Running head: HELTER SKELTER

Helter Skelter: A Que(e)ry of U.S. Public Response to the AIDS Pandemic

Jackie Poapst
George Mason University
May 2014

HELTER SKELTER

Helter Skelter: A Que(e)ry of U.S. Public Response to the AIDS Pandemic

Public relations is quickly becoming one of the largest fields of communication research
(Taylor & Botan, 2004). Taylor and Botan (2004) characterize this phenomenon as being a
problem with the erroneous view that public relations is just an applied technical area.
Theorists in public relations have attempted to provide broader inclusion of theoretical research
into the field (Taylor & Botan, 2004). Despite its growing popularity in academia, however,
public relations research has yet to bridge the lavender ceiling into deeper analysis of public
relations through a queer theory lens (Tindall, 2007).
Empirically, public health issues provide a common sector for public relations, and the
mass media is often relied on by medical professionals to fill a gap of medical knowledge for the
public (Park & Reber, 2010). Incidentally, but the federal government often leads the charge to
ensure that public awareness campaigns are given greater media attention. One key instance of
the cooperative influences of the mass media, medical professionals and the United States
government failing to disseminate medical knowledge was the AIDS epidemic. This paper will
attempt to provide a queer analysis of the United States federal governments public relations
initiatives on both the domestic and international levels.
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (from this
point forward referred to as ACT UP), a revolutionary group formed to counter the federal
governments inaction against AIDS (Morris, 2012). Considering ACT UPs historical criticism
of the United States lack of public relations surrounding the AIDS epidemic, this paper attempts
to provide an in depth narrative that takes into account these historical failures alongside a
similar critique of modern public relations approaches taken by the United States in response to
AIDS.

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3
United States Domestic AIDS Response

The AIDS epidemic is the perfect example of a public relations crisis. As Taylor and
Botan (2004) stated:
Crises are issues that have reached the critical stage and share two distinguishing
characteristics. First, a resolution is demanded by some outside force within a time frame
that is too short for the organization to engage in its normal decision-making process.
Second, a crisis represents a turning point for an organization so that it is unlikely to
return full to its precrisis state, whether for better or worse.
By the time HIV/AIDS gained media attention, hundreds had already died. Hysteria
regarding a new form of contagious cancer quickly followed the initial media coverage. This
issue was a crisis, yet despite traditional understanding that public relations crises demand
focused attention and reaction, the U.S. response was anything from expected.
Reagan Administration and Lack of Response
Even to this day, the United States framing of AIDS contributes to its image as a gay
disease. Because of this queer stigmatization in the United States, the Reagan administration
avoided discussion of AIDS (White, 2004). For the eight years that Reagan was in office,
governmental actions taken to address AIDS were halting and ineffective, and media coverage
was misinformed or nonexistent (White, 2004).
Grassroots efforts from organizations like ACT UP represented some of the most
comprehensive strategies to combat the spread of and provide societal awareness of AIDS during
the first several decades of its spread, but suffered from both governmental avoidance and a lack
of governmental cooperation (Halberstam, 1993). Throughout the Reagan presidency, appeals
were made and AIDS continued to spread, yet Reagan himself remained silent:

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With each passing month, death and suffering increased at a frightening rate. Scientists,
researchers and health care professionals at every level expressed the need for funding.
The response of the Reagan administration was indifference. By Feb. 1, 1983, 1,025
AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the United States. Reagan said
nothing. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced
4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. In San Francisco, the health
department reported more than 500 cases. Again, Reagan said nothing. That same year,
1984, the Democratic National Convention convened in San Francisco. Hoping to focus
attention on the need for AIDS research, education and treatment, more than 100,000
sympathizers marched from the Castro to Moscone Center. With each diagnosis, the pain
and suffering spread across America. Everyone seemed to now know someone infected
with AIDS. (White, 2004)
Reagan chose not to address the AIDS crisis until seven years after its discovery, very
close to the end of his second term (White, 2004). Yet, Reagan could have been the perfect
candidate to take this public relations crisis and resolve any homophobic sentiment resulting
from the outbreak. As a president who boasted a positive approval rating and seductive
Hollywood charm, Reagan could have taken the time to change media framing of the epidemic.
Salyer (2004) writes:
Had he chosen to speak up after Hudson's death, the world would have listened. Ronald
Reagan, the man who confidently parlayed Hollywood stardom into a successful political
career, could not have had a more compelling opportunity to open his mouth. Some
carefully chosen words might have squelched the homophobic rhetoric of the day. Some
genuine leadership might have generated compassion to counter growing hostility and

