Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Lesbian Blood Sisters of the HIV Crisis About this episode Why did 200 people queue to give blood in the San Diego summer heat on 16 July 1983?
During the AIDS crisis, many people living with HIV developed severe anaemia as a result of the disease and the treatments available at the time, leaving them dependent on regular blood transfusions. But where would the blood come from, especially with gay men being turned away from donating?
In this episode, we're exploring one of the most inspiring examples of solidarity between lesbians and gay men in modern history: the Blood Sisters.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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1:11 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to another episode of Betwix the Sheets. Hello, thanks for coming back. But before we go any further, I do have to tell you, and I have to keep telling you, I mean, you can say it with me, we can make a rap out of it, I don't know, but here we go. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, a growing age, and a subject who's been adulty, well, let's just get the [bleep] on with it.
1:36 Kate Lister? It is early in the morning of July 16, 1983, and we are in San Diego, and we are at a gathering of women who are actually queuing. They're queuing down the road to get into something. What the hell's going on? We'll get a little bit closer and find out. These women are lesbians. The lesbians are massing, but what for? Why are they here? Well, they're here to donate their blood, and they're donating to a very, very special cause. They are donating their blood to hospitals treating patients with HIV. But why do these women feel the need to do it? Why weren't regular blood supplies enough? Who organised this and what impact did they have?
2:20 Kate Lister? These are the Lesbian Blood Sisters of San Diego, and today we're going to find out about their story.
2:49 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. By the end of 2024, the World Health Organisation was estimating that HIV had been responsible for the deaths of up to 53.4 million people. This is a disease that has caused no end of heartbreak and misery and tragedy, but it has also exposed all manner of vile prejudice and horrendous intolerance, as one of the main groups afflicted were gay men. But that's not the whole story. As the HIV epidemic hit, people also banded together in forms of community support and activism as the government seemed to be doing nothing at all. And today we're looking at one such group,
3:33 Kate Lister? the story of the Lesbian Blood Sisters. Why was giving blood so important in the early years of this crisis? What were they up against? And how were they seen by other members of the LGBTQ plus community? Well, today I'm joined by Jennifer Breyer, author of Infectious Ideas: US Political Response to the AIDS Crisis to talk about these women. Are you ready to hear more? I know I am.
4:02 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Jennifer Breyer. How are you doing?
4:08 Speaker 04 I'm well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
4:10 Kate Lister? You are Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. So how is Chicago doing?
4:18 Speaker 04 Well, it's a difficult time here in the States, I will say. But the University of Illinois Chicago is an amazing place and this city is... It's a crossroads of many things and it's got a rich history of lesbian lives, to be perfectly honest, so.
4:38 Kate Lister? Absolutely.
4:38 Speaker 04 Excited to talk to you and to listen to what people have to say.
4:42 Kate Lister? This is a fascinating, it's so strange to call it history because I was here when it happened, but it is history. We're looking at reactions to the AIDS epidemic as it emerged in the 1980s, but particular how lesbian groups in America responded to it, the lesbian blood sisters, which is just the most extraordinary story. But before we even get to that, let's just do a real page one starter beginner question. What is HIV? What is AIDS?
5:16 Speaker 04 Well, there's a biological way to answer that question, a historical way to answer that question, a sociological, political way. I'll take it from the historical side because I'm sure that there are people who can do a better job on the deep biological side. At the most basic level, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is the virus that causes AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which is a constellation of illnesses and opportunistic infections that basically create in the human body, the inability to resist various kinds of infections
6:01 Speaker 04 and causes, really dreadful consequences in the human body, different in people assigned female at birth than people assigned male at birth. It is something that we now understand is acquired through blood. So that means blood and blood products. So semen, blood being shared in various ways, including blood donations and blood products, but also through intravenous drug use. It's something that can move from pregnant woman to fetus. Although, you know, that's an interesting story as well, how women have basically been
6:46 Speaker 04 at the forefront of helping us figure out how to stop that from happening and therefore stop it from happening across all humans. But it is a virus that was discovered in the early 1980s. AIDS as a, as a syndrome, as a, as a constellation of illnesses, was identified first in 1981, just in June of 1981. But of course, it predated, its existence predated those early reports. So we, and I'm part of this, I wrote a book about the history of HIV.
