Representations of Hiv/Aids in Popular American Comic Books, 1981- 1996

Home , 1979 in comics, A1 (comics), Advanced Gay, American Males, Andy Helfer, Andy Mangels

REPRESENTATIONS OF HIV/AIDS IN POPULAR AMERICAN COMIC BOOKS, 1981- 1996

William Richard Avila

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2021

Committee:

Jeffrey Brown, Advisor

Michael Decker Graduate Faculty Representative

William Albertini

Timothy Messer-Kruse

William Richard Avila

ABSTRACT

Jeffery Brown, Advisor

From 1981-1996, the United States experienced an epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) that held profound implications for issues ranging from civil rights, public education, and sexual mores, to government accountability, public health, and expressions of heterosexism. Popular comic books that broached the subject of HIV/AIDS during the U.S. epidemic elucidate how

America’s discourse on the disease evolved in an era when elected officials, religious leaders, legal professionals, medical specialists, and average citizens all struggled to negotiate their way through a period of national crisis. The manner whereby comic book authors, illustrators, and publishers engaged the topic of HIV/AIDS changed over time but, because comic books are an item of popular culture primarily produced for a heterosexual male audience, such changes habitually mirrored the evolution of the nation’s mainstream, heteronormative debates regarding the epidemic and its sociocultural and political implications.

Through studying depictions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular comic books, alterations in the heterocentric, national discourse emerge revealing how homophobic dismissals of the “gay plague” in the early 1980s gave way to heterosexual panic in the mid-1980s, followed by the epidemic’s reinterpretation as a national tragedy in the late-1980s. Ultimately, this study uncovers how, in the early 1990s, HIV/AIDS awareness became a national cause célèbre and a fad effectively commoditized by the economic forces of American popular culture until its novelty waned when the epidemic phase of the U.S. HIV/AIDS crisis drew to a close in the mid-1990s. iv

Throughout, representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comic books show how comic book creators sought to elevate their medium beyond the confines of its perceived juvenile trappings by exploring topical and controversial material that would appeal to the expanding market of adult buyers that blossomed from the early 1980s until the comic book industry imploded circa 1994. In utilizing a matter of major sociocultural and political significance to achieve artistic and commercial aims, this study demonstrates how the business dictates of the comic book industry, principally the need to attract and retain readers, drove the medium’s creative considerations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. v

To my parents, John and Margaret Avila, whose love of art, music, and literature introduced me

to the world of cultural studies. vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people that I need to acknowledge for their assistance in bringing this dissertation to fruition. Firstly, I thank the members of my dissertation committee. I am extremely grateful to my advisor, Dr. Jeffery Brown, as well as Drs. William Albertini, Timothy

Messer-Kruse, and Michael Decker for their constant backing and guidance. I thank them all for demonstrating models of excellence in their scholastic rigor, instructional talent, and professional decorum.

Secondly, I thank the libraries and archives whose outstanding collections and dedicated staff helped facilitate my research. I must especially thank Dr. Nancy Down, Dana Nemeth, and

Stefanie Dennis Hunker, of Bowling Green State University’s Browne Popular Culture Library, for their friendship and unwavering support. I also thank the library staff at Michigan State

University’s Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections, who assisted me in accessing their Russel B. Nye Popular Culture collection, as well as the librarians at The Ohio

State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum for all their efforts on my behalf.

Like the aforementioned libraries and archives, my research would not have been possible if not for the aid of some wonderful comic book retailers. I would most like to thank

Terry Kalkanian, the proprietor of Unicorn Comics & Cards in Villa Park, IL, and his brother

Gerry Kalkanian, Esq. It was at Unicorn Comics where the seeds of this dissertation first germinated and the Kalkanians’ knowledge of the comic book industry and its history, to say nothing of their incredible selection of comics, helped me immensely. I would also like to thank the staff at Graham Crackers Comics of DeKalb, IL, specifically manager Kevin Healy, for bringing some relevant titles to my attention and for tracking down several elusive back issues.

Furthermore, I would be remiss if I did not thank Johnathan Smith, former owner of Cameron’s vii

Comics and Stuff, who, for an all-too-brief period, operated a comic book shop in Bowling

Green, OH a mere block away from my apartment door.

Thirdly, I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor E. Taylor Atkins of Northern Illinois

University’s Department of History. During my years as an NIU undergraduate and Master’s student, it was Dr. Atkins who piqued my academic interest in artifacts of popular culture and their capacity to illuminate historical questions. My work on HIV/AIDS and comic books began in earnest during one of Dr. Atkins’s graduate research seminars and I thank him for all of the advice he gave me then that has only proven more insightful as the years went by and this dissertation took shape.

Last, but the farthest from least, I thank my family and friends whose love and encouragement has carried me through. I could not have done this without you. In addition to my parents, John and Margaret Avila, I thank my sisters, Roxanne Packer and Michelle Dobbs, my brothers-in-law, Andrew and Jonathan, and my nieces and nephews, Gwendolyn, Bertille, John, and Maria Packer, and Isla and Cormac Dobbs. I love you all. Special thanks to Britt Rhuart, cohort member and friend, for his comradery, good cheer, and the privilege of borrowing items from his vast collection of feature films and television series. Finally, I thank The Shindiggers, a fellowship of legendary beings. viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I. FROM “GAY PLAGUE” TO STRAIGHT PANIC, 1981-1985...... 15

1981: A Queer Medical Mystery ...... 16

1982: Inventing the “Gay Plague” ...... 24

1983: Fear of Casual Transmission and Heterosexual Panic ...... 33

1984: Receding Panic and the Discovery of HIV ...... 51

1985: Heterosexual Panic Returns and HIV/AIDS in American Narrative Art ...... 60

CHAPTER II. AIDS, AMERICAN CULTURE, AND COMIC BOOKS, 1985-1986 ...... 72

1985: AIDS on Stage and Screen ...... 73

1986: AIDS and the Courting of Adult Comic Book Readers ...... 85

CHAPTER III. THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC IN TRANSITION: FROM HETEROSEXUAL

PANIC TO TRAGIC, NATIONAL CRISIS, 1987-1988 ...... 134

1987: A Pivotal Year ...... 141

1988: HIV/AIDS Becomes a Fixture in Popular Comic Books ...... 175

Looking Toward the ‘90s...... 211

CHAPTER IV. AIDS ENTERS THE 1990S: ACT UP’S ACTIVISM, AIDS EDUCATION

AT RIVERDALE H.S., AND AN ATHELETE’S ANNOUNCEMENT, 1989-1991 ...... 213

1989: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back ...... 214

1990-1991: The Triumph of Heterosexual Recontextualization ...... 244

CHAPTER V. FROM A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE TO YESTERDAY’S NEWS: HIV/AIDS

AWARENESS AND POPULAR COMIC BOOKS, 1992-1996 ...... 263 ix

1992-1994: A “Scause” Célèbre...... 268

1995-1996: The Epidemic’s End and the Waning Days of AIDS Awareness ...... 312

CONCLUSION ...... 322

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 327 1

INTRODUCTION

During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States experienced an epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) that became one the defining events of late-twentieth century American history. In 1981, when doctors first documented the illness in a number of young, gay men living in Los Angeles, New York, and

San Francisco, a lack of knowledge, regarding the malady’s origin, its mode(s) of transmission, and its possible treatments, fostered an atmosphere of clinical uncertainty that was exacerbated by the illness’s homophobic appraisals within products of the American news media. While

AIDS diagnoses and deaths mounted fastest and most frequently within America’s gay communities, it was not long before patients embodying a range of sexual orientations, ages, and genders become diagnosed with the mysterious new disease. Despite early evidence that homosexuality was not a prerequisite for AIDS, many Americans became aware of the developing health crisis, if they learned of it at all, through the homophobic assessments of the popular press that, in the early 1980s, labeled AIDS as the “gay plague.”

Suffusing formative, popular press coverage of the epidemic, the characterization of

AIDS as a “gay plague” communicated influential and homophobic messages about the disease to wide segments of the American public. Fueled by an initial dearth of biomedical knowledge, the disease’s seemingly inevitable lethality, and America’s deep-seated heterocentrism, “gay plague” narratives engendered persistent, AIDS-based prejudices that, as the epidemic grew, expanded to demonize not only homosexual men, but intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, sex workers, and racial minorities as well. As a result, the popular press’s initial promotion of AIDS as the “gay plague” created the conceptual bedrock on which Americans’ subsequent understanding of the epidemic was built. Initial reports describing AIDS as the “gay plague” 2 succeeded in framing the illness not simply as an issue of public health, but as a matter of sociocultural concern that increasingly provoked widening and intense political debate.

As the decade of the 1980s progressed, and instances of AIDS rose among white, heterosexual, middle-class citizens living in communities far removed from the urban, costal centers where AIDS was most prevalent, the news media and popular press’s coverage of the epidemic exhibited an increasingly apocalyptic tenor. The 1983-1984 discovery of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, failed to quell the nation’s growing anxiety and, in some respects, its discovery intensified heterosexual Americans’ fear of falling victim to a virus portrayed as emanating from gay communities to threaten the nation’s heterosexual population. By 1985, the accumulation of such coverage induced heterosexual panic on a national scale. It was during the mid-1980s, the era of heterosexual panic, that HIV/AIDS become not only the subject of pervasive journalistic interest, but a growing focus of American arts and entertainment as well.

Influenced by the maelstrom of media attention and public interest that arose in the wake of the heterosexual panic, creators of popular American comic books incorporated the subject into their work. Remarkably, given their medium’s reputation for producing what its critics considered puerile flights of fancy, comic book creators generated some of the earliest, most persistent, and most substantive assessments of the HIV/AIDS epidemic found within commercial products of American mass-entertainment media. Appraising representations of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular comic books offers valuable historical insights that illuminate the sociocultural and political concerns attendant to the epidemic and can help historians better understand how Americans perceived those concerns as the epidemic progressed. Furthermore, scrutinizing representations of HIV/AIDS within the comic book medium sheds light on the political economy of the comic book industry and demonstrates how the epidemic was utilized to 3 enhance the medium’s artistic prestige and increase sales during a transitionary phase in the history of American comic book production, distribution, and consumption. In that regard, it provides a case study demonstrating how one facet of the popular culture industry functioned to capitalize on a contemporary event of vital sociocultural and political significance in order to promote greater sales of its products.

My work argues that comic book authors, artists, and publishers, from the mid-1980s thru the mid-1990s, sought to elevate their medium beyond the confines of its perceived banal and juvenile trappings by including representations of, discussions about, and references to

HIV/AIDS. In doing so, comic book creators confronted a matter of real-world importance in order to attract new consumers within the era’s then-burgeoning market of adult readers.

Through their efforts, creators increased sales, conferred a degree of artistic legitimacy upon their industry, and produced an array of primary source documents through whose study scholars can accurately chart the sociocultural and political history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Studying popular comic books that broached the subject of HIV/AIDS elucidates

Americans’ understanding of the epidemic during a time when citizens, civic leaders, and religious organizations struggled to negotiate their way through a period of crisis that held profound implications for matters ranging from civil rights, public education, and sexual mores, to government accountability, public health, and patterns of heterosexism. My research assesses how popular comic books referenced HIV/AIDS, why they did so, how their considerations of the subject changed over time in order to highlight alterations in the way Americans perceived, interpreted, and reacted to the epidemic. Ultimately, it reveals the evolution of popular discourses concerning HIV/AIDS during the decade and a half following the epidemic’s onset as well as how the epidemic was utilized and commodified within products of American popular 4 culture. To better understand mainstream, heteronormative perceptions of the crisis, my research emphasizes the ways in which popular comic book narratives alternately mirrored or contradicted prevailing sociocultural and political debates about HIV/AIDS through demonstrating how representations of HIV/AIDS in popular comic books demarcate the progression of the national discourse that emerged as a result of the epidemic. Because popular comic books are created for an audience of primarily heterosexual, male readers, they evidence heteronormative understandings of the epidemic more consistently than many other forms of

American mass-entertainment media.

The paramount contribution I make with this study is an expansion of the cultural historiography of the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Through producing a cultural history that utilizes artifacts of popular culture, and assesses their meaning as it pertains to the considerations of the era in which they were created, I will demonstrate how the heteronormative discourse regarding HIV/AIDS developed from the onset of the epidemic, at the dawn of the 1980s, until the termination of the crisis’s epidemic phase in the mid-1990s. Popular American comic books provide an ideal focal point for this historical analysis because they offer an ample number of primary sources spanning the entirety of the time period under consideration, contain both visual and textual evidence testifying to the beliefs and values of their creators and consumers, and were widely available at the time of their initial publication. Moreover, popular comic books have been underappreciated within cultural studies scholarship on the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic despite their substantial reflections on the subject.

While theatrical productions, works of fine art, and some folk-art projects have been assessed by scholars, more scholarship is needed regarding how artifacts of popular culture considered the epidemic. Because popular culture is mass produced and widely disseminated, it 5 reaches an enormous audience. Due to its pervasiveness, historical insights gleaned from popular culture can give scholars a fuller understanding of how a preponderance of Americans understood the epidemic and its consequences. Aside from significant scholarship on the

HIV/AIDS epidemic in motion pictures and television, most other popular cultural mediums have been overlooked or undervalued. Despite numerous interrogations of HIV/AIDS across a significant length of time, popular comic books have generally been neglected within cultural studies scholarship on the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This study helps correct that oversight by showing how popular comic books both promoted and refuted heterocentric narratives that circulated via the popular press and shaped the national discourse on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By comparing and contrasting considerations of

HIV/AIDS in popular comic books with those in other publications, such as newspapers and magazines, I demonstrate how comic books presented readers with views on the epidemic that alternately buttressed and undermined the dominant sociocultural and political assessments championed in news and entertainment periodicals. My research articulates how the comic book industry utilized the HIV/AIDS epidemic to advance its commercial agenda and, in the process, made critical statements about HIV/AIDS that, when taken as a whole, signify the evolution of

America’s national discourse on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

While only a handful of scholarship concerning portrayals of the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular comic books have been produced, articles have appeared sporadically since the early 1990s. Their findings, while necessary for contextualizing my study, further underscore the need for more comprehensive analysis. The first and most influential example of such work comes from Matthew McAllister in his 1992 article “Comic Books and AIDS.” McAllister provides an excellent overview of the subject, but his depth of inquiry is limited due to dividing 6 his attention among a range of comic books including those produced by charitable organizations solely for educational purposes.1 Due to the article’s broad focus, popular comic books created for the mass market, the kind that my research focuses on, received only minimal consideration.

