14] National Gay Blood Drive, quoted in Kim Painter, “There’s a Catch as Ban Ends for Gay Male Blood Donors,” Des Moines Register, December 22, 2015, B.3.

^[15] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Activism” section; the ACT UP / Jesse Helms action is widely documented.

^[16] Artavia and Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” 88.

^[17] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Activism” section.

^[18] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Activism Happened in Art” section.

^[19] “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library, “Activism Happened in Art” section.

^[20] Lesbian safer-sex poster (“low risk isn’t no risk”), reproduced and discussed in “Lesbian AIDS Activism,” Yale University Library.

^[21] Cynthia A. Gómez, “Lesbians at Risk for HIV: The Unresolved Debate,” in AIDS, Identity, and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Gay Men, ed. Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995), 19–31, here 20.

^[22] Gómez, “Lesbians at Risk for HIV,” 20.

^[23] Gómez, “Lesbians at Risk for HIV,” 20.

^[24] Gómez, “Lesbians at Risk for HIV,” 31.

^[25] Jennifer Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses to AIDS, 1982–1984,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 2007): 234–248, here 234.

^[26] Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 234–235.

^[27] Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 235.

^[28] Cindy Patton, in Bob Andrews and Cindy Patton, “Talking About AIDS,” Gay Community News, June 18, 1983, as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 238–239.

^[29] Cindy Patton, “Illness as a Weapon,” Gay Community News, June 30, 1984, as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 241–242.

^[30] Patton, “Illness as a Weapon,” as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 242.

^[31] Patton, “Illness as a Weapon,” as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 242–243.

^[32] Amy Hoffman, “Gay Liberation: The Spirit of Stonewall,” Gay Community News, July 2, 1983, as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 240.

^[33] Marie Goodwin, “AIDS and the New Morality,” Gay Community News, August 13, 1983, as quoted in Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses,” 240-244.

^[34] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO, April 23, 2024.

^[35] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO.

^[36] Canadian Journal of Public Health 80, suppl. (May/June 1989): S18–S20, here S19.

^[37] Clausson, “AIDS: The Community-based Response,” S18.

^[38] Allen M. Omoto and A. Lauren Crain, “AIDS Volunteerism: Lesbian and Gay Community-Based Responses to HIV,” in AIDS, Identity, and Community, ed. Herek and Greene, 187–209, here 202.

^[39] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO.

^[40] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO.

^[41] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO.

^[42] Clausson, “AIDS: The Community-based Response,” S18.

^[43] Clausson, “AIDS: The Community-based Response,” S19.

^[44] Unnamed HIV physician, quoted as an epigraph in Robert H. Remien and Judith G. Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS and the Role of Community,” in AIDS, Identity, and Community, ed. Herek and Greene, 169–186, here 169, 185.

^[45] Larry Kramer, as recounted in Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 181 (citing GMHC, 1983).

^[46] Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 182.

^[47] Unnamed woman (former drug user and ACT-UP member), quoted in Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 182.

^[48] Unnamed woman (a lawyer), quoted in Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 183.

^[49] Unnamed woman (Narcotics Anonymous outreach worker), quoted in Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 183.

^[50] Remien and Rabkin, “Long-Term Survival With AIDS,” 182.

^[51] Omoto and Crain, “AIDS Volunteerism,” 188.

^[52] Omoto and Crain, “AIDS Volunteerism,” 188.

^[53] Artavia and Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” 88.

^[54] Artavia and Anderson-Minshall, “Art, Activism & AIDS,” 88.

^[55] “Lesbian Solidarity During the AIDS Epidemic,” YouthCO.

^[56] William A. Bailey, “The Importance of HIV Prevention Programming to the Lesbian and Gay Community,” in AIDS, Identity, and Community, ed. Herek and Greene, 210–225, here 220.

^[57] Bailey, “The Importance of HIV Prevention Programming,” 220-221.

^[58] James Slack, “Zero-Sum Politics, the Herbert Thesis, and the Ryan White CARE Act,” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 24, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 80–102.