7:27 Speaker 04 We say it started in June of 1981, but of course HIV was endemic in many places, certainly in the States and in other parts of the world in the 1970s, without question. So we just call it that. That's when we start to name it as something, right? Strange illness affecting homosexual men. But we know that HIV, that virus, even though it wasn't called that yet, and even though it wasn't identified yet, was in the blood supply, was in people's bodies, was, we were living with it long before 1981.
8:08 Kate Lister? Do we know yet where HIV or AIDS came from? Do we know the source? Why suddenly? I mean, it didn't suddenly, as you've just explained, but it began to present in the 70s and leading into the 80s?
8:21 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, I mean, there's been some incredible natural history work. A colleague, Richard McKay, wrote a great book about the making of Patient Zero, which sort of, and has done some work with some people who study natural history, and they have some sense. There's evidence of one of the first people in the States to
8:45 Speaker 04 Have lived with HIV and likely died from AIDS. A teenager named Robert Rayford in St. Louis, 1969. His biological remains existed and were tested, you know, in the 1990s and found out that he was living with HIV in 1969. There are a lot of things related to blood, actually, that happened in the 1970s that helped to explain. I mean, we know that it has roots in Africa and the sort of language of that, the imperial medical language of that, which the Brits are certainly at the forefront of, is a subject that is well beyond my scope.
9:29 Speaker 04 But I have been thinking a lot about what happens in the 1970s that produced the conditions of what would be and what we now know is an AIDS epidemic and that we associate so deeply with the 1980s and the Reagan and Thatcher administrations and what the political economy of that is. But the 70s are just an incredibly important moment. And the way we've understood the 70s to date is from something like Randy Schultz's And the Band Played On that starts with the 1976 bicentennial as we are about to celebrate the 250th in an entirely different context in the States.
10:14 Speaker 04 So you hear about gay liberation and gay men's sexual practice as the driving force of what becomes AIDS. But the politics, the political economy of blood, the political economy of drug use is so fundamental in the 1970s. And part of what we understand is when we focus on particularly gay male sex, we forget about everything else that was also happening. So it's the first time in, it's the first time that it's possible to sell your blood, right? So poor.
10:55 Speaker 04 People who are able, the blood products industry is really revolutionized in the 1970s. And so you're able, if you're poor and that's the only thing you can sell, you can sell your blood and your plasma, you can pool blood products together to create different things. And that's the piece about hemophiliacs. It's also a time when people who are incarcerated are able to give blood. I mean, there are such a whole set of things related to blood. And then there's the reality that heroin drug use becomes quite substantial in the 1970s.
11:34 Speaker 04 And there's some sense that men returning from the Vietnam War who have become addicted to using heroin or just changes in urban economies that make that kind of survival economy necessary. So there are just a whole host of things happening to the blood supply. So we talk about blood sisters. They, they come out of a context where the meaning of blood was really shifting. So I think there's a lot to be said for the 1970s and studying it. And the reality is that we know that communities were developing survival strategies that
12:19 Speaker 04 predated safer sex, that predated even the blood sisters. There's a lot to be said for studying the 1970s. It's something that I really encouraging people who are thinking about AIDS to start to do. We've got the eighties, we need to think about the seventies.
12:37 Kate Lister? Think about the seventies. There will be many people listening to this podcast who, who weren't alive in the seventies or eighties and, and good luck to them. But there'll be many, many more who were and who remember when the AIDS crisis started to emerge. But to anybody that perhaps didn't live through it and wasn't even aware of it, or perhaps kept on the periphery of their experience, can you describe what that environment was like when the, when the illness started to take hold and it started to present itself?
13:09 Speaker 04 Just to put a small pin in that and say, we don't yet know what happened in the 70s. I just want to, this one example, if you look at the Journal of the American Medical Association, and then I will talk about the 80s, I promise. I spend a lot of time thinking about the 80s also. There are articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the mid 70s that talk about community-acquired pneumonia among intravenous drug users.
13:38 Kate Lister? In the mid 70s?