What is more, among the titles McAllister cites to show how popular comic books dealt with the topic of HIV/AIDS are several issues of the series Alpha Flight that considered a fictitious,

AIDS-like illness, but never referred to either HIV or AIDS specifically.2

McAllister’s inclusion of allegorical references to HIV/AIDS demonstrates how comic books and other popular culture mediums could address the epidemic obliquely. While such considerations are worthy of note, my research concerns itself solely with popular comic books that referred to HIV/AIDS directly and unequivocally. While allegorical references to HIV/AIDS gave comic book creators the freedom to obscure controversial material behind a mask of fantasy, creators who made unambiguous references to HIV/AIDS had no such protection.

Therefore, marking the difference between allegorical and explicit references to the epidemic is an important distinction to make. This dissertation considers only popular comic books that unmistakably addressed the epidemic through direct references to HIV and/or AIDS. Doing so, when the topic was a fixture of national interest and a matter fraught with controversy, evidences that the publishers and creative personnel responsible for those comics knew that their choice of subject matter entered them into the national debate over HIV/AIDS and opened their products to any praise or castigation that might follow as a result.

From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, products of mass entertainment that expressly addressed the epidemic became conduits of information through which increasing numbers of Americans found themselves confronted by the sociocultural issues and political

1 Matthew P. McAllister, “Comic Books and AIDS,” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 2 (1992): 1-24. 2 Ibid., 10. 7 controversies attendant to the subject of HIV/AIDS. Comic book narratives that openly addressed HIV/AIDS are indisputable contributions to the vast national discourse on the epidemic; a discourse that began in journalistic outlets, but quickly expanded into other mass media forums including popular culture. Beyond tackling a subject of attention-grabbing, contemporary importance, to bolster sales and solicit critical accolades, comic creators used their references to HIV/AIDS to comment on Americans’ sociocultural and political response to the epidemic.

Indicative of Americans’ receding interest in the HIV/AIDS crisis over the course of the

1990s and early 2000s, no significant scholarly studies of HIV/AIDS and comics appeared during that time. However, in 2007 an article by Sean McGrath called “Are You Positive? A

(Very) Brief History of HIV/AIDS in Comics” appeared in a small, queer press periodical.3 Like

McAllister’s work fifteen years earlier, McGrath takes a wide-ranging look at educational, charity, alternative, and popular comic books, albeit from a fan centric, nonacademic standpoint that takes the form of an annotated timeline documenting the publication history of comic books that dealt with the subject of HIV/AIDS. Among the highlights of McGrath’s timeline are snippets of oral history recorded from interviews with comic book writers, artists, and fans. In their testimonials, the interviewees recount their thoughts and feelings upon reading specific comic books that dealt with HIV/AIDS. Written for a popular audience, “Are You Positive?” is a human-interest story not a scholarly treatise. Its publication shows, however, that public interest in the history of HIV/AIDS in general, and in the representations of HIV/AIDS in American comic books specifically, was undergoing a revival in the twenty-first century.

3 Sean McGrath, “Are You Positive? A (Very) Brief History of HIV/AIDS in Comics,” Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics no. 5 (Atlanta, GA: Prism Comics, 2007), 26-32. 8

In the 2010s, academic studies on the portrayal of HIV/AIDS in comic books resurfaced and scholarly research was being drafted that focused on popular comic books exclusively. Ben

Bolling’s “The U.S. HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Negotiation of Queer Identity in Superhero

Comics, or, Is Northstar Still a Fairy?,” exemplifies that trend.4 A comprehensive analysis of the superhero character Northstar, Bolling rightly argues that studying Northstar is necessary because the character “is widely considered to be one of the earliest, if not the first, openly gay superheroes in mainstream comics.”5 Like McAllister, Bolling’s work relied on issues of Marvel

Comics’ Alpha Flight that depict an allegorical, AIDS-like illness, and his narrow focus on a single superhero yields only fleeting glimpses into the wider world of popular comic books.

Nevertheless, Bolling’s essay marked a new beginning for scholarly inquiries regarding comic books and their portrayals of HIV/AIDS.

Thus far, the most substantive work on HIV/AIDS and popular American comic books comes from Sean Guynes in his 2015 article “Fatal Attractions: AIDS and American Superhero

Comics, 1988-1994.”6 Centered exclusively on popular comics of the superhero genre, Guynes’s study cites only titles sold by the comic book industry’s two largest publishers, DC Comics and

Marvel Comics. Guynes argues that creators utilized the magical realism of the superhero genre in order to rebuke homophobic responses to the epidemic and challenge the social stigma attendant to living with HIV/AIDS. Similarly, Guynes posits that depictions of the epidemic in superhero comics increased the public’s awareness of HIV/AIDS and offered a popular culture critique of public indifference and government inaction.

4 Ben Bolling, “The U.S. HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Negotiation of Queer Identity in Superhero Comics, or, Is Northstar Still a Fairy?,” in Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, ed. Matthew Pustz (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012), 202-219. 5 Ibid., 204. 6 Sean A. Guynes, “Fatal Attractions: AIDS and American Superhero Comics, 1988-1994.” The International Journal of Comic Art 17, no. 2 (2015): 177-216. 9

Guynes’s survey of superhero comic books is expansive, but he avoids discussing comic books whose creators used the subject of HIV/AIDS not in an effort to critique social stereotypes or raise awareness of the illness, but to enhance the artistic standing of their medium and coopt a larger share of the then-burgeoning market of adult buyers. Guynes places too much stock in the altruistic ambitions of comic creators while ignoring the economic factors that propelled the business of comic book publication. As the ravages of the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic unfolded, the comic book industry enjoyed a period of exceptional growth and many creators felt less driven by a sense of social justice than by their industry’s opportunity to expand its audience and appeal to an emerging market of adult readers. This dissertation offers a more wholistic study of the industry that accounts for its economic concerns as well as its creative and altruistic ones.

Unlike the scholarship of McAllister, Bolling, and Guynes, who cite titles garnered almost exclusively from the superhero genre, my research looks at a much larger quantity of comic books from across the genre spectrum in order to best assess how creators, throughout the industry, referenced HIV/AIDS, why they did so, and how their incorporation of the subject changed overtime. While McAllister, Bolling, and Guynes argue that, in the main, comic book authors and illustrators used their commentaries on HIV/AIDS to promote tolerance and raise public awareness, their conclusions overlook creators who included the subject to fulfill the base, economic incentive of cultivating readers from the then-expanding market of adult buyers. By unduly emphasizing the altruistic motivations of some comic book creators, scholars have overlooked the economic factors that spurred the creation of HIV/AIDS narratives within popular comic books. Factors such as the desire to exploit heterosexual Americans’ fears of infection, attempts at sick humor, the need to heighten the realism of a story, or simply the 10 piggybacking of their work on a cause célèbre, all motivated the use of references to HIV/AIDS within various comic book narratives of the era.

In the twenty-first century, some popular comic books have included references to

HIV/AIDS but my research is only concerned with comic books published from the 1980s through the mid-1990s. I have limited my study to that timeframe because the epidemic phase of

HIV/AIDS in America began with the recognition of the illness in 1981 and concluded during the mid-1990s when U.S. infection and death rates started declining. Innovations in the medical treatment of HIV infection and federal policies ensuring healthcare for HIV-positive citizens transformed the virus, at least in the United States, from being an almost universal death sentence into a chronic, yet manageable, condition. Concurrent with the epidemic, the comic book industry enjoyed a period of explosive growth from the early 1980s until it crashed precipitously in the mid-1990s. When U.S. infection and death rates dropped, the public discourse on the epidemic subsided along with its representations in popular comic books.

This dissertation relies predominantly on the historical method along with elements of literary and art criticism to perform a textual and visual analysis of primary source documents.

Through a close reading of comic books that addressed the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I assess how textual narrative and visual imagery worked in conjunction with one another to support or rebuke notions advanced within the nation’s wider, public discourse during the time when those comic books were first created and consumed. To evaluate the various phases of U.S. public discourse on HIV/AIDS, I consider a host of primary sources including, newspapers, magazines, medical books written for the lay reader, political cartoons, museum exhibitions, feature-length motion pictures, television programs, stage plays, political speeches, advertising, and public service announcements. 11

In the first chapter, “From “Gay Plague” to Straight Panic, 1981-1985,” I note that although it was not until the fall of 1985 that popular comic book creators began incorporating the topic into their work, the manner in which they initially engaged the subject reflected the intellectual, social, and cultural milieu generated from 1981 through 1985. To better understand public perceptions of AIDS, at the moment when comic book creators first included the disease in their stories, an appreciation for how Americans became aware of the subject is necessary. Of specific importance is understanding how heterosexuals’ estimation of the illness’s potential to impact their lives changed during the first half of the 1980s. Such an appraisal establishes an appreciation for the stereotype-laden climate of ignorance into which comic books dealing with

HIV/AIDS entered publication. 1981 through 1985 were years of burgeoning heterosexual fear.

By recognizing how heterosexual Americans’ homophobic conceptualization of AIDS evolved from relegating the illness to the status of a “gay plague,” at the start of the 1980s, to the realization that HIV/AIDS constituted a public health emergency of vast proportions in 1985, one can better appreciate how comic book creators of the era either challenged or embraced perceptions of the illness promoted in the popular press from the mid-1980s onward.

In the second chapter, “AIDS, American Culture, and Comic Books 1985-1986,” I look at why artists working across various mediums and for audiences ranging from connoisseurs of high art to consumers of popular culture appeared, seemingly suddenly, in 1985. The proliferation of cultural products confronting the subject of HIV/AIDS, especially works of popular, narrative art, such as television programs, movies, and comic books, began in earnest during the final months of 1985, but their creation and distribution came on the heels of successes within the high art world, specifically that of New York City’s theatrical community.

This chapter looks at how the success of stage plays about HIV/AIDS, and commercial 12 developments within the comic book industry of the early 1980s, compelled comic book creators to incorporate the AIDS epidemic into their work. I argue that the underlying principles that drove comic book creators to incorporate representations of HIV/AIDS into their work ran the gamut from economic and artistic motivations to the belief that their work could serve a greater good by establishing counternarratives to the dominant public discourses of homophobia and heterosexual panic that suffused the zeitgeist of mid-1980’s America.

Chapter three, “The AIDS Epidemic in Transition: From Heterosexual Panic to Tragic,

National Crisis, 1987-1990,” shows that, from 1987 onward, notions of the “gay plague” no longer monopolized national discourse to the degree that they had during the epidemic’s formative years. Instead, an increasing number of heteronormative Americans began supporting a process of recontextualizing the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a tragic, national crisis. Due to the edicts of heterosexism, that prevented heterosexual Americans from considering themselves susceptible to a “gay” disease, the concept of the “gay plague” fell out of favor in part because heterosexuals, recognizing their potential to become HIV-positive, worked to divest the virus of its stigmatizing, queer connotations.

Forming the bedrock of AIDS-based discrimination in the United States, homophobic conceptualizations spawned during the seminal years of the epidemic started losing their cultural currency when counternarratives calling for increased awareness, tolerance, and support for persons with AIDS emerged in a sizeable quantity within America’s journalistic and entertainment media. As a result of such counternarratives, mainstream, heteronormative thought on the subject of HIV/AIDS gradually transformed. That evolution is evidenced throughout

American culture but is, perhaps, most vividly demarcated within popular American comic books. Because the narratives presented in popular comic books were directed toward a 13 readership overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, comprised of young, heterosexual males, a survey of comic book narratives that addressed the HIV/AIDS epidemic discloses alterations in heteronormative perceptions of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s.

The fourth chapter, “AIDS Enters the 1990s: ACT UP’s Activism, AIDS Education at

Riverdale H.S., and an Athlete’s Announcement, 1989-1991,” uncovers how heteronormative

Americans’ reinterpretation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a tragic, national crisis, as opposed to a repulsive “gay plague,” caused a profusion of popular comic books focused on HIV/AIDS to inundate U.S. markets at the dawn of the 1990s. Signifying a sociocultural transition away from the medical ignorance and homophobia that induced a national hysteria years earlier, products of art and entertainment that spoke to the topic of HIV/AIDS during the late 1980s and early 1990s did so, almost universally, in a broadminded manner and from a standpoint of overwhelming support for people with HIV/AIDS.

Comic books that considered the epidemic routinely castigated individuals and organizations that advanced “gay plague” narratives or were otherwise antagonistic toward people with HIV/AIDS. Popular comic books that spoke to the subject of HIV/AIDS at the start of the 1990s often did so in order to disseminate public health information about prevention, transmission, and treatment. Popular comic books from the dawn of the 1990s reveal how AIDS activism, AIDS education, and the nation’s receptivity to counternarratives that challenged heterosexist understandings of HIV/AIDS supplanted timeworn prejudices as landmark events, including the death of Ryan White, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s revelation of his HIV-positive status, marked the end of the epidemic’s first decade 14

Chapter five, “From a Cause Célèbre to Yesterday’s News: The Brief Pinnacle and Swift

Decline of HIV/AIDS in Popular Comic Books, 1992-1996,” covers how heteronormative conceptualizations of the crisis underwent their greatest alterations in the aftermath of 1991’s landmark events. Coopted between 1992 and 1996 by the commercial forces that propel

American popular culture, AIDS activism and the promotion of AIDS awareness became transformed into a consumer trend du jour. The regular appearance of HIV/AIDS-related subject matter within popular comic book titles featuring some of the industry’s most recognizable flagship superhero characters testifies to that transformation. During those years, AIDS activism become estranged from its foundation as a deadly serious, grassroots movement and transfigured into a commodity that necessitated only symbolic gestures of support and the parroting of toothless calls to action.

Epitomized by the proliferation of popular comic books that considered the epidemic, the prominence with which those considerations were manifested, and the superficial manner whereby such considerations were often made, the nature of commercialized HIV/AIDS awareness during the early 1990s is best understood not as an earnest attempt to halt the epidemic, but as an opportunity for the U.S. popular culture industry to profit from it. In the end,

Americans’ waning interest in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the implosion of the comic book market that coincided, brought about the disappearance of HIV/AIDS references in popular comic books when, during the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS activism ceased to be a cause célèbre. At that time, omnipresent expressions of support for HIV/AIDS causes, that arose in the early

1990s, evaporated as quickly as any consumer fad that had come before.