HELTER SKELTER

hysteria about AIDS in America. How profoundly different our world might be today if
Reagan had pointed to one insufferable preacher and bellowed, "Rev. Falwell, you
sanctimonious turd, sit down and shut up!" Or what if this man, this piece of allAmerican craftsmanship, had simply offered an affirmation of plainspoken optimism
about AIDS? What if he'd just told us he cared about the lives of the people infected or
affected by the virus?
Post-Reagan Domestic Public Campaigns
After Reagans late reaction to AIDS, the government began a small-scale public
awareness campaign in the United States to increase media coverage of AIDS. This media
coverage was ineffective, however, because it was often inaccurate and vague. These campaigns
encouraged the continual understanding of AIDS as a gay disease that straight sexual acts could
prevent; a well-known response article to these campaigns even stated: While the message was
technically true, it was also highly misleading. Everyone certainly faced some danger, but for
most heterosexuals, the risk from a single act of sex was smaller than the risk of ever getting hit
by lightning (Davis, 2012).
Following these awareness campaigns were years more of scare tactic campaigns. While
medical understanding was growing, media coverage framed the issue of AIDS as being one
where the public only needed to know that AIDS was a death sentence and condoms prevented
the spread. Medical awareness beyond that never reached the population (Davis, 2012). One well
known advertisement even utilized the image of a grave site:
A visibly sad teenage Latino stands in the rain. He recounts how he told his brother that if
he had sex, he should use condoms so he wouldnt get AIDS. But his brother had laughed
at him, saying, Condoms arent macho. Then the teen kneels down, and the camera

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follows to reveal he is sitting in a cemetery. Looking down over his brothers grave, he
reflects gloomily, My brother, he was so macho (Davis, 2012).
Magic Johnson and MTV
Public relations campaigns began to change in the United States when they gained a
famous figurehead: the basketball player named Magic Johnson. More of the population seemed
willing to learn about AIDS, hotline calls grew tremendously, and the government began to start
targeting their campaigns toward at-risk populations such as African-Americans and Latinos.
Magic Johnson coming out as HIV-positive forced the U.S. population to realize that this disease
could spread to even the healthiest individuals. Campaigns began to focus on the every day
person: the straight population. No longer did public messages overwhelmingly utilize fear
mongering in an effort to prevent sexual transmission, but rather attempted to focus on education
concerning prevention and treatment. However, fear messages still existed, but had shifted
audiences to drug use (Davis, 2012).
Not only did advertisement campaigns shift, but efforts to promote awareness increased
after Magic Johnsons announcements. More television networks jumped on board, in order to
provide education concerning AIDS to a younger population. MTV began several television
series that featured individuals who had AIDS. Most of these representations attempted to show
that there were now ways to treat AIDS, in order to reduce the stigmatization tied to the disease
(Davis, 2012).
Progressive measures and solutions became the new approach to AIDS that the media
relayed to the public, an approach that has continued domestically to this day (Davis, 2012). A
closer look will reveal that counts of the virus are drastically increasing in areas like the Deep
South and other rural areas where funding is too low to be effective (Bardhan, 2002). However,

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an overall framing of AIDS as a resolved issue in the United States has permeated the media
leaving the U.S. domestic public unaware of the continued devastation that the epidemic is
causing. (Bardhan, 2002)
United States International AIDS Efforts
Queer Analysis
The Queers Burden
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the idea that AIDS is the queers burden to
shoulder as a consequence for their sexual deviancy has proliferated. AIDS campaigns only
became effective in garnering research support and awareness when public relations began to
frame the disease as a heterosexual problem. Before that, the deaths of hundreds of gay men
was inconsequential as long as straight America was safe. Stephenson (2009) articulated this
change in campaign strategy as a desperation attempt:
The campaign making AIDS everyones problem was a public relations event that was a
desperate response to the disinterest and prejudices of the American public and
government. The disinterest was to such an extent virtually no prevention or research
dollars could be approved. After all, fags and junkies were dying, who cared?
(Stephenson, 2002)
While calling these governmental campaigns a desperation attempt may seem correct,
this framing also washes over the historical governmental complacency at the start of the AIDS
epidemic. Another, more critical, view of this change in public campaigns against AIDS is that
the government truly feared that AIDS would become an everyone problem instead of a
disease that seemed to punish the immoral. This view corresponds with statements made by
those close to the Reagan administration, such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan, who