13:39 Speaker 04 In the mid 70s. So I say that as a precursor to explain that if you read that article that appeared in the New York Times on July 3rd, 1981, I have many versions of it. I have the single column that runs along the left side with a huge advertisement for a bank on the other. I grew up in New York City. That was where I, you know, I was a, I was a young pre-teen in 1981. And the first person my family knew who died of AIDS, Kevin Majors, was 1983. So I have a real sense of this, I mean, of real, deep, visceral memories of it. And then, as a historian, I've looked back on it to try and understand it as well.
14:24 Speaker 04 But if you read that article, you, and that shaped how you came to understand AIDS for the next, I don't know, five, 10 years, five, 10 months even. You would believe that this was the first time this ever happened. And it was happening to white homosexual men. And that is, and it was happening to what we now call white gay men or white men who have sex with men. That is real, but they were so far from the only group being affected. But it really did something.
15:03 Speaker 04 That association and that and the deep homophobia of it and the deep hatred of gay men and the deep fear of them and somehow that they were dirty or, you know, ill, because this is just on the heels of of homosexuality being declassified as a psychiatric disorder, in essence. So that's 73. So you think about what gay liberation meant and then to have this, it's like the kind of exclamation point that homophobes could only
15:39 Speaker 04 dream about. So it has all of these consequences. And part of what it was like to be, I mean, you probably have these memories, too. You know, people were men for the most part in that moment, although it certainly wasn't only men. Men were visible then, were dying, and many of them wasting away and their their cheeks getting completely gaunt. They had they would have Kaposi's sarcoma, the sort of lesions that would appear on the body, one of the opportunistic infections that we know is more likely to affect people
16:20 Speaker 04 assigned male at birth than people assigned female at birth. So more likely to affect men than women. But it was terrifying. There was a healthcare system that didn't want to care for people. There were some, I mean, there were certainly doctors and nurses and pharmacists, dermatologists, who did all sorts of things to take care of people. But people would were literally dying in front of us. And again, just to say, we know how HIV travels through the human body. So we know that by the time we were seeing that manifest itself in these communities, it meant that HIV had been in their bodies
17:05 Speaker 04 for a long time. Right? Because we understand how the evolu-- like, we understand how the disease travels. Through the body and how it emerges. So, and it's all before the internet. It's all before cell phones. So we're living in a world there where we're seeing these profound changes to our community. And there are no digital cameras. We're working with telephones on a wall and mail and fax machines. And the mechanisms of communication that we now know were completely different and non-existent.
17:47 Speaker 04 So you would see posters up all around the East and West Village of New York City. You would see phone trees. There were buddy systems. The gay men's health crisis emerges, I think in eighty-two, eighty-three, it happens in San Francisco. There's this incredible effort, primarily initially by gay men, but then by huge, like much bigger allied communities emerging to create a care system in a vacuum. I mean, the Reagan administration, the city government, it's true in the UK as well. I mean, the government is nowhere.
18:28 Kate Lister? Nowhere at all, no.
18:29 Speaker 04 And it's these individual people and organizations that are fledgling, that are forming in response to a crisis that really shapes the early nineteen eighties in some profound ways. And the Blood Sisters are part of that.
18:47 Kate Lister? The levels of homophobia that emerge are really astonishing. They are visceral and they are aggressive and they range from-
18:55 Speaker 04 I get the chills just hearing, I mean, I, it's like, I can feel it in my body.
18:59 Kate Lister? It's, people felt absolutely free to just say the worst things. And they did, that, you know, that this is a community that brought it on themselves. That, that I, I saw interviews with politicians saying that gay people should have to wear badges, marking them out, that they should be locked up, that you, there are cases, as you said, of doctors, many doctors doing heroic things, but also cases of people in the medical profession or refusing to touch or be in the same room as-
19:26 Speaker 04 Refusing to bring food into people's-
19:29 Kate Lister? Holy fuck.
19:30 Speaker 04 Hospital rooms.
19:32 Kate Lister? It's that desperate. I think that I've watched a lot of documentaries and read a lot. And I think one of the most profound documentaries I ever saw was it's called We Were Here. And I would recommend anybody go and watch that if you want to see just how this thing hit and how it
19:45 Speaker 04 That's right.