CHAPTER I. FROM “GAY PLAGUE” TO STRAIGHT PANIC, 1981-1985

During the mid-1980s, a growing number of comic book authors and illustrators sought to elevate their work beyond the confines of a medium that, in the minds of the general public, seemed replete with juvenile fantasies and devoid of intellectual and artistic merits. By including representations of, discussions about, and references to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

(AIDS), comic book creators attempted to confer a degree of contemporary relevancy upon their industry and its products in the hope that such topical material would appeal to the readership of the rapidly expanding adult comic book market that blossomed as a result of an industry-wide turn toward direct market distribution in comics specialty shops. Direct market distribution, unlike previous forms of newsstand distribution, eschewed the censorship guidelines of the restrictive Comics Code Authority (CCA) and opened the door for the creation of comic book narratives that, through their exploration of adult themes, use of explicit language, and frank depictions of violence, sexuality, and illicit drugs, challenged widespread understandings of the medium as an arena of popular culture designed for children’s consumption alone.7

Despite the medical community’s clinical recognition of the immunological disorder that ultimately became known as AIDS in the summer of 1981, it was not until the fall of 1985 that popular comic book creators began incorporating the topic into their work. The manner in which comic books initially engaged the subject of AIDS reflected the intellectual, social, and cultural milieu of America from 1981 to 1985; a historical moment typified by burgeoning heterosexual fears that what was once considered solely a disease afflicting people consigned to the margins of society, chiefly gay or bisexual men, intravenous drug users, and Haitian immigrants, had spread into the heteronormative, mainstream population. As heterosexual Americans’

7 Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 160-162. 16 recognition of AIDS grew, and transitioned from unfamiliarity, indifference, pity, or a sense of personal security rooted in the belief that their sexual orientation alone could kept them insulated from infection, into climate of media-fueled trepidation bordering on hysteria, comic book creators, working in a medium derided as trafficking in adolescent power fantasies took notice, integrated the crisis into their work, and played on the heterosexual public’s anxiety in order to craft storylines with relevance to contemporary life that they believed would attract an older, more sophisticated audience to their work.

In order to better understand public perceptions of AIDS, at the moment when comic book creators first included the disease in their stories, an appreciation for how heterosexual

Americans became aware of the subject is necessary. Of specific importance is understanding how heterosexuals’ estimation of the illness’s potential to impact their lives changed over the course of the early 1980s. Such an appraisal establishes an appreciation for the stereotype-laden climate of ignorance into which comic books dealing with AIDS entered publication. Through recognizing how heterosexual Americans’ homophobic conceptualization of AIDS evolved from relegating the illness to the status of a “gay plague,” at the start of the 1980s, to the realization that, by 1985, AIDS constituted a public health emergency of vast proportions, one can better appreciate how comic creators of the era alternately challenged or embraced prevailing stereotypes and national perceptions of the illness in their creative portrayals from the mid-1980s on.

1981: A Queer Medical Mystery

In the 1980s, AIDS was among the most controversial subjects relevant to life in

America. Scholar Graham Thompson states that “from the moment of its emergence as an identifiable illness, AIDS operated in the broader cultural and social domain less as a biological 17 fact than as an opportunity to pass moral judgment.”8 During the years immediately following its recognition as a unique ailment, the disease which immunologists ultimately dubbed AIDS, existed in the minds of health practitioners, researchers, and the American public alike, beneath a shroud of mystery. The lack of medical knowledge that pervaded the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, coupled with the fact that gay men were the first Americans to exhibit symptoms of the syndrome and bring its manifestation to the attention of healthcare workers and, through subsequent media reports, the public writ large, fostered a climate of speculation, fear, and homophobic prejudice that has never fully dissipated.9 As a consequence of medical ignorance and the reality that gay men were being disproportionately afflicted, AIDS became defined via journalistic accounts throughout those formative years as something of a queer disease, both in the sense that its cause was a baffling mystery and that the majority of its original sufferers, gay men, expressed a socially marginalized sexual identity outside the scope of mainstream,

American heteronormativity.

The events which culminated in the recognition of AIDS as a distinct malady began at the conclusion of the 1970s, but an authoritative classification of AIDS as a unique, and heretofore- unrecognized, illness did not occur until the final months of 1981.10 As early as 1979, anecdotal reports began circulating within New York City’s medical community that unusually virulent forms of bacterial, fungal, and viral infections were afflicting, and appeared confined to, members of the metropolis’s gay subculture.11 However, reports of young, gay men being stricken by, and quickly succumbing to, what normally were non-lethal infections did not remain

8 Graham Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, Twentieth-Century American Culture (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 21. 9 Ibid. 10 Yole G. Sills, The AIDS Pandemic: Social Perspectives, Contributions in Medical Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 1. 11 Mirko D. Grmek, History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic, trans. Russell C. Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6. 18 geographically isolated for long. Over the next two years, gay men in San Francisco and Los

Angeles began to die from either Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare skin cancer usually diagnosed in male, senior citizens of Mediterranean descent, or opportunistic infections of the kind claiming the lives of their New York counterparts.12 By June of 1981, such fatalities attracted the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who alerted American physicians, via the

CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, of the peculiar infirmities striking gay men who had, until recently, appeared completely healthy.13

One of the first national news outlets to break the story was the New York Times.14 In the newspaper’s July 3, 1981 edition, medical correspondent Lawrence K. Altman, a former CDC staffer-turned-journalist, summarized the CDC’s findings in a short article. “Rare Cancer Seen in

41 Homosexuals” informed the American public for the first time about the health phenomenon that confounded medical experts and cultivated an increasing degree of fear within America’s gay communities.15

Raising more questions than answers, Altman’s work set the tone for public perceptions of the disease through its characterizations of the emerging illness as an unidentified, lethal scourge restricted to the nation’s coastal, urban, gay populations. Reporting that, in a majority of the cases, the victims were sexually active gay men “who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week,” Altman fostered the belief that only the most sexually active gay men put themselves at

12 Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the Aids Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 60; Grmek, History of AIDS, 4. 13 Lucas Richert, “Regan, Regulation, and the FDA: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Response to HIV/AIDS, 1980-1990,” Canadian Journal of History vol. 44, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 468. 14 John-Manuel Andriote, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 49. 15Grmek, History of AIDS, 8. 19 risk of contracting the baffling new disease.16 Altman’s article further castigated victims by portraying them as debauched users of club drugs such as amyl nitrite, a widely used and legally available vasodilator known colloquially as “poppers,” or illicit substances like the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to “heighten sexual pleasure.”17 Altman’s portrayal of the first

AIDS patients as hedonistic pleasure seekers promoted an understanding of the illness that situated it within a subculture beyond the personal experience of mainstream, heterosexual

America and squarely within the realm of perceived social deviance.

By consigning AIDS to what most Americans considered the aberrant fringes of society,

Altman helped cement an incorrect view of the illness within the minds of the American public.

As noted by sociologist Yole G. Sills, Altman’s assertion that there existed “no apparent danger to non-homosexuals” distanced the illness’s victims from America’s heteronormative majority and demarcated AIDS, at its emergence, as a health crisis restricted to gay Americans only. 18

That distinction laid the groundwork for a climate of homophobic fear as the 1980s progressed and the illness began surfacing outside of the gay community.

Although one brief article buried on the twentieth page can hardly be counted as an overly influential piece of journalism, Altman’s initial report remains emblematic of future news coverage in its marginalizing tone and homophobic tenor. Altman and the other journalists who picked up the story continued to emphasize the fast-paced homosexual lifestyles of some AIDS patients even when new information proved that the illness constituted much more than a public health emergency unique to members of America’s urban, gay communities.19 In his characterization of the illness’s sufferers, Altman created a template for future journalists to

16 Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” The New York Times, July 3, 1981, pg. A20. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Sills, The AIDS Pandemic, 53. 20 follow when the story garnered wider media attention during the closing months of 1981.

Covering the increasing number of gay men diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) and

Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), Science News addressed the two most common opportunistic infections whose appearance in otherwise healthy individuals indicated the advanced stages of the inexplicable immunosuppressing syndrome. Although the Science News article conveyed its message in a clinical manner, it glossed over the fact that a woman was among the 152 cases of

KS and PCP reported to the CDC at that time and that a full ten percent of the men from those reports were neither gay nor bisexual.20 Despite mentioning that some patients were “identified as users of heroin, methadone, or cocaine,” all drugs which can be consumed intravenously, thereby opening their users up to the possibility of infections from bloodborne pathogens via the use of nonsterile injection tools, Science News chose to emphasize medical hypotheses revolving around the sexual habits of gay patients, “because of a greater average number of sexual partners,” in contrast with heterosexual men whose sexual practices exposed them to fewer microbial agents.21

While attending physicians and researchers for the CDC paid close attention to patients’ patterns of drug use, because the absorption of a tainted substance might account for their suppressed immune systems, news coverage tended to emphasize the pleasure-seeking impetus which compelled drug seeking behaviors as much as it highlighted the possibility that a study of those habits could yield a causal explanation for the onset of immunosuppression. Like Altman’s report, a Time magazine article devoted attention to patients’ prior use of “drugs like amyl nitrate

[sic] and butyl nitrate [sic]” noting that those inhalants “are said to enhance orgasm.” 22

20 Science News, “New Outbreak of Serious Diseases Focuses on Homosexual Men,” November 14, 1981, 309. 21 Ibid. 22 TIME, “Opportunistic Diseases: A Puzzling New Syndrome Affects Homosexual Men,” December 21, 1981, 68. 21

Furthermore, the article remarked on the “high level of sexual activity with numerous partners” that a number of CDC patients reported engaging in prior to their falling ill.23

At a moment when scientific understanding of the newly recognized, yet still unnamed, medical condition was at its lowest point, news reports focused on the socially taboo elements associated with the emerging health crisis to flesh out their stories. Despite the reality that facets of such reporting were grounded in what little truths were then know about the illness, i.e. its disproportionate manifestation in gay men and its possible linkages to drug use, journalistic accounts often struck a salacious tone as they lingered on aspects of gay sexuality which some researchers hypothesized had a causal connection to the illness’s onset. In articles that read like passages of homophobic detective fiction, journalists documenting the search for a biological cause, such as those writing for Time, indulged in purple prose describing “homosexual patients besieged by bacteria, fungi, and offbeat viruses” in addition to pondering the theory that an

“immunological overload” might be to blame as “[h]omosexuals with many sex partners often contract numerous venereal diseases, intestinal disruptions (gay bowel syndrome), mononucleosis and other infections” that, over time, might simply cause the immune systems of gay men to implode.24

“Diseases that Plague Gays,” a Newsweek article from December 1981, further exemplifies that style of reporting in its emphasis on gay hook-up culture and descriptions of the health consequences that can follow anonymous sexual encounters. Lamenting the limited possibility of tracking the illness’s origin through contact tracing, “because homosexuals are sometimes reluctant to name their sexual partners—and in some cases they may not know their names at all,” “Diseases that Plague Gays” paints a picture of a medical crisis “closely linked to

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 22 the life-style of gay men with many sexual contacts” and a gay community rife with dangerous promiscuity.25 Reporters Matt Clark and Mariana Gosnell repeatedly use the word

“promiscuous” to describe the habits of gay men in a manner which frames such behavior as not only deviant, but the rule rather than the exception in terms of its importance in the lives of the majority of gay men. In doing so, Clark and Gosnell give credibility to an early, and ultimately erroneous, medical hypothesis “that promiscuous gay patients lose their immune defenses because of the multiplicity of infections they catch.”26

Including a reference to “butyl or amyl nitrite, inhalants that are supposed to heighten the pleasure of orgasm,” Clark and Gosnell seem most interested in producing a tale of decadence gone awry within a setting of “bathhouses, gay bars and bookstores in major cities where homosexual men meet.”27 Contributing to the moralizing tone of their article, Clark and Gosnell include descriptions of dangerous opportunistic infections and the depredations they imposed on immunologically compromised patients’ bodies. Clark and Gosnell’s descriptions of severe herpes outbreaks and intestinal disorders present those health concerns as if they were the unavoidable consequences of gay sex, as opposed to simply the byproducts of unsafe sexual practices regardless of the participants’ sexual orientation, and contextualize the new, unidentified disorder as simply the latest and most lethal addendum to a long list of sexually transmitted infections beleaguering America’s gay communities. Prefiguring the heterosexual panic that would emerge in full force by the middle of the decade, Clark and Gosnell’s article concludes with an ominous warning that it appeared only a matter of time before bisexuals introduced the ailment to the heterosexual population.28

25 Matt Clark and Mariana Gosnell, “Diseases That Plague Gays,” Newsweek, December 21, 1981, 51. 26 Ibid., 52. 27 Ibid., 52,51. 28 Ibid., 52. 23

In lieu of verifiable facts concerning the biological realities of the disease’s origin and forms of transmission, journalists covering the onset of the health crisis overemphasized the scant bits of empirical evidence they had, specifically that an alarming number of gay men were becoming sick from an unknown, and likely sexually transmitted, disease. Padding their reports with insinuations regarding the culpability of sexually active gay men for ushering in the appearance of a new and deadly illness, journalists helped induce a general perception of the disease as a phenomenon of individual wantonness through their choice to emphasize salacious topics such as anonymous sex and drug use in their coverage. While overtly sensationalistic descriptions diminished from mainstream media reports during the late 1980s as the AIDS epidemic progressed, medical advancements like the discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) came to light, and a growing number of heterosexuals became diagnosed, journalists’ initial portrayals helped originate the stereotype that AIDS was a “gay disease” in spite of their knowledge that documented cases existed in a small, but significant, quantity of heterosexual patients.

Because of their myopic renderings during the first months of the crisis, an indelible association between AIDS and gay men became planted in the minds of many Americans and would remain rooted there well into the 1990s.29 Thus, AIDS became understood simultaneously as an inexplicable and deadly illness yet one whose victims could be safely relegated to gay, and later other marginalized communities, by the majority of the American public. Those two factors helped facilitate the creation of enduring AIDS stereotypes during the early 1980s.

However, in order for AIDS to become an issue of relevance to all Americans, and therefore a topic which comic book authors believed would contribute to the seriousness of their

29 Spencer A. Rathus and Susan Boughn, AIDS: What Every Student Needs to Know, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994), 11. 24 comics, denote a level of artistic maturity, and attract new, older readers, the publics’ understanding of the subject needed to transcend the boundaries of its fringe status as a calamity solely befalling gay Americans. That process occurred gradually between 1982 and 1985.