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said respectively that "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals" and that AIDS is "nature's
revenge on gay men." (White, 2008)
The desire in governmental public awareness campaigns to prevent the AIDS spread into
the general population created identity formulations in policy making of the normal,
heterosexual identity and the diseased, queer identity. This marking allowed for a rhetoric of
disposability to emerge and profligate through societal actions taken in the AIDS crisis.
Containment became synonymous with extermination of an entire group, as long as that group
was excluded from what was considered to be normative society. Dean (2003) writes:
Public discourse showed less concern for helping those ill with the disease than for
protecting the general population that they might contaminate. As Simon Watney has
shown in his analysis of media discourse about AIDS in Britain and the United States, the
idea of a general population implies a notion of disposable populations in much the same
way that the category of the normal denes itself in relation to the pathological, on which
it necessarily depends. 3 Hence the general population can be understood as another
term for heteronormative society. Those excluded from the general population whether
by virtue of their sexuality, race, class, or nationality are by denition queer. In this
way, queer came to stand less for a particular sexual orientation or a stigmatized erotic
identity than for a critical distance from the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm.
The Queer and the Corpse
Not only did the queer become the diseased, scourge of society, but the provided
characterization of AIDS as a gay disease tied both death and a lack of future to the queer subject
(Stephenson, 2002). Under such heteronormative framing, the queer body is one with no future;
queers are a group of sexual nihilists who stand in the way of those who would otherwise hope to

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attain a bright and hopeful future, their very existence becomes a reminder of death (Schotten,
2009). AIDS is not just symbolic of death, but is the picture of the corpse. Heterosexual society
comprises existence free from the lesion covered, AIDS infested corpse of the queer.
Queer willingness to engage in their sexuality signifies a willingness to reject social
temporality and accept the inevitable death via AIDS that comes with becoming queer
(Schotten, 2009). This futureless state creates schisms in notions of reality which allow for
heteronormative exclusion: rejection of futurity is in direct opposition to notions of permanence
and reality to which the heterosexual subject ties itself. Heteronormativity operates within an
understanding of existence and productivity. Yet, the AIDS epidemic among queer communities
created spaces that were forced to experience and open up new forms of space and time, because
AIDS meant the future was not guaranteed:
Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS, for example, by rethinking the
conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity, and by making community in relation to
risk, disease, infection, and death (Bersani 1996; Edelman 1998). And yet queer time,
even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation;
it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conven-tions of family,
inheritance, and child rearing. (Halberstam, 2005)
Despite this new framing provided by the queer community and its response to AIDS, the
symbol portrayed continued to be that of the queer abject, or the AIDS infested queer corpse.
Politicians allowed the disease to continue unfettered, because AIDS was seen as getting rid of
the gay problem without hurting the straight population:
If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare Id rather spend it on a baby or in- nocent person
with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with

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AIDS says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an
hour long video of people dying on cam- era because they cant afford the limited drugs
available that might extend their lives and I cant even remember what this official
looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half and I
was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of
the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths
because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country If you want to stop
AIDS shoot the queers (Wojnarowicz, 1992)
AIDS and the Child
A tendency too commonly seen in media covered AIDS awareness campaigns is the
attempt to tie its potential spread to children. The media endorsed a logic which preached that
society must control their behavior in order to preserve the future for their potential children.
This fear for the child is rooted in desires for productivity, a fantasy-laden future dependent upon
reproduction to achieve progress. However, operating under such a decision making calculus
ensures that we are trapped in a state of endless drive toward progress in which anything deemed
incapable of progress gets pushed to the periphery. In the case of the non-heterosexual individual
inflicted with AIDS, ensuring their care became less important than ensuring the same care be
adequately delivered to the straight individuals who can guarantee stability for the children of
tomorrow. Giffney (2008) writes:
Reproductive futurism is, what I call, heterocycloptic, bound up with the desiring gaze
and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of progress moving endlessly towards
a better future, in the process imposing a panopticonlike self-surveillance: Its a
machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those