19:46 Kate Lister? And the devastation that it wrought. And there are people being interviewed saying that I would lose several friends in a week. It would just be bam bam bam. And there was no help. So let's talk about who the lesbian blood sisters were and what they set out to do against this backdrop.
20:06 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, the lesbian blood sisters, they were in lots of different places, but the ones that have the greatest historical record are the ones in San Diego, California, which is in Southern California. It's a Navy town. It's a town that has a huge Navy base and a longstanding democratic, democratic tradition. Blood sisters were primarily, in the case of San Diego and also in some other places, they were part of a sort of budding and it's, it's a complicated story. And obviously your listeners will not be surprised to hear this. This is before there
20:49 Speaker 04 is some, there's an acronym called LGBT. It's certainly before there's an acronym called LGBTQ, right? This is the early 1980s, 1982, 1983. And it's a time when, just to put one more contextual piece in place, we were working with the representation coming out of particularly popular media, but not entirely just popular media. I think also public health was this idea that there were four Hs, the four Hs of the categories of people who were at risk for acquiring this thing called AIDS. It was actually maybe even then still called sometimes GRID, Gay
21:31 Speaker 04 Related Immunodeficiency. So just to sort of think about that, that there would be something called gay-related immunodeficiency that then became AIDS. But the four Hs, homosexuals, and there it was never totally clear if that meant gays and lesbians. So.
21:51 Speaker 04 Again, just to sort of say that homosexual, which is a word used still, I think, more in Great Britain than it is in the States now. Maybe not, maybe I'm wrong about that, but that word at the time applied to both gay and lesbian, at least potentially. So homosexuals, hemophiliacs, people who had hemophilia and had to have blood products, and they knew pretty soon that that was a key piece of it. The other one in the great imperial project of the Western Hemisphere is Haitians. So there was this sense that AIDS came from Haiti.
22:30 Speaker 04 And there is a very deep history of what the AIDS epidemic looked like and continues to look like in Haiti. And entities like Partners in Health, which are some of the key activists around the world, thinking about global access and care, they have their first clinics in Haiti. But so Haiti, so Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin, IV drug users. And then sometimes, alternately, and this is part of the story as well, hookers were sometimes an H as well, so what we today call sex workers. So these are the four or five Hs.
23:12 Speaker 04 And you start to understand that what was happening in that model is that people were being given an identity. So if you held that identity, you were at risk. It wasn't yet about behavior. It was about how you were identified. So homosexual, in that case, right? Hooker, right? That you're an identity, that's your identity. It's not about something that you do. Heroin, IV drug use, maybe is more about behavior, but it is not entirely about behavior. It's about an identity. Remember my community-acquired pneumonia among intravenous drug users from the 1970s?
23:54 Speaker 04 And then hemophiliacs, again, an identity, not a behavior. So the blood sisters emerge in that. That context. So, blood is identified as the thing. Blood is the danger, right? Blood is the danger. And gay men are basically banned from, you know, not legally quite yet, but very close. Like, they are not going to be able to give blood. They also need blood. They're in the hospital, they're dying, they need different kinds of infusions. We don't have treatment yet. We don't know what is going to make people better. And we're not going to know for a long time. But the blood sisters emerge in that context.
24:36 Speaker 04 You know, this is still a time, and I think it's true today, too, although I think AIDS, in many ways, changed this. Gay men and lesbians are running along separate tracks. It's not a unified movement. I mean, I think LGBTQ now rolls off our tongues so quickly that we forget that those are very different struggles, right? They're different political struggles, they're different sexual liberationist struggles, they're different sociological struggles. The women's health movement that had preceded, that was in the 1970s as well, the abortion, reproductive justice movement that has its roots in the 1970s and well earlier as well.
25:20 Speaker 04 Gay men don't necessarily connect themselves to lesbian health. But we start to see, especially in places where there's a strong gay and lesbian democratic club, which there is in San Diego. So those people have been forged together in some kind of political struggle, right? Even if it's mainstream, but mainstream political struggle. Throughout the course of the 1970s, you start, that's where you start to see lesbians make a decision that they are going to start to give blood to support who they call their gay brothers. So they define themselves as blood sisters.