1982: Inventing the “Gay Plague”

If journalists established a homophobic template for coverage of the crisis in 1981, reports from 1982 followed it unfailingly, magnifying the linkages between the disease and the gay community despite mounting evidence that sexual orientation was not a prerequisite for manifesting the immunological breakdown that opened the door to opportunistic infections indicative of the mysterious sickness. While a genuine lack of medical knowledge promoted the dissemination of formative and ultimately detrimental reporting in 1981, a time when researchers strongly considered several hypotheses contingent on the mistaken belief that AIDS was, and would remain, a disease localized within urban, gay communities, news coverage in 1982 further entrenched stereotypes about gay men and AIDS even as the disease became identified in a growing number of heterosexual men and women.

As is the standard practice in epidemiology, investigators direct their attention to where and within what groups an illness first manifests itself. When the CDC first sounded the alarm about the illness, gay men living in the costal, urban centers of New York, San Francisco, and

Los Angeles constituted the overwhelming majority of cases. Consequently, investigators believed that something unique to those communities must be causing the illness. Reporters latched on to epidemiologists’ postulations regarding a causal relationship between gay sexuality and AIDS, committing themselves to contagion narratives typifying AIDS as a “gay disease” even in light of cases diagnosed in purportedly heterosexual patients. Articles of mainstream reporting from 1982 demonstrate how scant medical understanding, when combined with the 25 news media’s unwillingness to acknowledge, in an explicit manner, that AIDS was an issue relevant to all Americans regardless of their sexual orientation, a position laid bare in journalists’ persistent presentation of homosexuality as a sine quo non of the disease, hindered the implementation of substantive, nation-wide public health measures and produced vanguard coverage that christened AIDS a “gay plague” and cemented in the minds of the heterosexual

American public a perception of AIDS that marked it not simply as a medical condition that could befall anyone irrespective of their sexual orientation, but as a biological menace that could slip from its marginalized confines in coastal, urban, gay communities to threaten the safety of heterosexual families in the heartland of America.

Theorist Susan Sontag, writing in AIDS and Its Metaphors, her study of the sociocultural connotations of AIDS, professed that “[t]he emergence of a new catastrophic epidemic, when for several decades it had been confidently assumed that such calamities belonged to the past, would not be enough to revive the moralistic inflation of an epidemic into a ‘plague.’ It was necessary that the epidemic be one whose most common means of transmission is sexual.”30 As early as

1988, the year Sontag published her book, the globalized scale of the epidemic had proven that

AIDS was “predominantly a heterosexually transmitted illness.”31 But, in the United States circa

1982, the only publicized form of sexual transmission was homosexual. Owing to Abrahamic prohibitions as old as the biblical city from which its name derives, sodomy, despite its rechristening after the sexual revolution as anal intercourse, remained a highly stigmatized and licentious act in the minds of heteronormative Americans specifically and the heterocentric

Western world more generally. Journalistic reports from 1982 promulgated the falsity that homosexuality was something akin to a requirement for contracting AIDS in spite of well

30 Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 60. 31 Ibid., 61. 26 documented heterosexual cases. Their willingness to overemphasize the connection between

AIDS and gay men ostracized AIDS patients, playing on longstanding homophobic prejudices, while simultaneously mollifying an anxious, heterosexual public. By doing so, they helped concoct the enduring American myth of AIDS as “the gay plague.”

In May of 1982, the New York Times again published an article by Lawrence Altman that focused on the AIDS crisis and reinforced Altman’s initial, 1981 portrayal of AIDS as an illness correlated with the sexual orientation of gay men. For example, Altman noted that researchers had started referring to the illness using the acronym “A.I.D., for acquired immunodeficiency disease,” but he then refers to the disease throughout the remainder of his article using the term

“GRID,” an acronym for gay-related immunodeficiency, which was, by mid-1982, already becoming an antiquated term within the lexicon of healthcare professionals and medical researchers who authenticated ever rising numbers of AIDS cases in heterosexual men and women.32

Reiterating information provided by the CDC, Altman’s article does mention that thirteen heterosexual women were then counted among the 335 documented cases of AIDS at that time and that some male patients were “believed to have been heterosexual, and to have been chiefly users of heroin and other drugs by injection into their veins.”33 Nevertheless, Altman devoted the lion’s share of his coverage not to considering the implications of heterosexual patients with

AIDS, a discovery which discredits the belief that AIDS and homosexuality were concomitant, but to the hypotheses of several doctors who continued to ponder why the disease would strike the gay community at the dawn of the 1980s “[g]iven that homosexuality is not new.”34 Though

32 Lawrence K. Altman, “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials,” The New York Times, May 11, 1982, C1, C6. 33 Ibid., pg. C1 34 Ibid., C6. 27 noteworthy for reporting, albeit in passing, that heterosexuals were becoming afflicted with

AIDS, Altman’s second article buttressed the belief that AIDS and homosexuality were synonymous and that AIDS was only a disease that gay men would likely contract.

Shortly after the publication of Altman’s article, New York magazine ran a story with an equally stigmatizing message. Under the inflammatory title of “The Gay Plague,” author Michael

VerMeulen continued the journalistic trend of promoting a public understanding of AIDS whereby the illness and gay male sexuality became inseparably conjoined. However, like Clark and Gosnell’s Newsweek article from the previous December, the brief moments when

VerMeulen considered the ramifications of AIDS on heterosexuals he did so using a tone that evoked images of innocents imperiled by an illness brought about through the imprudence of sexually active gay men. VerMeulen’s admonition that “[a] bizarre assortment of rare and deadly ailments are striking a significant number of homosexual men and spreading with terrible swiftness to the straight population” implies that AIDS germinated exclusively within the gay community, where it would have remained confined, yet, like an errant biological weapon, had seeped from its rightful zone-of-containment, as an effect of gay promiscuousness, to terrorize unwitting heterosexuals.35

VerMeulen expounded on that sentiment throughout his article, peppering it with passages like the following wherein he laments that “[n]ow heterosexual men and women are getting sick. They share little with the homosexuals’ backgrounds. Their sexual encounters are less numerous. They do not report the same incidence of sexually transmitted disease.”36 In another passage that further underscores the article’s moralizing message of gay culpability,

VerMeulen quotes an anonymous “homosexual doctor” who wearily pondered that “‘[p]erhaps

35 Michael VerMeulen, “The Gay Plague,” New York, May 31, 1982, 52. 36 Ibid., 56 28 we’ve [gay men] needed a situation like this to demonstrate what we’ve known all along:

Depravity kills!’”37 VerMeulen placed the burden of preventing the spread of AIDS squarely on the shoulders of the gay community and opined that “[t]he fast New York gay life-style may or may not be the root of this mystery disease. And the homosexual community may or may not be concerned enough to alter that life-style as a precaution.”38

Believing that gay men were not up to the task, VerMeulen concluded his article by relating an exchange he witnessed at one of the first AIDS benefits sponsored by the Gay Men’s

Health Crisis (GMHC), a not-for-profit organization based in New York City and founded by playwright Larry Kramer to raise funding for AIDS research and treatment. At the benefit, held

April 8, 1982 at the Paradise Garage discotheque, “a saucy three-woman disco ensemble called the Richie Family closed its set with some motherly advice, counseling the men to stay out of the bathhouses, the back rooms” and have sex with one partner in the context of a monogamous relationship only. Rejecting that recommendation, the crowd of 2,000 attendees “formed its own impromptu chorus, chanting back, ‘NO WAY!’”39 Through an anecdote chosen to exemplify gay men’s disregard for their personal safety, and by extension their disregard for the safety of the heterosexual public whom VerMeulen’s analysis placed squarely in the crosshairs of a widening epidemic for which he blamed gay men, a foreboding tone of denunciation was struck that left heteronormative readers with the impression that “the gay plague,” while still at that moment a

“gay problem,” might soon come to plague them.

Even as leading U.S. news publications appeared content to ghettoize AIDS through either focusing on gay men’s sexual habits or making editorializing presumptions about the gay

37 Ibid., 61. 38 Ibid., 62. 39 Ibid. 29 community’s culpability in manifesting the crisis, the expanding diversity of persons with AIDS was making it harder to reconcile the disease’s proliferation within the myopic definition of a

“gay plague.” As the spring of 1982 turned into summer, the New York Times ran two articles revealing a rising number of patients whose identities did not conform to the stereotypical parameters of the typical person with AIDS.

In the first article, Altman, as he had a year earlier, broke the news of a startling immune system disorder with a high mortality rate whose symptoms included a host of opportunistic infections. This time, however, the opportunistic infections were not diagnosed in gay men, but in Haitian immigrants. Under a bold, eye-catching headline, announcing that “Five States Report

Disorders in Haitians’ Immune Systems,” Altman reported on the findings of the CDC’s bewildered epidemiologists who questioned whether the Haitians’ illnesses were caused by the same disease seen in gay men and intravenous drug users.40 Using euphemisms like “the immune disorder previously reported,” Altman completed his article without mentioning AIDS once in a telling example of how uncomfortable mainstream journalists were with informing the public that AIDS cases were developing in individuals who did not conform to the common, homophobic understanding of who was susceptible to infection. Professing their heterosexual orientations and, in the vast majority of cases, denying any use of drugs, the Haitian patients presented researchers and reporters with the quandary of how they contracted AIDS given their lack of engagement with the personal behaviors previously earmarked as likely avenues of the illness’s transmission.

Similarly, in a second article, this time with reporting credited to the Associated Press wire service, the news of hemophiliacs exhibiting immune system disorders entered the public

40 Lawrence K. Altman, “Five States Report Disorders in Haitians’ Immune Systems,” The New York Times, July 9, 1982, pg. D15. 30 record with no mention of the acronym AIDS.41 Instead, the Associated Press discussed CDC researchers’ concern “because the patients immunological systems showed breakdowns

‘strikingly similar’ to those found in the groups [gay men and intravenous drug users] previously affected.”42 Reticent to announce the identification AIDS in persons who did not fit the profile of the average AIDS patient, CDC epidemiologists performed their duties with an abundance of caution due to the undetermined and mysterious nature of the new disease. At the same time, their diagnostic restraint was influenced by their heterocentric views and stemmed, at least in part, from an abiding faith that AIDS manifested itself, in the vast majority of cases, only in patients whose personal backgrounds included numerous gay sexual experiences or intravenous drug use.

AIDS patients whose personal identities did not conform to the prevailing understanding of AIDS as a disease of young, urban, sexually active gay men continued to emerge with accelerating frequency during the summer of 1982 and demonstrated to medical professionals that whatever caused the illness was not remaining confined to America’s gay communities.

Although outlying cases had been noted for almost a year, their numbers, in proportion to the quantity of cases documented in gay men, were small enough that they were imprudently disregarded as statistically insignificant. The immune system disorders found in Haitian immigrants and hemophiliacs compelled researchers to broaden the scope of their inquiries.

While cases of AIDS in intravenous drug users and heterosexual women had been noted in 1981, it took the outbreak of AIDS in Haitians and hemophiliacs to goad researchers into discarding the immunological overload hypothesis or other hypotheses that fixated on

41 Associated Press, “Immunology Breakdown Found in Hemophiliacs,” The New York Times, July 15, 1982, pg. A8. 42 Ibid. 31 environmental factors such as the sanitary conditions of bathhouses or gay bars. In an article from Science, journalist Jean L. Marx explained that the spread of AIDS “suggests a viral pathogen” and that researchers’ interests had become “focused on the possibility that an infectious agent causes AIDS.”43 Remarking on how intravenous drug users “like sexually hyperactive homosexual males, have a high incidence of hepatitis B infections, which may be spread through sexual contact or by contaminated needles,” Marx stated that the hemophiliac cases are “particularly disturbing because of the possibility that they acquired an infectious agent from the blood product they take to prevent bleeding.”44

In Newsweek, an article revealed that “the ‘homosexual plague’ has started spilling over into the general population” while simultaneously tempering that assessment by reassuring readers that “[h]ealth officials say the epidemic doesn’t pose any immediate threat to the

American public as a whole.”45 Other reports discussing the revelation that AIDS could occur in heterosexuals, and might be spread through contact with contaminated blood or other bodily fluids, tended to ponder what commonalities linked drug-users, Haitian immigrants, and hemophiliacs with gay men. In Time, journalist Claudia Wallis stated that “the epidemic has spread beyond the homosexual community into several other segments of the U.S. population” and that medical theories which point to a gay lifestyle as an essential attribute of AIDS patients cannot explain the appearance of AIDS in the heterosexual population.46 Accordingly, in the words of Science News reporter Susan Lawrence, many researchers were “inclined to suspect a blood-borne virus as the culprit.”47 Soon, hospital personnel began worrying about contracting

43 Jean L. Marx, “New Disease Baffles Medical Community,” Science, August 13, 1982, 619. 44 Ibid., 618. 45 Newsweek, “‘Homosexual Plague’ Strikes New Victims,” August 23,1982, 10. 46 Claudia Wallis, “The Deadly Spread of AIDS: Homosexuals, Haitians, and Hemophiliacs Fall Victim,” TIME, September 6, 1982, 55. 47 Susan Lawrence, “AIDS—No Relief in Sight,” Science News, September 25, 1982, 202. 32

AIDS from those they cared for and blood banks started questioning the integrity of their stockpiled blood supplies.48

Whereas epidemiologists and healthcare workers understood, by the fall of 1982, that an as-yet-unidentified virus, in all likelihood, functioned as the infectious agent responsible for the immunological breakdowns symptomatic of AIDS and that any person, irrespective of their sexual orientation, could become infected if sufficiently exposed to contaminated blood, and possibly other bodily fluids, mainstream journalistic reports clung to presenting AIDS as “the

Gay Plague.” In the October 1982 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, a stalwart publication of heteronormative, middle-American views, most recognized for bringing the artwork of Norman

Rockwell to national prominence, journalist Barry Vinocur composed an article that ignored the broadening scope of AIDS and communicated a homophobic understanding of the illness that, even by the conventions of early-1980’s medical journalism, stands out as remarkably biased.

Titled “Being Gay is a Health Hazard,” Vinocur’s article reiterates year-old medical reports to reassure heterosexual Americans that AIDS “is primarily affecting homosexual men who are highly sexually active” and, for that reason, remains of little concern to the heteronormative majority.49 While Vincour’s demographic pronouncements about the “victims of this ‘gay plague’” are tempered throughout by adverbs that precede them, such as “primarily” or “principally,” Vincour never mentioned any of the heterosexual patients whose diagnoses repudiated all delusions of a “gay plague.”50 Willfully omitting even the most longstanding and commonly recognized group of outliers, intravenous drug users, Vincour painted a distorted portrait of the crisis at a moment when the dissemination of objective, scientific facts would have

48 Ibid., pg. 202-3. 49 Barry Vinocur, “Being Gay is a Health Hazard,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 1982, pg. 73. 50 Ibid., 26,73. 33 helped counteract heterosexual perceptions of AIDS as a “Gay Plague,” a subject that made for an entertaining magazine article, but lacked all potential to impact their lives and whose victims could, therefore, be either quickly forgotten or easily ignored.

