Katie Batza. Before Aids

In Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s, Katie Batza examines the state of gay community clinics and sexual health outreach programs during the gay liberation era of the 1970s. Through a series of three case studies, she demonstrates how a national gay medical network was already well in place when the AIDS crisis hit in 1981. Challenging a narrative that focuses on the unique role of ACT UP, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and other AIDS-era organizations in creating a community response to public health threats, Batza finds that “gay health activism” was already flourishing in the 1970s (2). Batza’s research focuses on three local examples of gay communities trying to provide for their own unique health needs. Each developed during the time after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when the mainstream American medical system still considered homosexuality itself an illness and generally made gay men feel unwelcome and shameful. Batza’s focus rests on gay men, since, as she explains, lesbian health activism occurred mostly within the context of women’s health clinics, not LGBT ones.

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