26:03 Speaker 04 It's a kind of patriotic move. Support our boys, right? It has that kind of- Of rhetoric to it, and some historians have talked about that. But they really understand the need to give blood as a way of caring for their gay brothers in a context in which there's nothing else that they can do.
26:34 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break.
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27:27 Kate Lister? I remember seeing, well, I don't remember because I wasn't there, but I have seen one of the original posters from the San Diego Lesbian Blood Sister Drive, and it just said, "Our Boys Need Our Blood." I just found that so moving.
27:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:39 Kate Lister? Just that, you know, that I think it's the "our boys" bit of just like, right, now we have to step up. So how did, do you know how that this system worked then? Were they able to donate their blood and make sure that it specifically went to gay men dying of AIDS in the hospitals?
27:57 Speaker 04 I have never gotten that sense, that that was, that it was like a, what we today have as like a targeted blood donation. I mean, you have to sort of think about it again. There's no test HIV doesn't exist as a thing yet. There's no test. So to just look back on, and I'm, I am not making a comparison between COVID-19 and HIV AIDS. I'll just say that at the outset, but the speed with which we developed and isolated SARS-CoV-2,
28:35 Speaker 04 the virus that causes COVID-19, that was because we had done the work of HIV, like, and it was 40 years later. There's no test yet. There's nothing. So I don't think it really worked the way it would go on to work later. There were blood shortages because people were afraid. It was pretty clear that, I don't remember when the US system basically tells gay men that they can no longer donate blood. They too are seeing their, their friends, their, you know, comrades, their, their fellow Democratic club members die.
29:17 Speaker 04 And they think this is one of the things that we can do. And they also know that they are not dying.
29:25 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah, of course.
29:27 Speaker 04 I mean, we know historically and epidemiologically that the lesbians who are most impacted by HIV AIDS, even in the early 1980s, are likely women of color who have been engaged in some kind of sex work or survival economy work, or have some history of drug use, or are women who have sex with men and women. And we know that now. But then they would just be like, we're just regular old dykes. Like, nothing's happening to us. You know, nothing's, we're not dying. They're dying. We're not dying.
30:09 Speaker 04 And they, they knew that that meant that, I think that they knew that that meant that they could do this and it would be okay.
30:17 Kate Lister? Can you describe that? First San Diego Lesbian Blood Sister Drive because it was Barbara Vick, I think, was one of the founding members and they thought maybe a few people would turn up.
30:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it is an incredible story. I went back when I was preparing for this and read the Teen Vogue, like, there's a Teen Vogue article about it. But I imagine that dozens of women came together and sort of, in the tradition of women's health that had happened before, in the tradition of lesbian feminist organizing that happened all across California and the country, but particularly in the West Coast. I think that they were already deeply politicized. They understood how homophobia functioned. They experienced their children being taken from them. They experienced what it was like
31:10 Speaker 04 to have the state make a decision about them because of who they loved and how they loved. They had experienced the misogyny and lesbophobia of the state, even though they were not people living with a condition that was causing them to waste away.
31:27 Kate Lister? That first drive, they actually had a queue of 200 people and they took over 130 donations.
31:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, that just, it just proves the point that, I mean, I'm not saying that they were political operatives, you know, like, I'm not, but they had been politicized. They had a consciousness about what it meant to be in this thing called a gay and lesbian community. So those are the two that are part of it. They understood that they had, that they were part of this. And I bet among them were also many separatists who didn't name and embrace the possibility of having an alliance between gay men and lesbians.
32:15 Speaker 04 So it's both. Both of those things existed at the same time. And we know that in spaces like this, lesbians were at the forefront of caring for people dying from this thing called alternately gay-related immunodeficiency and AIDS.
32:37 Speaker 04 So we were the people who were on the front lines of that.
32:44 Kate Lister? Going into the hospitals.