1983: Fear of Casual Transmission and Heterosexual Panic

The year 1983 can be considered a turning point in the cultural history of AIDS and it should be remembered not only for being the year when the crisis garnered a vast increase in coverage from mainstream journalistic outlets, but also for being the moment when the first current of panic, induced by ill-informed fears of infection combined with homophobic and racial prejudices, began to ripple through the heteronormative American population. Fueled by a swelling death toll and revelations of evermore cases of AIDS diagnosed in increasingly diverse groups of citizens, heteronormative Americans took serious notice of the crisis while researchers continued to ponder the cause of the illness in an atmosphere distinguished by a bona fide lack of biological understanding that, in some cases, facilitated the promotion of hypotheses concerning the potential for transmission which rendered the disease as more virulent than it proved to be upon further analysis.

While heterosexual panic grew throughout the nation over the course of 1983, the seeds of the straight community’s fears were sown long before when the earliest reports on AIDS promoted a public understanding of the illness as the “Gay Plague.” However, during the closing weeks of 1982, the first pediatric cases of AIDS were brought to light and their discovery facilitated a shift in media coverage. Stories of AIDS transmission became the principal focus of reporting, especially stories that involved heterosexual sex or a person’s receipt of tainted blood or blood products. No longer the lead feature, journalists, nevertheless, retained the “Gay

Plague” narrative by historicizing it as a genuine account of the crisis’s past and its progression. 34

The announcement of pediatric AIDS patients in mid-December 1982 struck an ominous chord that reverberated throughout the U.S. national consciousness. After receiving a blood transfusion traced back to a donor who later developed AIDS, the first pediatric AIDS patient died at the age of 20 months from opportunistic infections.51 In a matter of weeks, the number of pediatric cases of AIDS had grown to double digits and on December 27, Time reported that twenty-two suspected cases of AIDS had emerged in children under the age of five in New York,

California, and New Jersey.52 In a Newsweek article published the same day, New Jersey pediatrician Dr. James Oleske, who attended to eight of the identified pediatric AIDS patients, noted that each of the children “came from families considered at high risk for the disorder because of homosexual activity, drug abuse or origins in Haiti.”53 Oleske, however, remained unsure how the children contracted AIDS. Considering that “the disease may be transmitted during fetal life via the placenta, or during passage through the birth canal, or subsequently through intimate contact with the mother,” neither Oleske nor his colleagues could definitively say how their patients contracted AIDS.54

The identification of AIDS in an infant attracted the heterosexual public’s attention in a way that the disease’s previous manifestation in gay men, intravenous drug users, Haitian immigrants, and even hemophiliacs had not. Considered blameless innocents, children with

AIDS stimulated great public sympathy because, unlike gay men or drug addicts, their affliction was not considered the result of conscious choices concerning lifestyles that ran contrary the status quo of American society and which many citizens viewed as aberrant. Lacking, in the

51 Harold M. Schmeck, Jr. “Infant Who Received Transfusion Dies of Immune Deficiency Illness,” The New York Times, December 10, 1982, pg. A22. 52 Time, “Young Victims: AIDS May be the Villain,” December 27, 1982, 79. 53 Matt Clark, “AIDS: A Lethal Mystery Story,” Newsweek, December 27, 1982, 63. 54 Ibid. 35 estimation of heteronormative, mainstream Americans, all culpability for their condition, pediatric AIDS patients perfectly embodied the concept of a sinless AIDS victim whose suffering could be thought of as wholly tragic. As the number and visibility of pediatric AIDS patients increased, Americans’ perception of children as “innocent” AIDS cases helped focus mainstream media attention on the disease and helped promote the publication of articles addressing AIDS across an expansive list of poplar periodicals. On the other hand, if pediatric

AIDS patients were deemed innocent, what did that make the gay or drug using patients?

Sociologist Gary W. Dowsett writes that, when considering HIV, “all forms of transmission carry with them some suspicion of deviance, a deviancy shaped originally by the first ‘fallen man’ in the epidemic—the homosexual, that is, the ‘original’ sexual deviant in the modern history of sexuality.”55 Through the supposed deviance of their actions, homosexuals were presumed guilty by the news media and the court of public opinion for the emergence of

HIV/AIDS and its proliferation into the wider population. Enduring the burdens of that judgement well into the twenty-first century, gay men and gay culture remain branded by that view because “the earliest mass media tagged the pandemic as the ‘Gay Plague’ even though other populations were infected right from the beginning.”56 Intravenous drug users, like gay men, were “blamed in their own right for ‘spreading’ HIV,” but, due to the publics’ presumptions of their heteronormativity and the media’s tendency to focus, almost entirely, on gay patients to support their “Gay Plague” narrative, intravenous drug users were never condemned to the same degree as gay men and, as Dowsett states, “the specter of the

55 Gary W. Dowsett, “The ‘Gay Plague’ Revisited: AIDS and Its Enduring Moral Panic,’ in Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight Over Sexual Rights, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 130. 56 Ibid., 133-134. 36 homosexual lurking behind every HIV infection (among men) remains potent.”57

Through the first pediatric AIDS patient’s death in infancy, Americans perceived, for the first time, a person with AIDS who could not be condemned because of their sexual orientation or drug use, nor marginalized because of their race and national origin, like the Haitian cases, nor habitually ignored by the media, as were heterosexual, female AIDS patients, because their identities did not fit the script of “Gay Plague” journalism. Pediatric patients with AIDS attracted widespread media attention, but required journalists to downplay their “Gay Plague” narrative in favor of increased reporting on the subject of the disease’s transmission. Reporters recognized that they could scapegoat neither gay sex nor drug use in their stories about pediatric cases of

AIDS because the first infant’s death provided “[d]irect evidence linking blood transfusions and blood products with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.”58 Following the identification of pediatric AIDS patients, journalists began emphasizing, as was the case in an article from

Science magazine, “the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by an infectious agent, possibly a virus that can be transmitted by close contact, including that between family members, or by blood products.”59 Choosing to underscore both the emerging details of the disease’s transmission and the yet unquantified mysteries of its spread, all while retaining references to the “Gay Plague” under the guise of historical contextualization, reporters’ new narrative tactic garnered greater national attention to the crisis through stoking heterosexuals’ fears of infection.

By the end of January, the fact that “AIDS may also be transmitted by heterosexual sex and other forms of intimate personal contact such as that between mother and child” was being increasingly reported. 60 The transition to coverage revolving around transmission narratives

57 Ibid., 135. 58 Science News, “Blood-borne agent in immune deficiency,” January 1, 1983, 8. 59 Jean L. Marx, “Spread of AIDS Sparks New Health Concern,” Science, January 7, 1983, pg. 42. 60 Jean L. Marx, “Health Officials Seek Ways to Halt AIDS,” Science, January 21, 1983, pg. 271. 37 spurred a rise in mass media coverage of the AIDS crisis. Exploiting heterosexual citizens’ fears of contagion and their genuine desire to learn more about the expanding AIDS crisis, national periodicals began printing articles about AIDS. Frequently, those articles featured an emphasis on heterosexual transmission and the mysterious origins of AIDS in conjunction with elements of the “Gay Plague” narrative that, although no longer the primary, served as a historical armature on which journalists hung their feature stories of heterosexual infection.

For example, in Rolling Stone reporter B.D. Colen asserted that “[b] the time it has run its lethal course, the Gay Plague may be known as the Plague. What is this mysterious killer?” 61

Colen’s statements contain a fear inducing warning with an undercurrent of blame, in its reminder to readers that what began as the “Gay Plague” is now spreading, while also noting that many questions remain unanswered regarding the biological origin and transmission of AIDS.

Emblematic of journalists’ new narrative approach, Colen concludes his article by leaving readers to ponder questions such as “who knows if AIDS can be spread through food handling and preparations? And who knows what a trip to the blood bank could trigger?”62 Statements like those helped disseminate the mistaken, albeit widely accepted, belief that AIDS could be transmitted as easily as the common cold and that even donating blood might put a person at risk.

Similarly, an article in People Weekly demonstrates journalists’ focus on heterosexual fears of contagion through descriptions of how “AIDS has made its incursion into the non- homosexual community” while also relating a story of the gay communities where persons with

AIDS predominantly lived.63 Within articles that contextualized the spread of AIDS as a disease that emanated from gay communities into wider society, journalists perpetuated “Gay Plague”

61 B.D. Colen, “Is There Death After Sex?” Rolling Stone, February 3, 1983, pg. 17. 62 Ibid., 51. 63 Nancy Faber, and Joyce Leviton, “AIDS, A Mysterious Disease, Plagues Homosexual Men From New York to California,” People Weekly, February 14, 1983, 43. 38 narratives through canonizing them as historical and medical fact. A Time article relayed that

“[s]ome experts feel AIDS will strike beyond the gay community,” despite cases of AIDS being diagnosed in heterosexual patients since 1981, and reminded readers “that AIDS may be transmitted through heterosexual relations.”64 In a cover story for Newsweek, reporters ceded that

AIDS “came into public view…derisively called the “‘Gay Plague,’” but produce an article that contains a stigmatizing quote from Dr. Jeffery Koplan, a public-health expert working for the

CDC, who described AIDS as “‘creeping out of well-defined epidemiological confines’” before predicting that “AIDS will begin appearing with greater frequency among heterosexuals as the epidemic grows.”65

Such descriptions anthropomorphized AIDS as a malevolent force that emerged from the gay community to terrorize heteronormative society. An article from Health takes that trend even further in statements that read more like the ad copy for a horror movie than a work of public- health journalism. Intoning that “It cropped up first in the gay community, but the circle has steadily widened. Armies of medical sleuths are now bent on tracking down the killer. So far, it has eluded them all…”.66 Because of such hyperbolic historicizing, the “Gay Plague” narrative endured, and continued to perpetuate anti-gay stereotypes, even as it was used to promote narratives of increasingly widespread infections. The anthropomorphizing of AIDS as a murderer on the loose, shows how journalists worked to create articles that engaged readers by capitalizing on both fears of infection and the mysterious qualities of the disease itself.

There was, in fact, a great deal of mystery concerning the exact nature of AIDS and its modes of transmission. Even some of the medical practitioners who worked most closely with

64 Claudia Wallis, “Battling a Deadly New Epidemic,” Time, March 28, 1983, 53. 65 Jean Seligmann, “The AIDS Epidemic,” Newsweek, April 18, 1983, 74. 66 Lester David, and Irene David, “An 80’s Epidemic,” Health, May 1983, pg. 62. 39

AIDS patients, like Dr. James Oleske who treated pediatric AIDS patients through his practice in

Newark, New Jersey, lacked a clear understanding of how AIDS might be transmitted. As the lead author, Oleske co-wrote an article with eight of his fellow medical doctors for the May 6,

1983 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) where they posited that

“sexual contact, drug abuse, or exposure to blood products is not necessary for disease transmission” as part of their hypothesis that pediatric AIDS patients might have been infected neonatally through casual contact.67

While the average American was not scouring JAMA for news about AIDS, many journalists covering the story were. Some journalists traded on the prestigious medical journal’s institutional authority to transmit fearmongering news stories that misrepresenting Oleske’s conjectures as clinically proven facts. Two months later, a Newsweek article took the Associated

Press (AP) to task for making the possibility of casual transmission “big news across the country” via their cherry-picked quotes from Oleske’s JAMA article.68 Newsweek also reported that because of the AP, the New York Times nearly ran the frontpage headline “MERE

CONTACT MAY SPREAD AIDS,” but that plan was “killed in the final edition.”69

Exacerbating the heteronormative public’s fear of contagion, well publicized reports of heterosexual women with AIDS emerged. In the New York Times Altman reported the story of six women who contracted AIDS through heterosexual contact.70 Other articles from medical journals, such as “a study of heterosexual transmission first published in The New England

Journal of Medicine,” attracted the attention of journalists who turned mole-hills of information

67 James Oleske and others, “Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Children,” The Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 249, no. 17 (May 6, 1983): 2345. 68 Charles Kaiser, “The Media and the Scare,” Newsweek, July 4, 1983, 21. 69 Ibid. 70 Lawrence K. Altman, “Research Traces AIDS In 6 of 7 Female Partners,” The New York Times, May 19, 1983, B4. 40 into mountainous news stories that caused an “AIDS panic…to spread across the country…fueled in part by a spate of sensationalized publicity.”71

The early summer months of 1983 were marked by panic due to the convergence of medical ignorance on the part of health professionals and overzealous reporting on the part of journalists who endorsed sensationalistic stories before vetting them. They were the months when AIDS hotlines became “flooded with calls asking if the disease could be contracted from holding subway straps or using toilet seats used by gays. [Or]…if there were any risks in sharing an apartment’s laundry room with gay tenants”72 According to U.S. News and World Report

“fear reached a new pitch in mid-June when the U.S. Conference of Mayors likened AIDS— acquired immune deficiency syndrome—to a ‘medieval plague.’”73 Newsweek reported that

“[t]he straight backlash has raged from silly and innocuous (Beverly Hills women are counseling each other to stop kissing their hairdressers) to the alarmingly serious (the Red Cross, with blood collections off 16.4 percent largely because donors mistakenly fear contracting AIDS,…issued a plea for healthy donors).”74 Articles such as one found in U.S News and World Report, discussed health leaders’ concern over “the transmission of AIDS from heterosexual men to women,” but, in an effort to quell heterosexual panic, also reminded readers that the disease was still well isolated.75 What “well isolated” meant was that AIDS remained, predominantly a “Gay Plague.”

Homophobic contradictions like those that allow for someone to get their hair styled by a person they fear has AIDS, yet who cannot bring them self to kiss that person on the cheek, were dismissed at the time as “silly and innocuous,” but homophobic folklore and urban legends about

71 Newsweek, “The AIDS Hysteria,” May 30, 1983, 42. 72 Ibid. 73 U.S. News and World Report, “Fear of AIDS Infects the Nation,” June 27, 1983, 13. 74 Mark Starr, “The Panic Over AIDS,” Newsweek, July 4, 1983, 20. 75 U.S. News and World Report, “AIDS Epidemic…Help for Glaucoma…Rabies Vaccine,” June 6, 1983, 56. 41 casual transmission stigmatized gay men and other persons with AIDS and critically informed the earliest and most enduring American misconception of AIDS as a “Gay Plague.”