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over whom it is exercised (Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocaloptic in the sense that desire
itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm becomes inextricable from
the natural. This technology of power a coercive universalization (Edelman 2004, 11)
operates at the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: the Child has come
to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom
that order is held in perpetual trust (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to
the future and in turn to politics, and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to
count as the future in advance.
The at Risk and the at Fault
As explained earlier, when AIDS campaigns expanded in the United States, large focus
was put on targeting certain at risk populations, mainly Black and Latino communities. These
communities were deemed vulnerable to AIDS expansion, characterized as having greater
quantities of people of lower socio-economic status and with an increased presence of sexual
stigmatization. Comparably, queer individuals, despite being labeled at risk, were largely
ignored by governmental campaigns, possibly because they were also considered to be at fault.
Dean (2003) explains:
Public discourse early in the epidemic aggressively stigmatized the groups of people that
rst manifested AIDS mortalities, primarily injection-drug users and gay men. Rightwing politicians and the media characterized AIDS as a disease of identity something
you would catch because of the kind of person you were. AIDS was represented as a gay
disease and even explained as divine punishment for unnatural sex, though lesbians
werent falling sick. In response to this reactionary discourse, gay activists insisted that
HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) was transmitted via particular acts, not via types of

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people, and that the notion of AIDS as a gay disease was dangerously misleading
because it promulgated the idea that one remained immune to HIV-infection as long as he
or she identied as a normal heterosexual. Gay activists started to see how the discourse
of identity that had proven so enabling in the 1970s had its drawbacks, as the hard-won
political gains of gay liberation were eroded by the new rationale that AIDS seemed to
provide for disenfranchising gay men. Rather than gradually being accepted into
mainstream society, gays abruptly were recast as plague-spreading sex deviates
As long as Black and Latino at risk status could not be blamed on homosexual
behavior, their status was one of victimhood, rather than culpability. However, the queer
individual can never be a victim, because their deviancy was a life that they chose to live (with
full knowledge of its consequences).
AIDS and the Masculine Protector
AIDS movements lost their taboo when they became tied to an individual that
majoritarian society could name as a masculine figurehead, Magic Johnson. Not only was
Johnson a healthy, professional basketball player, but he also claimed to be heterosexual. Magic
Johnson came out as being HIV-positive despite the overall continued stigmatization that came
along with that title. He used his status to promote greater public awareness for the disease, and
also served as an indicator for Americans that AIDS was not a death sentence.
While Johnsons actions in the fight against AIDS are applauded, the implicit assumption
made in considering Johnson a positive image for the fight against AIDS (in comparison to the
hundreds of AIDS positive gay individuals that came before him) is an understanding of
heterosexual and masculine usefulness. Magic Johnsons status as a strong, straight male placed
him in a category of the expected masculine protector, whereas gay men with AIDS emasculated

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themselves through their queerness. Gay became synonymous with the useless, or the feminine.
Whereas straight and male individuals could be categorized as productive, or the masculine.
(Halberstam, 1993)
Modern AIDS Response and Homonationalism
Homonationalism and the Assimilated Queer
Since the beginning work of Michel Foucault, normativity scholarship has analyzed
hierarchy, and acknowledged that hierarchal structures are ever changing and evolving (Curtain
& Gaither, 2005). While at a previous point in time a group can be excluded and marginalized by
the majority, progression in a society can begin to push that oppressed group back into normative
culture via consolidation or assimilation (Curtin & Gaither, 2005). This trend defines modern
progressivism within the United States concerning queer inclusion and the AIDS epidemic.
Despite historical queer exclusion in the United States, by and large, most queer individuals have
been assimilated into heteronormative society (Curtin & Gaither, 2005).
This categorization, however, is part and parcel of modern power that heteronormative
structures control. While queer individuals are included, their inclusion is contingent upon their
usefulness within the political economy of productive desires (Puar, 2007). Gays are accepted in
the United States, because their acceptance allows for continued heteronormative imperial
expansion, or homonationalism as renowned queer theorist, Jasbir Puar (2007) names it, by the
United States in the international sphere.
Throughout the entire ACT-UP movement, queer populations in the United States
became the conservative picture used to symbolize the consequences of hedonism in America.
Tolerance only came when an apparent lack of substantiated consequence allowed for the spread
this figure of death to heterosexual life (Puar, 2007; Poapst, 2014). The gay agenda became a