32:45 Speaker 04 Going into hospitals, taking care of people, being parts of buddy systems that brought food, helping people get to care, staffing hotlines, giving blood. The thing that I think is important to know, and I'm hoping that you and I can take up in another podcast, is that, of course, lesbians were living with AIDS too, and dying from AIDS also.
33:10 Kate Lister? Yes, yes, yeah, often overlooked in this story.
33:14 Speaker 04 But this one is about how much we were leading the charge to take care of people around our friends and comrades and family, chosen and biological, who were dying.
33:30 Kate Lister? I have a quote from Barbara Vick, who was a founding member of the San Diego Blood Sisters, and I'm wondering what your reaction to it is, and she went on record to say, "There was a powerlessness everybody felt, but the lesbian community seemed immune to the disease. I don't want to say there was guilt, but you look at the counterparts bearing the burden for no reason. At that time, women had less to give economically, but blood is such a basic thing."
33:55 Speaker 04 Right. I mean, I think there's so much in that quote to unpack, but at its fundamentally, it describes precisely what it felt like to have nothing left to give but your blood. And, you know, we could rehearse all the ways that women are always part of the caretaking economy, are always at the forefront of that sort of devotional, whatever it is. And we could talk about the misogyny of that, and we could talk about the lesbophobia of it, we could talk about the fundamental disregard for care as something that is meaningfully, economically sustaining.
34:39 Speaker 04 We could talk about all those things. But at its core, what they were doing was responding to a crisis that was happening all around them. The part that's tricky is the sense that lesbians were immune, because of course, we weren't. We were not. Those lesbians, it was not happening in their community. But a couple hours north of them in Los Angeles and a couple hours north still in San Francisco, it most certainly was.
35:10 Kate Lister? That goes back to your earlier point about the networks of communication. That this isn't a time when we had the internet or smartphones, that, you know, that people are trying to network, but maybe it's very difficult to build those lines of communication, to join up with these conversations.
35:27 Speaker 04 Well, and also, we don't, this is also a moment, and it lasts for a very long time, where we only know what AIDS looks like for men. We don't know what AIDS yet looks like for women. Women are vectors. So, so the other piece of this is, so the lesbians are immune part, that Barbara Vick quote, it's so important, and it's about their understanding of the world, the world that they were living in and what they saw happening. And the other language that's existing at this time around women, and here they're not necessarily talking about homosexuals or lesbians, they're just, they're talking
36:11 Speaker 04 about straight women, or who that people they believe are straight. Again, remember the identity, it's not the behavior. Is that sex, you know, prostitutes, sex workers were vectors. They were the thing that spread. So it's weird, like, how do you have these two things at the same time? So part of what Vick's quote asks at its basis is, we're not those women, we're these women. So I just think it's an important thing to note, not to undercut the incredible mobilization of it. But it does require a way of understanding themselves in relationship to other women who have sex with women. And define themselves as distinct.
36:59 Speaker 04 I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break.
37:10 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
37:52 Kate Lister? The Lesbian Blood Sisters, the San Diego's were the first, but then this is a movement that becomes replicated in different states. And it continued for, at least the San Diego Blood Sisters were operational for about four years.
38:05 Speaker 04 Well, they do, they work, they work through the early 1990s around the country. There are different ones, yeah.
38:13 Kate Lister? It's fascinating that you are picking up on the kind of, the things about this, this movement because at the time, there was a massive support for it, but there were, there was also pushback contained within this particular movement of where identities clash. And there were some voices saying that women shouldn't be the ones having to provide this care. They, they were there right at the time.
38:37 Speaker 04 It's a complicated moment to understand political context. You know, we talked about how AIDS is identified as a thing at the start of the Reagan administration in the States. And it's at a point of gay and lesbian liberation, right? Gay and lesbian liberation has really transformed over the course of these 15 or so years from, if you mark it as starting, gay liberation as a particular movement, starting in the 70s. So that by the early 1980s, there are these gay and lesbian democratic Clubs, as I said, there are also, and this is part of the Blood Sisters,
39:21 Speaker 04 gay and lesbian affinity groups, what we would now call affinity groups, inside of various religious congregations, so Reform Jews, the Metropolitan Community Church. And those are congregations that support Blood Sisters as well. So again, like brothers and sisters moving together and doing the things that they can do. It's part of now the National Organization for Women, the YWCA, the Young Women's Christian Association, in different parts of the country. It's part of GLAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. You know, it's all of these things.
