From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS

Abstract

My dissertation, From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS, tracks the agency of white gay leaders in shaping urban politics in the 1980s vis-à-vis the racialization of public health discourses and practices. In the context of state indifference spurred by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, these leaders embraced racialized norms of sexual hygiene to articulate their Americanness. Because early in the epidemic, the racially coded language of public health represented the gay community as a threat to white Americans, gay community activists learned that meeting institutionalized-defined standards of moral health and sexual hygiene was a precondition for their social membership. However, in testifying on behalf of the gay community’s moral cleanliness, these leaders sublimated fears of perverse spaces, atypical gender roles, and deviant sexualities onto communities of color. Under neoliberalism, I argue that these racialized norms of sexual hygiene stood as yardsticks for Americanization. I underscore that racialized norms of sexual hygiene provided for the anesthetization and co-optation of gay radical politics and, in turn, gave form to what Lisa Duggan calls “homonormativity,” the normalization of white, middle-class class gay and lesbian politics of sexual respectability. Specifically, through a case study of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I uncover how homonormativity converged with wider agendas and policies encompassing the “cleaning-up” of public urban spaces such as low-income neighborhoods and vice districts, and the policing of its racial denizens such as “crack-addicted” single black mothers, Hmong refugees, and Native American sex workers. Using multiple methods, including archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and discourse analysis, I illustrate that public health constructions of normative gender, sexuality, and domestic space became powerfully intertwined with private development so that both institutions worked in the service of promoting the economically prosperous potential of post-industrial inner-cities as centers of business, culture, and tourism. Gentrification, I conclude, does not simply denote the privatization of public urban spaces. It also reflects attempts at the privatization of non-normative sexuality in the service of reorganizing white heteronormativity.