Many lesbians, gay men, and those who would increasingly claim the category transgender who had felt the sting of the queer insult were quite surprised, then, to encounter the term’s reemergence in the 1990s, spurred both by a political formation of militant and creative LGBT activists and by a new cadre of academic scholars.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new social movement called for the rejection of labels such as queer and even homosexual (itself seen as pejorative and medicalizing) in favor of proud proclamations like “Gay Is Good.” It was often but not always offered as epithet and ascribed to others rather than claimed for oneself and by the twentieth century it was most commonly used for reasons of perceived sexual or gender non-conformity. Queer carried particular currency in scandal from the lingo of newspaper exposés and gossip columns to private epistolary speculation. Up through the nineteenth century the word was primarily used to mark individuals considered odd or outside social norms. HanhardtĪmong the first lessons instructors teach in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) history classes is about the changing definitions and uses of the word queer.
& Durack, D.T.Photo from the Seattle Municipal Archives () under a Creative Commons License 2.0 () Queer History Christina B.
et al (1981) 'Kaposi's sarcoma in homosexual men: A report of eight cases' Lancet 2(8247):598-600 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (1981, 4 July) 'Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia among Homosexual Men- New York City and California' MMWR Weekly 30(4):305-308 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (1982, 16 July) 'Epidemiologic notes and Reports Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia among persons with hemophilia A' MMWR Weekly 31(27):365-367 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (1982, 24 September) 'Current Trends Update on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)- United States' MMWR Weekly 31(37):507-508,513-514 New York Times () ‘New Name Is Proposed For the Cause of AIDS’ Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (1982, 9 July) 'Opportunistic infections and Kaposi's Sarcoma among Haitians in the United States' 31(26):353-4,360-1 Brennan, R.O.
et al (2014) 'The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations' Science 346(6205):56-61 BBC News (2014, 3 October) 'Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa' University of Oxford News (2014, 3 October) 'HIV pandemic's origins located' Hymes, K.B. et al (1997) 'Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 2 (HIV-2) Seroprelavence and Characterization of a Distinct HIV-2 Genetic Subtype from the Natural Range of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Sooty Mangebeys' Journal of Virology 71(5):3953-396 Science (1998) 'Oldest Surviving HIV Virus Tells All' (accessed ) Faria, N.R. et al (2003) 'Hybrid Origin of SIV in Chimpanzees' Science 300(5626):1713 Chen, Z. et al (1999) 'Origin of HIV-1 in the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytes' Nature 397(6718):436-441 Bailes, E. (2011) 'Origins of HIV and the AIDS pandemic' Cold Spring Harbour Perspectives in Medicine 1(1):a006841 Gao, F. et al (2010) 'Island biogeography reveals the deep history of SIV' Science 329(5998):1487 Sharp, P.M. A few years later, the virus was renamed as HIV. LAV and HTLV-III were later acknowledged to be the same. Scientists at the USA National Cancer Institute confirmed this virus was the cause of AIDS and called it HTLV-III.
In 1983, scientists at the Pasteur Institute in France identified the virus linked to AIDS, which they called Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus (LAV). In September that year, they named it Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It wasn't until mid-1982 that scientists realised it was also spreading among other populations, such as haemophiliacs and people who inject drugs. Scientists began to suspect that an unidentified infectious 'disease' was the cause.Īt first, the ‘disease’ was called all sorts of names relating to the word ‘gay'. In 1981, rare diseases, such as Kaposi's Sarcoma (a rare cancer) and a lung infection called PCP, were being reported among gay men in New York and California. But HIV had actually been around for decades by then. Because this is when people first became aware of HIV, and it was when HIV was officially recognised as a new health condition.