40:05 Speaker 04 So it's become sort of more mainstream. It's hard to call it mainstream. It's what we would today call mainstream gay and lesbian politics. And there is a very strong argument, first, among lesbian separatists, who also have a history in California and across the country, but particularly on the West Coast, making an argument that, like, they would never do this for us. They would never do this for us. Gay men would never be fighting for reproductive justice. They would never be doing something for women trying to survive breast cancer.
40:45 Kate Lister? Those were some of the voices at the time.
40:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:47 Kate Lister? Wow.
40:48 Speaker 04 So it's a complicated story, you know, it's just, I do think it goes back to the fact that now we say LGBTQ. And this was at a time when not only that acronym didn't exist, but I don't, I mean, and I don't even know that when we say LGBTQ today, that we recognize how much interacronym struggle there is. You know, we understand it for trans folks, but we don't necessarily understand it between gay men and lesbians. We skip bisexual completely.
41:27 Speaker 04 You know, there's a lot in that acronym. There's a lot of disagreement, conflicting, political struggles. There's not always solidarity, but this was a moment of a particular kind of solidarity that I think is worth knowing.
41:43 Kate Lister? And it has been celebrated. The Lesbian Blood Sisters have been awarded numerous awards, like the National Gay Task Force.
41:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, and that it was in teen vogue within the last three or four years just says something about how this kind of solidarity work speaks to us at this moment when we are so desperate for seeing solidarity. We are so, we need it so deeply.
42:11 Kate Lister? I find the whole story so moving that these women came together and they didn't have anything else to give, but they gave their blood and they gave their time and their care and they, they wanted to do something. And I think maybe that's it, is it's the solidarity of that moment of a group facing such oppression and such hostility and literally dying and people weren't helping in the way that they should have done. And these women came together and stepped up. And I honestly, I just find it so moving. And maybe, maybe you're right, maybe that's why it resonates so much is because at the moment, especially discussions around sexuality and identity feel so fractured, that this feels like a moment where it was like, look, none of this matters, we just have to help.
42:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it's, it's mutual aid. It's all of these things that we thought we learned in the pandemic, in the, in the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, as I think I've tried to describe, you and I have been living in pandemic times our entire life. The way AIDS care emerges over the course of the 1980s is a profound example of mutual aid, what we now call mutual aid. And we know that it existed in the 1970s and the 1960s. We know that this idea of a solidarity economy, of a practice of, of survivance, of survival and thriving.
43:37 Speaker 04 We, we know that these things come out of communities that have been Disenfranchised that have faced racist and homophobic assault that have been incarcerated, that have been told that what they do is illegal or immoral or dangerous. So we know the roots of our solidarity come out of that. And I just think that this is one of those moments where we see it put in very sharp relief and happening across a divide that right now we don't see as a divide, but then was. There was no predicting that we would get to something called LGBTQ.
44:20 Speaker 04 First of all, that we would put the L before the G and then that we would have this whole list of words. Plus, IA? No way. Didn't exist. These people didn't, that didn't exist in their minds.
44:34 Kate Lister? Jennifer, you have been absolutely fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much.
44:38 Speaker 04 My pleasure.
44:39 Kate Lister? For telling us about this often overlooked part of history. But if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
44:47 Speaker 04 They can read Infectious Ideas, which is the book I wrote almost 20 years ago. One of the first historical.
44:56 Kate Lister? Time flies.
44:57 Speaker 04 Historical monographs about the evolution of the AIDS crisis. And I beg you to go look at a website and a history project that I've been working on for about 10 years, and I hope you and I can talk about the next time, called I'm Still Surviving: A Living Women's History of HIV in the United States, which is about women living with HIV in their bodies, some of them lesbians. StillSurviving.net. One word, stillSurviving.net.
45:27 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. We will absolutely do that. You have been wonderful.
45:31 Speaker 04 Thanks.
45:34 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for listening and thank you to Jennifer for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject or we just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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