Perpetuating “Gay Plague” stereotypes in an era of heterosexual panic contributed to the anthropomorphized conceptualization of AIDS as a lethal force, a killer on the loose, through journalists’ sensationalistic coverage of AIDS that advanced a historical narrative of its initial containment, within U.S. gay communities, followed by its mysterious escape into the general, i.e. heteronormative, population, and the wait for its impending reign of terror.

The cover of Time, for its July 4, 1983 issue, featured nothing related to the anniversary of the United States’ founding. Instead, it promised stories of “Disease Detectives: Tracking the

Killers” and “The AIDS Hysteria” imposed over a photograph of an epidemiologist conducting laboratory work.76 Written by historian and journalist Walter Isaacson, the cover story “Hunting for the Hidden Killers” anthropomorphizes the disease its descriptions of “the confounding killer known as AIDS” as if “AIDS” was the alias of a murderous outlaw on the lam. 77 Isaacson continues the analogy in stating that “AIDS attacks its victims by knocking out the immune system, thus leaving them defenseless against a host of ‘opportunistic’ infections.”78 Conjuring up images of a vulnerable mark getting waylaid in a dark alley, beaten unconscious, and robbed,

Isaacson’s sensationalistic, anthropomorphized description engaged readers via the language of the detective fiction genre while also promoting an understanding of AIDS that endowed it with personal agency.

Isaacson’s tendency toward sensationalism becomes self-evident when he notes that

“[t]he outbreak of an epidemic can provoke a primal panic by raising the specter of a rampant

76 TIME, July 4, 1983, cover. 77 Walter Isaacson, “Hunting for the Hidden Killers,” Time, July 4, 1983, 50. 78 Ibid. 42

‘Andromeda strain,’”79 an observation that follows after he raised such a specter only paragraphs earlier when he began his article with a direct quotation from The Andromeda Strain, a 1969

Michael Crichton novel about medical researchers tasked with identifying and halting the spread of a strange, alien illness. In likening AIDS to the fictional extraterrestrial disease in the

Andromeda strain, Isaacson adds to the anthropomorphized depiction of AIDS as a fugitive killer with the characterization of AIDS as an alien force that has invaded the planet’s terrestrial ecosystem. Such analogies effectively othered persons with AIDS by making their suffering appear inhuman and otherworldly. After all, if AIDS was an alien disease, then those who contracted it must themselves be similarly unearthly.

The othering of persons with AIDS augmented by fear and medical ignorance fostered an environment where irrational understandings of AIDS and its modes of transmission could flourish. Quoted in a People Weekly article about how “AIDS hysteria is gravely threatening the blood bank system[,]” Dr. Alfred Katz, then executive director of the Red Cross Blood Services program in Washington, D.C., observed that “‘[t]here seems to be this vague connection in the public mind between needles and AIDS’” that leads them to avoid donating blood.80 Amid an atmosphere of panic, the public’s bewilderment regarding the nature of AIDS transmission led to confusing the act of donating blood with the possibility of receiving infected blood during a transfusion.

Some journalists, like Lindsy Van Gelder writing for Ms., tried to subdue the hysteria and condemn those who viewed “members of the 4H groups—especially gay men--…as the

79 Ibid. 80 Michael Ryan, “Dr. Alfred Katz Says Fear Not AIDS is Causing a Red Cross Blood Loss,” People Weekly, July 11, 1983, 32-3. 43 perpetrators of the disease on the rest of society.”81, Richard Kaye, writing for The Nation, criticized his journalistic peers at The New York Times Magazine when one of their articles asserted that “nonhomosexuals with AIDS are ‘innocent bystanders in the path of this new disease’—implying, of course, that homosexuals are not so innocent.”82 Even National Review ran an op-ed by D. Keith Mano who decried some heterosexuals’ “healthier-than-thou righteous gloating…[a]s if God were inclined to express his sexual preference microbiologically.” 83

In The New Republic, Charles Krauthammer counselled citizens searching for facts about

AIDS to rely on “the Center for Disease Control for such information, rather than on the New

York Post,” whose fearmongering coverage had been drumming up panic.84 In June, the Post printed an especially sensationalistic headline on its frontpage, “L. I. Grandmother Dead of

AIDS,” when it reported on a case of AIDS in Long Island where an elderly woman likely became infected through a transfusion of tainted blood during a heart surgery three years prior.85

When considering AIDS hysteria in 1983 for his book And the Band Played On, a history of the earliest year of the AIDS crisis, journalist Randy Shilts maintained that “the New York Post had mastered the art of fashioning exaggerated fear and paranoia into headline copy.”86

The Post’s indulgence in the worst kind of yellow journalism is apparent on its surface, in fact, its trumpeted on the newspaper’s frontpage. Krauthammer, on the other hand, reveals a duality common to some reporting on AIDS when he, after tendering a progressive position on education and public panic, decided to promote regressive “Gay Plague” stereotypes and explain that the general population does not need to worry about AIDS because it has stayed “for several

81 Lindsy Van Gelder, “The Politics of AIDS,” Ms., May 1983, 103; the term “4H groups” referred to the four identified high-risk groups, homosexual, intravenous drug users (heroin primarily), hemophiliacs, and Haitians. 82 Richard Kaye, “AIDS Neglect,” The Nation, May 21, 1983, 627. 83 D. Keith Mayo, “Journal of a Plague Year,” National Review, July, 8, 1983, 836. 84 Charles Krauthammer, “The Politics of a Plague,” The New Republic, August 1, 1983, 19. 85 New York Post, “L. I. Grandma Dead of AIDS,” June 13, 1983, pg. 1. 86 Shilts, And the Band Played On, pg. 320. 44 years confined to very narrowly defined populations of sexually active homosexual men, intravenous drug abusers, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.”87 In other words, heteronormative

Americans should not fear AIDS because, in the vast majority of cases, it only affects the lives of the socially marginalized. Trafficking in “Gay Plague” stereotypes, even as he attempts to articulate a supportive stance, Krauthammer, expounded that “AIDS is not a threat to the general public, it is killing and terrorizing a large number of homosexuals,” before offering that “no one knows whether AIDS is accidentally a homosexual disease or intrinsically so.”88 Krauthammer’s decision to denounce the hysteria-inducing yellow journalism of the New York Post, while he regurgitated tired reassurances of intrinsic safety based on heterosexual identity, exemplifies the often binary nature of the mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS. Often, articles wavered between delivering broad-minded messages promoting AIDS education and further aggravating fearful prejudices through propagating the myth of the “Gay Plague.” Medical facts, presented in a manner calculated to reassure heterosexual readers that AIDS remained a “Gay Plague,” became a favorite trope of AIDS journalism in the summer of 1983.

With an anthropomorphic headline that invokes images of AIDS as a violent gangster, akin to the highway bandits and big city mobsters of the 1930s, a Newsweek article “AIDS:

Public Enemy No. 1” reassured heterosexual readers that “an overwhelming 94 percent of all

U.S. cases still fall into one of the four high-risk groups: homosexual or bisexual men, intravenous-drug abusers, Haitian immigrants, and hemophiliacs.”89 Moreover, the article publicized findings from a medical symposium in Port-au-Prince, Haiti that concluded “of the approximately 100 AIDS cases on the island, more than a third have admitted to homosexual

87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 21. 89 Newsweek, “AIDS: Public Enemy No. 1,” June 6, 1983, 95. 45 activity.”90 Although, “the ‘Haitian connection’…baffled AIDS researchers,” it was learned that many Haitian patients had worked as male prostitutes, primarily because of economic necessity, and because of the strict taboo against homosexuality in Haitian society, kept that information a secret from physicians on the island as well as in the United States. Only too happy to retrench notions of the “Gay Plague” in the minds of Americans, Newsweek used the Haitians’ disclosures to soothe anxious heterosexual readers fearful of infection.

As a result of their “high-risk status,” Haitian-Americans claimed that employers were firing them from their jobs or forcing them to take leaves of absence simply because of their

Haitian descent.91 Old modes of racial prejudice combined with the burgeoning AIDS hysteria to generate a civil rights crisis. Marked by their dark skin and French accents, Haitian immigrants to the United States had been timeworn targets of nativist racism and xenophobia, but the panic over AIDS added a medical element to previous forms of bigotry through objectifying persons of

Haitian descent as incubators and possible transmitters of AIDS. Both native Haitians and

Haitian immigrants argued that their inclusion in the high-risk category had adversely affected elements of their social and economic lives.92

Members of the Haitian Medical Association issued a statement charging the CDC with employing unscientific methods, motivated by racist attitudes, in their classification of Hattians as a high-risk group. However, in support of removing Haitians from the stigmatizing high-risk categorization, the association’s members pointed to the recent finding that a significant number of Haitian patients had a history of gay sex, while working as male prostitutes, or were

90 Ibid. 91 Lawrence K. Altman, “Debate Grows on U.S. Listing of Haitians in AIDS Category,” The New York Times, July 31, 1983, pg. 1. 92 Ibid. 46 intravenous drug users.93 After fully acknowledging the socioeconomic consequences that followed from discrimination against persons branded for ostracization by placement in a high- risk category, the Haitian Medical Association readily promotes the “Gay Plague” stereotypes of persons with AIDS as being solely gay men or junkies and, therefore, more easily marginalized.

Increasingly, gay men were marked for avoidance and scorn, through the denial of services or public shaming, because they were presumed to be carriers of a lethal and contagious sickness by a significantly large and medically ignorant portion of the U.S. population.94

According to Newsweek, “[f]or all their progress in recent years, gays enjoy[ed], at best, a precarious tolerance in the public mind” and some gay men were “as fearful of homophobic backlash as they [were] of AIDS itself.”95 However, Americans’ ignorance mirrored the fact that even within the best educated and most experienced circles of the medical profession, clinical mysteries about AIDS remained and numerous theories about its transmission received considerable debate. Because it was “not yet known how AIDS spreads,” concern became heightened to the point where the federal government started “pouring money into AIDS research partly as a response to political pressures generated by fears that the disease may turn into a major epidemic.”96

Newsweek reported that in San Francisco, “worried citizens want to know if they can catch AIDS from a bus seat, from food served by a gay waiter—or even from documents that have been handled by a gay co-worker.”97 In New York, a woman admitted to thoroughly washing her hands every time she leaves a cab “whose driver she suspects might be Haitian.” 98

93 Ibid., 50. 94 Ibid. 95 Tom Morganthau, “Gay America in Transition,” Newsweek, August 8, 1983, 33. 96 Gina Kolata, “Congress, NIH Open Coffers for AIDS,” Science, July 29, 1983, 436. 97 Jean Seligmann, “AIDS: Fears and Facts,” Newsweek, August 8, 1983, 40. 98 Ibid. 47

Journalistic reports culled from interviews with epidemiologists and medical researchers who, lacking replicable lab experiments, provided tentative responses from force-of- professional- habit whenever they were questioned on the subject of transmission, added to the public’s confusion. Statements like “[s]aliva, semen, and feces are all possible vehicles of transmission, but some researchers believe infection cannot take place without a ‘portal’ into the bloodstream through a break in the skin or mucous membranes,” invited readers to conclude that other researchers must, therefore, believe an entry point into the bloodstream is not necessary and that

AIDS could be virulently infectious.99 Months after Dr. James Oleske’s claims of casual transmission caught the attention of the news media and “set off much of the current panic about

AIDS,” the social consequences of reporters promoting that hypothesis emerged whenever

“hospital workers, prison guards, undertakers, and many others…regard[ed] AIDS victims as lepers.”100

Fearful reactions from those who believed that they or their families “might suddenly catch some mysterious, fatal illness which until now has been confined to society’s outcasts,” occurred throughout the country that summer.101 According to The Progressive, a public swimming pool in Tulsa, Oklahoma “was drained after members of a gay rights organization rented it.”102 Lamenting that the public’s “fear of the disease has been exploited and raised to the level of hysteria by some of the media as well as such right wing-wing groups as Jerry Falwell’s

Moral Majority,” the same article noted that “AIDS has provided a new pretext for distrusting and despising homosexuals.”103 A letter to the editor, commenting on Newsweek’s AIDS cover

99 Ibid. 100 Robert Bazell, “The History of the AIDS Epidemic,” The New Republic, August 1, 1983, 15. 101 Ibid., 14. 102 The Progressive, “Everybody Out of the Pool,” September 1983, 11. 103 Ibid. 48 story from August 8th, demonstrates such a response in the writer’s claim that “homosexuality, however prevalent, is nothing but deviant sexual behavior and should be kept ‘in the closet,’ not released on the public by your sick editorial acceptance and hype.”104 The irrational belief that by simply addressing the topic of gay sexuality, a publication of record “released” dangerous ideas capable of contaminating the heteronormative population exemplifies the degree to which homosexuality itself became demonized as a source of infection.

Because of longstanding homophobic prejudices finding new expression as a result of the

AIDS crisis, public panic began to diminish as the fall of 1983 approached and it became clear that AIDS was not spreading as virulently as anticipated. After months of news coverage, the vast majority of new AIDS diagnoses remained confined to patients classified as belonging in, or having had intimate contact with someone belonging in, one or more of the four high-risk groups. Americans took notice and reasoned that AIDS must be, if not a “gay” plague, certainly a queer one in that it afflicted people living, to varying degrees, outside the conventions of mainstream society due to their sexual orientation, illegal drug habits, race and national origin, or medical history. Sociologist Cindy Patton calls that pattern of thinking the “queer paradigm” as persons with AIDS could never be, in the minds of heteronormative Americans, “considered

‘real’ heterosexuals (even if they were non-homosexuals).”105 Elaborating on the queer paradigm, Patton states “the illegal drug or unconventional sex behaviors of drug injectors and bisexual men, and social stereotypes which feminized men with hemophilia and desexualized anyone old enough to receive a transfusion during a surgery already marked [those] people as sexually feminized, unmasculine, not fully heterosexual.”106 As the years progressed, less

104 Aruthur R. Abelson, “Letters,” Newsweek, August 22, 1983, 7. 105 Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), 117. 106 Ibid. 49 homophobic perceptions of persons with AIDS emerged and countered, but have never totally supplanted, the queer paradigm it the popular imagination of many straight Americans.

