Profit, Porn, and Protease Inhibitors
Ronnie Burk’s Radical Activism in “Post-Aids” San Francisco
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6188133 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Victoria Carroll (King's College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.11691 |
| OpenAlex | W2581236239 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
In early 2000 gay Latino poet Ronnie Burk courted controversy when he posted a quasi-pornographic activist flyer depicting the Executive Director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation masturbating with a dildo inscribed with AZT on the website of the controversial San Francisco-based offshoot of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. A demonstration against the commodification of HIV/AIDS and its newly emerging treatments, the image indexed the shifting responses to the epidemic in San Francisco at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article considers the build-up and fallout attending this controversy, offering close readings of Burk’s flyer and tracing the image back to its roots in European political pornography, breaking with consensus-based HIV/AIDS discourse that curtails the narration of the epidemic in 1996, the year that the efficacy of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy using protease inhibitors was confirmed
Art · Art history · Commodification · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Medicine · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Virology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |