The government’s failure to halt the entirely preventable monkeypox outbreak immediately generated public confusion and distrust. Many voiced fears that monkeypox would be labeled a “gay disease,” a concept that dates to the initial year of the AIDS epidemic, before HIV was identified as the cause for AIDS, and before AIDS was even named. At the time, the plague affecting queer men was known as GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, a sociological name that quickly became a tautology: one would get GRID if they were gay, and if one had GRID, it was because they were gay. What followed was the homophobic conflation of AIDS with queerness, and the violent belief that queer people deserved to contract HIV, develop AIDS, and die.
In the early weeks of the outbreak, the fear of monkeypox being labeled a “gay disease” dominated conversations about how to craft public health messaging about the virus. Some argued that tailoring public health campaigns to queer men would encourage monkeypox’s status as a “gay disease,” instead of a virus that could affect anyone. For example, outlets like NPR encouraged its readers not to “overemphasize” sex when talking about monkeypox, despite nearly every indication that the virus was moving through sexual networks.
However well intentioned, what these arguments misunderstood was that public health campaigns for queer men are not only not homophobic, but are in fact one of the greatest achievements of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS activists, who fought incessantly for government action and pharmaceutical resources, understood the fundamental difference between homophobic attention that stigmatizes queer sex and dismisses HIV and AIDS as a “gay disease,” and the specific messaging necessary for queer men to safeguard themselves from contracting the virus.
For example, public health posters during the 1980s and ’90s not only eroticized condom use and safe sex for gay men, but, as historian Jennifer Brier details in her book Infectious Ideas (2009), Black, Latinx, and other gay activists of color worked tirelessly to create safe sex campaigns that addressed their community’s specific needs. Nor did HIV education for queer men end with the introduction of antiretrovirals in 1996. For example, in the recent “Swallow This” advertisement for the prevention regime PrEP, a close-up photograph of a Black man’s open mouth shows a PrEP pill on his outstretched tongue, and is accompanied by the words “Swallow This” in bold type. The ad builds on the success of earlier campaigns targeted to queer people of color, for example ACT UP action group Gran Fury’s 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” NYC bus campaign, which showed people of color kissing to raise awareness about how the disease is (and isn’t) spread. Such messaging, directed to queer and trans people of color, is crucial to any serious public health education aimed at ending the epidemic.