The Queer Nation Acts Up: Health Care, Politics, and Sexual Diversity in the County of Angels

Abstract

The emergence of organized political groups of people with AIDS has forced issues of health and illness into a public visibility which threatens traditional assumptions of privacy and public heterosexual privilege. The struggle against the stigmatization of AIDS has forced many gay men and lesbians to reject the relative pleasures of the closet and its legal girdings in discredited notions of constitutional privacy for a radical insistence on the right to be ‘queer’ on their own terms in public. ACT UP and Queer Nation present a threat not only to prevailing state and church ideologies of power and submission, but perhaps more importantly to the gendered and sexualized assumptions which define the boundaries of public space itself. People who are ill and people defined as degenerates present a special threat to the historical myths and antiurban morphology of Los Angeles, which still is perceived as an island of private consumption and public piety by those in power. The challenge presented by ACT UP and Queer Nation is an integral part of the spatial densification of the region, feared by old Anglo and new Catholic authorities.