Although casual transmission was the sensationalistic lead story that summer, coverage from the fall took a more measured approach in reminding citizens that AIDS, though mysterious, remained an illness that struck high-risk individuals almost exclusively and was far more difficult to contract than previous reports had indicated. An example of that shift in coverage comes from the August issue of Harper’s Bazaar and an article by Simi Horwitz informing readers that “experts all stress that no one will contract AIDS through casual social contact or in a working environment.”107 Observing that “the puzzle of AIDS seems to grow more complicated and baffling with each new disclosure,” Horwitz acknowledged the illness’s unknown qualities while simultaneously assuring readers that “there is no indication that this infectious agent is airborne or transmitted through food, water, saliva, dirty towels, public toilets or laundry rooms.”108 Other examples, like Jonathan Lieberson’s consideration of AIDS literature in The New York Review of Books, depicted the illness as chiefly the concern of high- risk individuals, especially gay men, ceding that “AIDS cases have continued to increase, but they have not doubled in the past six months, as was expected; the rate of increase appears to be leveling off in both the city [New York] and the nation.”109 Hearing that the rate of newly diagnosed AIDS cases was leveling off comforted heteronormative readers who had been driven to panic by overwrought news coverage.

That fall, journalists presented the declining rate of AIDS diagnoses as proof that the disease was still sequestered within high-risk groups. With a shortage of conclusive, scientific

107 Simi Horwitz, “The AIDS Panic: Are You Safe?” Harper’s Bazaar, August 1983, 196. 108 Ibid., 28, 196. 109 Jonathan Lieberson, “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 1983, 20-1. 50 information regarding the transmission of AIDS, articles like USA Today magazine’s “All About

AIDS” answered questions such as “Who gets AIDS?” by specifying that “[n]early 95% of the

AIDS cases have occurred in people belonging to one of four distinct groups.”110 Reassuring heterosexual readers with that statistic became standard practice in stories that approached their coverage of AIDS by downplaying the possibility of casual transmission while accentuating its manifestation in persons deemed high-risk. Journalists, concluding that the “fear of

AIDS…[was] growing much faster than the disease itself,” retreated from their warnings of widespread contagion, and returned to depicting AIDS as an illness that strikes only the marginalized few in American society.111

No longer referring exclusively to gay men, the “gay plague” narrative became revitalized in the final months of 1983, a period of receding hysteria, to encompass everyone diagnosed with AIDS or whose identity placed them in a high-risk category. As Susan Sontag noted, “to get AIDS is precisely to be revealed…as a member of a certain ‘risk group,’ a community of pariahs.”112 Whether a patient’s identity conformed to the parameters of the four high-risk categories was immaterial. According to Sontag, every AIDS diagnosis “confirms an identity” leading to “an experience that isolates the ill and exposes them to harassment and persecution.”113 Sontag explains that AIDS, understood as a disease of “indulgence, delinquency—addictions to chemicals that are illegal and to sex regarded as deviant,” transforms persons diagnosed with it, or suspected of carrying it, into outcasts in the eyes of the unaffected, heteronormative majority.114 With AIDS ostensibly quarantined to various high-risk groups,

110 USA Today (periodical), “All About AIDS,” October 1983, 16. 111 Denise Grady and Kelly Tasker, “AIDS: A Plague of Fear,” Reader’s Digest, October 1983, 152. 112 Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, pg. 24-5. 113 Ibid., 25. 114 Ibid. 51

Americans began 1984 feeling confident that the disease’s spread had been halted and that its potential for threatening the heteronormative majority had been exaggerated.

1984: Receding Panic and the Discovery of HIV

Even though the total number of AIDS diagnoses continued to rise, the catastrophe of widespread infection did not manifest itself during the summer of 1983 as many hyperbolic news reports had predicted. Summarizing the national mood in the first months of 1984, Newsweek carried an article that stated “[a]lthough the wave of panic the disease spawned across the United

States last year has ebbed, an AIDS hot line set up by the government in July is still fielding

1,000 calls a day.”115 Marking the decline in panic, such an assessment shows that individual fear and national concern had diminished but not fully abated. Declaring that “[a] major reason for the decline in public hysteria over AIDS is increasingly strong medical evidence that the disease rarely strikes outside certain well-defined groups,” the article assured readers that “the epidemic has, in a way, settled in, taken on a more established character, a certain familiarity that provides a measure of reassurance to both doctors and patients.”116 America’s heteronormative majority could be added to that list as well. With widespread heterosexual infection no longer a cause for alarm, the “certain familiarity” which AIDS began to take on was a reacquisition of its earlier identity as the “gay plague.”

Only months before, news reports like Altman’s “New Cases Widen Views About

AIDS,” which outlined the story of a seventy-year-old Florida woman who contracted AIDS from her hemophiliac husband, a case that yielded definitive evidence of male-to-female sexual transmission and prompted Altman to pronounce that “AIDS can be spread heterosexually,”

115 Jean Seligmann, “New Theories About AIDS,” Newsweek, January 30, 1984, 50. 116 Ibid., 50-1. 52 would have surely provoked a strong public reaction.117 However, in January of 1984, after having spent the better part of the previous year being inundated by warnings of heterosexual infection, a significant number of Americans were already operating under the assumption that heterosexual transmission was not only possible but likely, and viewed evidence of its clinical proof as yesterday’s news. Aside from reporting a noteworthy instance of heterosexual transmission, Altman’s article, like many from 1984, took the time to reiterate that the disease was, for all intents and purposes, isolated within high-risk groups. That information mollified

Americans by reaffirming that AIDS retained its essential character as a malady confined to gay men and a few select others whose lifestyles placed them outside the mainstream of American society through either their illicit drug habits, prior health conditions, or their race and national origin.

The reaffirmations of national journalistic outlets, that AIDS remained localized, as it had since 1981, within high-risk groups, especially America’s gay male population, were critical to the decline in panic during 1984. Although couched in more sensitive language and conveying increased empathy, coverage from 1984, nevertheless, regurgitated elements of the “Gay Plague” narrative while refraining from using that term itself. Emblematic of such portrayals is an article from Psychology Today that addressed gay male promiscuity in light of the AIDS crisis and delivered a message similar to “Gay Plague” narratives from years earlier in its descriptions of anonymous, gay sex and the role of such activity in provoking a health emergency. Comparing and contrasting heterosexual and homosexual beliefs and behaviors concerning sex and romantic relationships, author Nikki Meredith suggested that the threat of AIDS would diminish as more gay men adopted monogamous practices like those of typical, heterosexual couples.118 Similar to

117 Lawrence K. Altman, “New Cases Widen Views About AIDS,” New York Times, January 5, 1984, pg. A20. 118 Nikki Meredith, “The Gay Dilemma,” Psychology Today, January 1984, 56-62. 53 earlier news coverage, magazine articles like Meredith’s relieved the fears of their heterosexual readers by reminding them that AIDS was primarily a concern of gay men and that only actions taken by members of the gay community could abate the crisis. Characterizing AIDS as a threat quarantined to gay communities, and relieving heterosexual readers of any responsibility to take action in halting the disease’s spread, Meredith branded AIDS as, if not the “Gay Plague,” than certainly a gay problem

With national worries of mass infections subsiding, and the possibility of casual transmission appearing increasingly unlikely, Americans became less receptive to exaggerated accounts of easily acquired and widespread contagion. Helen Schietinger, a San Francisco nurse who coordinated a residential AIDS treatment program was interviewed for an article in Ms. magazine and noted that “‘[f]or every person that has been paranoid and is afraid to be in the same room as someone who has AIDS…there are several more who come forward and offer help.’”119 Indicating a decline in fear, Schietinger’s observation also denotes an increasing empathy toward persons with AIDS. Although never totally absent from reporting on AIDS, increasingly compassionate considerations emerged in newspapers and periodicals during 1984 and marked a decline in national alarm from the previous summer’s hysteria.

Beginning in the late fall of 1983, articles detailing the trials faced by persons with AIDS and their loved ones emerged. Brief biographical sketches or short profiles of persons with AIDS had been standard fare in news reports since the first years of the epidemic, but feature-length articles were a new addition to the oeuvre of AIDS reportage. Some of the increase in journalistic empathy can be attributed to the appearance of pediatric cases of AIDS and the rise in heterosexual infections that garnered so much media interest the previous year. An early

119 Michael Helquist, “Coping with the Tragedy of AIDS,” Ms., February 1984, 22. 54 article emblematic of that tonal shift appeared in Ladies Home Journal in November of 1983 and told the story of a heterosexual woman who married a bisexual man, only to be widowed after he died of AIDS-related complications, leaving her to care for their infant son not knowing whether herself, her baby, or both of them, had contracted the disease from him.120

The chronicling of that family’s struggle demonstrates the transition from 1983’s heterosexual panic to the calmer discourse of 1984 in its generally sympathetic rendering of a middle-class American family in the midst of a “nightmare” scenario.121 However, that same story preserves elements of 1983’s heterosexual panic in that it can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about a heterosexual woman who knowingly invited disaster into her life by engaging in a romantic relationship with a man whose past included gay sex. Despite subtilty reinforcing the notion of gay sexuality as an inherent danger to heteronormative Americans, the article’s homophobic undertones are outweighed by a genuinely compassionate tenor and its humanistic portrayal of a grieving wife and mother.

Often appearing in women’s magazines, such profiles usually revolved around a heterosexual woman whose life had been altered by a family member or friend’s AIDS diagnosis. In Mademoiselle, an article told the story of a young, New York City psychologist grappling with her beliefs about AIDS after a gay, male friend fell ill.122 Soothing readers with a reminder that “fear has begun to subside since doctors have found that the vast majority of AIDS cases are confined to four small groups—homosexuals and bisexuals, intravenous drug users who aren’t homosexual, Haitians and a tiny number of hemophiliacs,” the article depicted heterosexuals as largely insulated from the possibility of infection while acknowledging that a

120 Katherine Barrett, “AIDS: What it Does to a Family,” Ladies Home Journal, November 1983, 98, 100, 202-206. 121 Ibid., 98. 122 Ellen Cantarow, “AIDS has Both Sexes Running Scared,” Mademoiselle, February 1984, 158-9, 238-40. 55 heterosexual woman could become infected “if she has sex with a man who has been infected, uses a needle that’s been used by someone who’s carrying the disease, or receives blood from a donor with AIDS.”123 Like the article from Ladies Home Journal, the portrayal of AIDS in

Mademoiselle linked the disease to gay promiscuity while also conveying a remarkably empathetic story of the physical and emotional struggles endured by persons with AIDS and their loved ones.

In pacifying heterosexual readers through reminders about high-risk groups while decreasing irrational fear through more humanizing portrayals of persons with AIDS, such articles indicated heterosexuals’ returning confidence in the belief that they were sufficiently safeguarded as long as they avoided engaging in intimate contact with anyone from a high-risk group. By the spring of 1984, heterosexuals’ confidence in their sexual-orientation-based immunity had been restored to such a degree that a cover story in Time magazine about the end of the sexual revolution and the changing sexual mores of the 1980s never addressed AIDS as a contributing factor in heterosexual Americans’ turn toward more conservative sexual practices.

Time determined that the fear of sexually transmitted infections played a significant role, but reported that “sexologists think herpes is the chief reason for the new conservatism.” 124 The article does not mention AIDS even in passing.

With the panic of the previous year swiftly fading, heterosexual Americans once again considered AIDS, essentially, a health issue that lacked the capacity to affect them directly because those chiefly afflicted, gay men and intravenous drug users remained, as they had since the illness’s discovery, its primary sufferers. The implication of the aforementioned Ladies Home

Journal article, that heterosexual women’s health could be jeopardized through intercourse with

123 Ibid., 159, 238. 124 John Leo, “The Revolution is Over,” TIME, April 9, 1984, 77. 56 a bisexual man, or that one’s gay friends might become ill, the message communicated in

Mademoiselle, were situations considered by heteronormative Americans, but with the cataclysmic infection of the heterosexual population seemingly halted, even as diagnoses and death tolls continued to rise, the ravages of AIDS appeared consigned to a slim minority of

American citizens leaving the heteronormative majority unscathed.

A major medical breakthrough occurred in the spring of 1984 that boosted many

Americans’ mounting sense of relief, when researchers in France claimed to have identified the cause of AIDS in the form of a virus they dubbed lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV).

Identified by Luc Montagnier and his team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, detection of LAV stimulated a surge of positivist thinking from citizens and medical researchers alike vis-à-vis the advancements in detection, prevention, and even vaccination that researchers believed would inexorably follow that monumental discovery.125 Researchers had long considered hypotheses pointing to a viral agent as the cause of AIDS and, in 1983, viral organisms became the primary focus of the CDC.126 A year later, speculation was replaced by medical fact and a public sense of optimism abounded.

On the heels of French researchers, American scientists, led by Robert C. Gallo of the

National Cancer Institute (NCI), identified a similar virus that they believed was the source of

AIDS called human lymphotropic retrovirus-3 (HTLV-3).127 Before long, LAV and HTLV-3 were recognized as one in the same and HIV, an acronym for human immunodeficiency virus, was settled on.128 With a Nobel Prize possibly at stake, the rivalry between the French and

125 Lawrence K. Altman, “Federal Official Says He Believes Cause of AIDS Has Been Found,” New York Times, April 22, 1984, pg. 1, 16. 126 Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Virus May Have Link with Immunological Illness,” New York Times, May 1, 1983, pg. A26. 127 D. Franklin, “Leukemia Virus Variant Fingered as Likely AIDS Cause,” Science News, April 28, 1984, 260. 128 Greg Behrman, Invisible People: How the U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time (New York: Free Press, 2004), 14. 57

American laboratories, over whose team would receive credit for the discovery, contributed to an atmosphere in which medical science seemed to be bringing the AIDS crisis to heel in a competitive fashion where, according to William Blattner, an epidemiologist from the NCI,

French and U.S. researchers were “‘racing to grab the brass ring on this disease.’”129 The press made much of the professional conflict between the French and American scientists, accentuating their international rivalry to supplement stories about blood-screening tests and exaggerated predictions concerning the potential for a vaccine.130 An article from U.S. News and

World Report, for example, confidently predicted that a prototype vaccine could be developed in as little as two years.131 Ultimately, isolating the AIDS virus did not yield rapid advances in formulating a vaccine, but the discovery of HIV did result in the creation of diagnostic blood tests which could determine if a person was infected with HIV long before they exhibited any overt symptoms of AIDS.

