Examining Critical Race Theory: Outsider Jurisprudence and HIV/AIDS - a Perspective on Desire and Power, 33(2) LAW & INEQ
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Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality Volume 33 Issue 2 Article 3 December 2015 Examining Critical Race Theory: Outsider Jurisprudence and HIV/ AIDS - A Perspective on Desire and Power Shannon Gilreath Follow this and additional works at: https://lawandinequality.org/ Recommended Citation Shannon Gilreath, Examining Critical Race Theory: Outsider Jurisprudence and HIV/AIDS - A Perspective on Desire and Power, 33(2) LAW & INEQ. 371 (2015). Available at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/lawineq/vol33/iss2/3 Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Examining Critical Race Theory: Outsider Jurisprudence and HIV/AIDS-a Perspective on Desire and Power Shannon Gilreatht PROLOGUE I am delighted to be part of this symposium celebrating Professor Delgado's fortieth year in teaching law. I've said before that I rarely look for heroes in the academy, primarily because I've found it to be a disappointing search. Something about careerism, or the sadomasochistic march to tenure, or both, makes it a disappointing search. But there are those rare moments when one meets someone whose work one has long admired, and one finds that the person is more generous, kinder, warmer, and more brilliant than one had even imagined. That's the way it was when I met Professor Delgado for the first time. I can say, unequivocally, that he is a hero of mine. I don't think there's a scholar of my generation writing about issues of inequality who is not in debt to Professor Delgado's amazingly prolific career-and I should add that it's absolutely fitting that Law & Inequality should host this gathering, since Richard has done as much as any scholar now living to contend with inequality. Not only have I benefited from his work-his writing-but I've also benefited from his mentorship in a more personal sense. Both he and Jean have been unflaggingly generous to me over the years. I am grateful for that and so happy to pay Richard the homage he deserves. This is a symposium titled "Examining Critical Race Theory: Honoring Richard Delgado." I rely specifically on Professor Delgado's work to make my case that HIV-specific criminal laws are unconstitutional. But I want to set out, beyond the simple observation that Critical Race Theory is Outsider jurisprudence T. © Shannon Gilreath 2015. Professor of Law and Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, N.C. This Essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the University of Minnesota Law School on October 7, 2014. For comments and illuminating conversation about the thoughts outlined in this Essay, I thank Michael Curtis, Don Donelson, Harold Lloyd, Russell Robinson, Marc Spindelman, and Ron Wright, as well as the audience of my October 7, 2014 presentation at the University of Minnesota Law School. Law and Inequality [Vol. 33: 371 with substantial inflections in feminism and gay liberation, the ways in which my chosen topic relates specifically to Critical Race Theory. We know that HIV is a problem of disproportionate consequence to poor communities and communities of color.1 We also know that the disproportionately alarming rates at which Black women seem to be getting infected with the virus have been fodder for the White press and the Black press, such as it is, to vilify and stereotype gay African American men as "down low"-as cheating on their wives in disproportionate numbers, and as the carriers of disease.2 Black intellectuals and pop culture guardians, like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, have done much to perpetuate these stereotypes-although there is little factual basis for believing they actually exist-in the process of reinforcing inferiority and victimhood for Black women.3 And, in eerie ways, old, Birth of a Nation-style stereotypes of Black men were behind a surge in HIV-specific statutes, motivated by news reports of a now-infamous case of a Black man infecting numerous White women. 4 Indeed, the foundational myth of AIDS in America, the myth of Patient Zero, largely owes its celebrity to the successful book And the Band Played On, in which gay author Randy Shilts purported to identify the man to which all HIV cases in the United States could be traced. Shilts laid the blame-quite erroneously and simple-mindedly, it now appears-on a French-Canadian flight attendant-a convenient piece of propaganda that fed neatly into American xenophobic tendencies. HIV, this great invader, could now be personified as an invader-outsider: something and someone from "across the border."' 1. Russell K. Robinson, Racing the Closet, 61 STAN. L. REV. 1463 (2009). 