I am writing the first book-length project to map the presence of lesbians in the anti-AIDS movement and to analyze their influence. In the 1980s, as AIDS ravaged the gay male community across the country, lesbians rushed to be of use. They delivered food to AIDS patients, organized blood drives, used their bodies to protest FDA rules, led AIDS social service organizations, and demanded more HIV/AIDS research. They were caregivers, educators, theorists, agitators, health providers, researchers, and case managers. By focusing on lesbians and their political and care efforts, this project reveals the coalitional gender politics (and their limits) at the heart of the anti-AIDS movement, the deployment of risk as an organizing tool, the influence of lesbian-feminist politics on movement strategies, and the consequences of AIDS on lesbian identity, activism and institutions. Overall, this history will expand our historical understanding of gender, sexuality, feminism, racism, and identity politics within the movement to end HIV/AIDS and the influence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on lesbian feminist politics.

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Judith Houck is the Wittig and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She works at the intersection of medical, gender, and sexuality histories in the United States. Her first book, Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine and Menopause in Modern America was published in 2006 (Harvard UP). It examined the medical, popular, and personal meanings of menopause and how they changed over the course of the twentieth century. Her most recent book, Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement (Chicago University Press, 2024) explored the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. It integrated women’s bodies into our emerging understanding of second-wave feminism, and it shed light on women’s efforts to shape health care and and reproductive control beyond. She is currently working on a history of lesbians in HIV/AIDS activism.

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