New Books In American Studies

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) explores this heretofore unrecognized story, chronicling the development of a national gay health network by highlighting the origins of longstanding gay health institutions in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, pl