How to Survive a Footnote: AIDS activism in the "after years"

September 2, 2015 2:20 PM

"When protease inhibitors arrived, one era of the AIDS crisis was over. Many stories of the plague years in America end with this victory. Sometimes a coda is appended to acknowledge that the crisis itself isn’t over, referencing ongoing epidemics in Africa and, less often, in black and brown populations in America. What’s often missing from these analyses is an era that I’ve come to think of as the “footnote years” of AIDS activism: a sliver of about five years, from 1996 to 2001, in which a specific urban, queer-identified American activism played a role in changing the global response to HIV, and sought, less successfully, to use this work as a jumping-off point for a broader quest for justice."
posted by roomthreeseventeen (2 comments total)

[read the whole article before commenting. this pullquote is seriously problematic without the surrounding context, but the article is pretty good]
posted by schmod at 2:57 PM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

This was a great article, thanks.
posted by triggerfinger at 3:21 PM on September 2, 2015