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symbol of potential in an effort to retain its productive capacity for heterosexual society. The
lesion covered zombies of the AIDS outbreak were quickly pushed aside for a new and luxurious
queer in the United States, the assimilated. Where the ACT-UP movement situated itself as a
break away from capitalist expectations for gay bodies (because queer anger over their
positionality in regards to death came in the forms of masculine violence) the assimilated queer
was relegated to places that did not disrupt capital productivity: the fashion industry,
entertainment, etcplaces they could be useful (Halberstam, 1993; Poapst, 2014).
However, this benevolence toward sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing
parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity,
and bodily integrity (Puar, 2007; Poapst, 2014). Only queer subjects that fit within the
understood parameters of the queer normative, the useful deviants, can be considered worthy
to play a role in sustainable society (Poapst, 2014).
AIDS as an Imperial Rallying Cry
The outbreak of AIDS signaled a point in history at which homophobia became not only
morally justifiable, but utilitarian (all because queer individuals could be labeled as a scourge
to the heterosexual population). In the early 1980s, rampant vitriol was encouraged by the media
in which AIDS first became the gay disease that was spreading throughout the United States. It
was not until AIDS became a straight disease as well that this became an issue of national
importance. Yet, even during this time of enlightenment, the overarching rhetorical portrayal
of AIDS in the United States was one that casted the queer population as the actual disease.
Queerness was spreading, and the poor straight population was suffering as a result of their sinful
actions (Wojnarowicz, 1992; Poapst, 2014).

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It is therefore intriguing that, despite this vast history of state-sanctioned homophobia,

modern rhetoric surrounding the now international AIDS issue is often used as a rallying cry for
American progressivism. Western media controls international perceptions of AIDS and portrays
the United States' actions to combat AIDS as secular and civilized compared to other nations (in
a completely ahistorical light). The United States' reactions to the beginning of the AIDS crisis
serve as the foundation for its modern approaches to AIDS, yet Western media constantly
characterizes non-Western approaches to AIDS as being backward and homophobic (Puar,
2007; Poapst, 2014).
Modern Western media attention concerning non-Western approaches to AIDS is one
veiled with judgment. The media chooses to fixate on foreign homophobia as a means to justify
and glorify the United States' actions (in support of the queer agenda) while demonizing the
others culture and state. While this media attention is framed as supportive of the LGBT
community, this positivity only lends itself to a racialized framing of the other. (Puar, 2007;
Poapst, 2014).
Modern rhetoric in the United States surrounding domestic actions in response to AIDS
often pits supposed positive approaches by the U.S. against what the state deems less accepting
or progressive steps by other nations. This rhetorical framing allows for the United States to
commodify queer experience in a rallying effect for American cultural expansionism, at the
expense of other cultures (Poapst, 2014). Puar (2013) writes:
It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some)
homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and
fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality.

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To say that this historical moment is homonational, where homonationalism is

understood as an analytics of power, then, means that one must engage it in the first place
as the condition of possibility for national and transnational politics. Part of the increased
recourse to domestication and privatization of neoliberal economies and within queer
communities, homonationalism is fundamentally a deep critique of lesbian and gay
liberal rights discourses and how those rights discourses produce narratives of progress
and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to citizenshipcultural
and legalat the expense of the delimitation and expulsion of other populations. The
narrative of progress for gay rights is thus built on the back of racialized others, for
whom such progress was once achieved, but is now backsliding or has yet to arrive.
Conclusion
The rhetorical situation of AIDS has undergone constant change. The United
States' portrayal of the virus as first a cancerous and deviant disease then consequently a global
and urgent humanitarian crisis was intentional. The historical situation of AIDs is clear: it has
been used as a tool by the white, heteronormative praxis which underlays modern media and
politics to otherize and essentialize populations or individual bodies and groups deemed
detrimental or potentially obstructive to the progress which the praxis produces. Raegan-era
rhetoric and response (or lack thereof) to AIDS was an effort to lance the boil that was America's
hidden queer population - a population portrayed exclusively as diseased and soon to die.
Modern media and political approach to the disease is instead exclusively positive, a positivity
which is purported to be found only in the media and policies of a government as caring and
benevolent as the secular and modernized United States. Here, the praxis works to racialize those

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outside of its scope: the United States dismisses its own transgressions in combating the threat of
AIDS as part of an effort to frame the lack of response taken by other (usually non-Western)
states as barbaric and inhumane. Whereas before the media practice was a defensive effort to
protect a heterosexual, and thus sexually productive, majority from the threat of a disease
uniquely associated with the queer community, homonationalist rhetoric and policy is an
offensive effort to expand and exceptionalize U.S. presence in "backwards", non-Western states
(a more sinister form of production). It is therefore necessary to re-historicize and accurately
identify the media's continual efforts to queer AIDS and its importance as a disease.

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