2. Id. 3. Id. 4. See Jennifer Frey, Jamestown and the Story of 'Nushawn's Girls,' WASH. POST, June 1, 1999, at C1; see also Robinson, supra note 1, at 1515-16 (discussing the highly publicized case of Nushawn Williams). 5. Shilts did not invent the Patient Zero myth (the CDC had done that-one of the many things CDC researchers got horribly, sloppily wrong), but his bestselling, gossipy, judgmental book forever cemented "Patient Zero" as a part of the story of AIDS in America. See RANDY SHILTS, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON: POLITICS, PEOPLE, AND THE AIDS EPIDEMIC 23 (1987) (identifying French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas as responsible for AIDS in the United States). 6. Interestingly, not until 2010 was a U.S. ban on HIV-positive visitors and immigrants allowed to expire. See Devin Dwyer, U.S. Ban on HIV-Positive Visitors, Immigrants Expires, ABC NEWS (Jan. 5, 2010), http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ united-states-ends-22-year-hiv-travel-banlstory?id=9482817. 2015] EXAMINING CRITICAL RACE THEORY Moreover, HIV-specific laws have been leveraged against the very populations for which Critical Race Theory operates: those people whom we understand, through the lens of multiple consciousness, to be Othered and rendered vulnerable because of their outsider status.' In this case, namely gay men and African American men who may or may not identify as gay, as well as homeless and prostituted people.8 INTRODUCTION This Article analyzes the trend in the United States of criminalizing the sexual activity of HIV-positive people. In some jurisdictions, including my home state of North Carolina, an HIV- positive individual is breaking the law any time he has sex without a condom-even when transmission of the virus does not occur; even under circumstances in which transmission is, in fact, impossible or of substantially decreased risk; and even with the informed consent of an HIV-negative partner, or when both partners are already HIV-positive. Some jurisdictions demand disclosure of HIV-positive status regardless of whether a condom is used, although informed consent may be a defense to criminal liability." This Article concludes that HIV/AIDS has replaced "sodomy" as the metonym for gay male existence and that, consequently, the criminalization of sex when a sexual actor is HIV-positive is an effort to revive and perpetuate the legal category of "sodomite," supposedly obliterated by the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas," in the guise of public 7. For a discussion of multiple consciousness, see Mari J. Matsuda, When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as JurisprudentialMethod, 14 WOMEN'S RTS. L. REP. 297, 299 (1992) ("[Mlultiple consciousness ... is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed."). 8. See Mary D. Fan, Sex, Privacy, and Public Health in a Casual Encounters Culture, 45 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 531, 573 (2011) (stating that, of the 164 HIV- exposure convictions between 1986 and 2001, "[m]ore than 70% of all prosecutions arose from behavior already illegal under general criminal laws, such as nonconsensual sex, assault, or prostitution") (citing Zita Lazzarini et al., Evaluating the Impact of Criminal Laws on HIV Risk Behavior, 30 J. L. MED. & ETHICS 239, 244-45 (2002)). 9. See infra note 12. 10. See, e.g., IDAHO CODE ANN. § 39-608(3)(a) (1988) ("It is an affirmative defense that the sexual activity took place between consenting adults after full disclosure by the accused of the risk of such activity."). 11. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 578 (2003) (overruling Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), and holding that a Texas statute criminalizing sodomy violated the Due Process Clause) ("The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty Law and Inequality [Vol. 33: 371 health. This Article also mounts an argument that such criminalization is, in fact, unconstitutional after Lawrence. Two incidents principally led me to this topic. First, several years ago now, I was contacted by a young man in his twenties who wanted to discuss appealing his conviction under a North Carolina health regulation that says when one is HIV-positive one must do two things: 1) disclose one's status; 2) never have any kind of sexual contact unless a condom is used. 12 In this case, the young man claimed that he had disclosed his status, but that fact was in dispute. Furthermore, at least some, if not all, of the conduct at issue was oral intercourse, which has definitively been established not to transmit HIV.13 In any event, the young man was "undetectable" 4 -meaning he was compliant with antiretroviral therapy and thus had no virus in his blood or semen to transmit to a third party. He received a sentence suspended to three years supervised probation.