Before the discovery of HIV, epidemiologists could only plot the course of the disease through diagnosing patients who became ill from the opportunistic infections that followed the immunological breakdown indicative of AIDS. Because of HIV’s extraordinarily long incubation period, epidemiologists were reduced to tracking AIDS across vectors traveled years earlier.132

The discovery of HIV did not provide a direct route to a cure as some had hoped, but it did lead to the development of testing that could detect the presence of HIV antibodies in an individual’s blood well before that person’s immune system collapsed and made them vulnerable to opportunistic infections. That allowed epidemiologists to track the disease in a manner more closely approximating its real-time spread. Moreover, simply answering the longstanding

129 Claudia Wallis, “Knowing the Face of the Enemy,” Time, April 30, 1984, 66. 130 Jean Seligmann, “Tracing the Origin of AIDS,” Newsweek, May 7, 1984, 101. 131 U.S. News and World Report, “Vaccine Against AIDS on the Way,” May 7, 1984, 12. 132 Shilts, And the Band Played On, 457. 58 question of what caused AIDS negated some of the fear triggered by the disease’s previously unknown biological cause. In spite of the benefits, the possibility of detecting HIV in individuals who exhibited no outward signs of ill health presented social dilemmas linked to civil and human rights. At-risk individuals, especially gay men, feared that a positive test result could lead to the loss of their employment, housing, or insurance coverage.133

The discovery of HIV launched a debate over screening for the disease and triggered a deluge of voices calling for mass testing of individuals by employers, school systems, and insurance providers in the months and years that followed.134 Occasionally, drastic and invasive measures, such as quarantining individuals who tested positive for HIV or marking them in some fashion so that they could be identified at a glance, were proposed by politicians and media pundits as a legitimate means of protecting the U.S. population from exposure to the virus.135

Identifying the viral cause of AIDS eliminated the disease’s most cryptic quality, its mysterious cause, but other the biological facts which the discovery imparted, that the virus had an exceptionally long incubation period, for example, frightened the public. Such fears caused some

Americans to lash out at groups stigmatized by their high-risk designation. That was the case in

New York City’s Haitian community where “AIDS allegations” made against coworkers, students, or fellow tenants, caused job loss, discrimination, and psychological stress.136

Alleviating certain fears while raising the specter of others, the discovery of HIV marked a turning point in how heterosexual Americans thought about AIDS. In a year primarily characterized by waning national panic, the identification of HIV marked the moment when

133 Marvine Howe, “Homosexuals Call for Assurance on Confidentiality of AIDS Tests,” The New York Times, October 12, 1984, pg. B10. 134 Allan M. Brandt, “AIDS: From Social History to Social Policy,” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 157-158. 135 Ibid. 136 Marvine Howe, “Haitians Quietly Find Better Life in the City, Despite Their Fears,” The New York Times, May 22, 1984, pg. B2. 59 heterosexual Americans’ anxiety began slowly waxing once more. With all the talk of diagnostic testing surrounding HIV’s discovery, media attention returned to America’s blood banks and the possibility of screening the nation’s stockpiles of stored blood for the virus. At a time when

AIDS seemed confined to high-risk groups, and scientific understanding of transmission was so poor that an article in Science even stated that “[a]lthough there is evidence that the disease is transmitted by the transfusion of AIDS-positive blood, frankly little is known about how great a risk that is[,]” heteronormative Americans, who had abstained from using intravenous drugs or experimenting with gay sex, nevertheless, considered a tainted blood transfusion the most likely avenue through which they could be infected.137 Tales of transfusion-based transmission, like one story in People Weekly that told of an affluent heterosexual couple whose infant son died years after receiving tainted blood, become a locus of media attention and questioned the “one- in-100,000 chance” that national blood-bank officials claimed were the odds of being infected by a blood transfusion.138 In June of 1984, there were fifty-four documented cases of transfusion- related AIDS.139 During the months that followed, that number rose significantly.

Even with the rising numbers of transfusion related cases, during the closing months of

1984, the AIDS crisis appeared primarily under control and heterosexual Americans seemed loath to return to the panic of the previous year. Major revelations, like the detection of HIV in human saliva, caught the public’s attention and, in the minds of some, gave medical credence to longstanding AIDS myths about causal transmission, despite researchers’ assurances that any concern over gay, sneezing waiters was simply irrelevant.140 In spite of some heterosexuals’

137 Barbara J. Culliton, “Crash Development of AIDS Test Nears Goal,” Science, September 14, 1984, 1128. 138 Helen Kushnick, “A Mother Tells How a Blood Donation, the Gift of Life, Led to her Young Son’s Death from AIDS,” People Weekly, June 4, 1984, 62. 139 Ibid., 65. 140 Jean Seligmann, Mary Hagar, and George Raine, “AIDS: The Saliva Scare,” Newsweek, October 22, 1984, 103. 60 willful misinterpretation of the saliva findings, mass hysteria never ensued and news that would have landed like a bombshell in 1983 faded swiftly from the headlines. As part of a Time article surveying medical advances in the months following the identification of HIV, journalist Claudia

Wallis pronounced “[t]he good news is that aside from 86 transfusion-linked cases, the epidemic has not struck the general population. But the bad news continues relentlessly for the four major risk groups.”141 Wallis’s assessment of the epidemic, as a crisis for high-risk groups but not a serious threat to the general, i.e. heteronormative, population serves as a perfect summation of how the majority of heterosexual Americans viewed the AIDS epidemic at the close of 1984: they were well aware of it and, to varying degrees, concerned by its potential to spread, yet, by and large, did not consider themselves or their families to be at risk.

1985: Heterosexual Panic Returns and HIV/AIDS in American Narrative Art

Nineteen eighty-five proved a pivotal year in the history of HIV/AIDS. Although it began rather placidly, the year ended amid a whirlwind of heterosexual panic reinvigorated by a series of events including the findings of the first International AIDS Conference and the AIDS-related death of Hollywood leading man Rock Hudson. Before the heterosexual panic emerged in full force during the summer of 1985, there were signs that the diminuendo in fear that distinguished

1984 had come to an end. One indicator was that many Americans, frightened by stories of transfusion-related infection, were “refusing to either give or receive blood because of the fear of getting AIDS in the process.”142 Beyond Americans’ crescendoing and often irrational fear, such stories demonstrate the degree of confusion and medical ignorance that permeated broad swaths of the population.

As a consequence of conflating blood donation with receiving donated blood, some

141 Claudia Wallis, “A Virus as a Rosetta Stone,” TIME, November 5, 1984, 91. 142 Matt Clark, “AIDS: The Blood-Bank Scare,” Newsweek, January 28, 1985, 62. 61

Americans erroneously believed that they could become infected just by donating blood and abstained from giving to blood drives and other collection initiatives, thus jeopardizing the national stockpile.143 According to Michael Quam instances of “confusion regarding cause and effect” illuminated Americans’ “deepest fears regarding the disease and stigmatization of

AIDS.”144 Quam posits that because Americans associated AIDS with “nonmonogamous, and especially homosexual, sex and with intravenous drug use, activities…considered immoral by some and in some venues even illegal, any contact with the symbolic or real barriers of [AIDS] must be avoided” as much out of a reluctance to suggest even the slightest personal connection with those taboo behaviors as for any actual deficiency in personally understanding how HIV could be transmitted.145 Throughout the remainder of the 1980s, health educators fought to counteract that tendency and convey to the public that mere association with the stigmatized subcultures of gay men and intravenous drug users would not endanger their health, but participating in unsafe sex, whether straight or gay, and using unsterilized injection equipment could, by exposing them to infected bodily fluid(s).146

In 1985, there were signs that such messages were making inroads. Encouraging an understanding of HIV as a biological agent whose transmission was not predicated on sexual orientation or chemical dependency, public health experts and AIDS activists tried to reorient heteronormative Americans’ longstanding belief that AIDS was, fundamentally, a gay disease.

Through a process that sociologist Cindy Patton calls the “degaying of AIDS,” a phenomenon best defined as the decline of “the insistent homosexualization of AIDS…in the rhetorics

143 Ibid. 144 Michael D. Quam, “The Sick Role, Stigma, and Pollution: The Case of AIDS,” in Culture and AIDS, ed. Douglas A. Feldman (New York: Praeger, 1990), 35. 145 Ibid. 146 Patton, Inventing AIDS, 110. 62 employed in public,” Americans from 1985 onward witnessed a discursive shift in the national conversation about AIDS wherein a myopic focus on homosexuality, that had held sway since the disease’s earliest recognition, was, in part, gradually abandoned, at least in public forums, in favor of a more holistic characterization that promoted the vulnerability of the entire American body politic.147 Patton explanations that “[t]he degaying of AIDS in 1985, while strategically important in separating gay-based discrimination and AIDS-based-discrimination and in forcing public discussions of AIDS in general, only further complicated discussions of heterosexuals with AIDS” and never fully excised the equation of homosexuality with AIDS from the

American imagination.148 Moreover, the degaying of AIDS unintentionally nurtured the growth of heterosexual hysteria.

Apart from a few months in 1983, when the threat of casual transmission incited a brief but panic-stricken response, most heterosexual Americans considered themselves, if not insusceptible to the disease, at least well insulated from it by their sexual orientation. Improbable accidents and tainted blood transfusions aside, prior to 1985, the prospect that they themselves might become infected, through heterosexual intercourse no less, was never seriously entertained by the majority of heteronormative Americans. In 1985, the recognition that AIDS constituted a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that heterosexuals should be wary of contracting began to dawn on a significant portion of the population. Unlike Time magazine’s article about heteronormative Americans’ changing sexual mores from the previous April, which failed to mention AIDS once, even to suggest that the fear of its contraction might be a contributing factor in the demise of the sexual revolution, a Newsweek report from February of 1985 explicitly mentioned “AIDS” as the most terrifying of all emergent STDs because, unlike the equally-

147 Ibid., 19, 116-7. 148 Ibid., 118. 63 incurable genital herpes, “the outcome [of AIDS] is almost-certain death.”149 That April, research findings about the global primacy of HIV transmission from heterosexual intercourse were presented at the first International AIDS Conference where, according to Patton, all “the computers, statisticians, and brilliant and creative minds of the worldwide scientific community had no good news” to offer.150 Instead, they presented grim assessments of the epidemic’s present course and bleak prognostications about its future path, that U.S. news outlets highlighted and publicized to a nation becoming ever more terrified of widespread infection in the general, meaning heterosexual, population. Following the conference, Newsweek declared that “AIDS has become one of the most sinister infectious diseases of this or any other century, threatening the world’s general population and assuming the proportions of what epidemiologists call a ‘pandemic.’”151

Restating the pronouncements of conference attendees, Newsweek printed fear-inducing declarations from esteemed professionals like Dr. Bijan Safai of New York’s Memorial Sloan-

Kettering Cancer Center who stated that “‘[t]he data you hear on heterosexual infection [in the

US] is exactly what we were hearing in ’81 on homosexuals,’” and focused on the enormous quantity of heterosexuals, female as well as male, being diagnosed with AIDS in central African countries like Zaire. 152 The belief that the U.S. epidemic would soon take on the same character as the virus’s transmission across the African continent, where HIV spread “mostly by sex between men and women and by women passing it on to their offspring,” was championed at the conference by AIDS experts and restated by journalists and media pundits in periodicals like The

149 Jean Seligmann, “A Nasty New Epidemic,” Newsweek, February 4, 1985, 72. 150 Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Montreal, Québec: Black Rose Books, 1986), 48. 151 Matt Clark, “AIDS: A Growing ‘Pandemic’?” Newsweek, April 29, 1985, 71. 152 Ibid. 64

New Republic.153 Conjuring up images of a country teetering on the verge of decimation by an illness only recently considered contained among high-risk groups, Time warned readers of medical projections that “[o]ne million Americans may have already been exposed to the AIDS virus.”154 At a moment when the number of Americans living with AIDS had only recently crested five thousand, the prospect of one million unidentified and unwitting carriers of the virus was an astronomically large and supremely chilling number.155

In spite of a documented history of transmission through heterosexual intercourse, a history that stretched as far back as the first years of the epidemic, articles following the conference speciously reported the global rise in such cases as if the appearance of heterosexual transmission alone were an entirely novel and previously unknown phenomenon. People Weekly stated that “[t]he most disturbing implication for the general public is the growing recognition among AIDS researchers that heterosexual transmission is occurring.”156 Accompanied by horrifying statements from medical doctors, like Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien of New York

University who was quoted as saying “‘[i]f you were the devil, you couldn’t conceive of a disease that would be more disruptive and disturbing than this one,’” the People article reads as if it was tailor made to stoke fears and encourage a heterosexual panic.157

As they had in 1983, some journalists covered AIDS researchers’ most farfetched hypotheses without properly emphasizing that many of the most worrisome notions they reported were only scientific conjecture. Laboratories throughout America were busily considering every

153 Robert Bazell, “Waking Up To AIDS,” The New Republic, May 13, 1985, 18. 154 Claudia Wallis, “Battling AIDS,” Time, April 29, 1985, 68. 155 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “FIGURE 1. Estimated AIDS Incidence, Deaths, and Prevalence, by quarter-year of diagnosis/death—United States, 1981-2000,” from “HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981—2000,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report vol. 50, no. 21 (June 1, 2001): 430-434. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm#fig1 156 Peter Carlson, “AIDS: Fatal, Incurable and Spreading,” People Weekly, June 17, 1985, 42. 157 Ibid. 65 possibility in their race to deduce the biology of HIV/AIDS and oftentimes their experiments, such as one that was “exploring the possibility that AIDS can be contracted after long-term exposure to mosquitos and other biting insects carrying the virus,” found their way into news magazines like Newsweek that failed to sufficiently underscore those experiments’ wholly theoretical and unproven natures.158 With many Americans confused by or ignorant of how HIV can be transmitted, misreading, misunderstanding, or merely misremembering Newsweek’s article could lead to further bewilderment or outright panic. Americans’ generally muddled understanding of HIV/AIDS, an ignorance enabled by the disease’s association with gay sex and other socially taboo behaviors, became further disordered by such misinterpreted news items.

Heteronormative Americans still working their way toward understanding the relative dangers and differences between blood donations and blood transfusions, such that articles in magazines like Good Housekeeping were required to spell out those disparities, made for a population easily confused or alarmed by half-reported stories of scientific speculation.159

By July, when the cover of LIFE magazine announced “NOW NO ONE IS SAFE FROM

AIDS,” to promote an article profiling heterosexual Americans diagnosed with AIDS, the conviction that “AIDS minorities are beginning to infect the heterosexual, drug-free majority,” the core precept of heterosexual panic, had reemerged and would only become more widely circulated as heterosexuals’ anxiety grew throughout the remainder of the year.160 Susan Sontag observed that “it is one thing to emphasize how the disease menaces everybody (in order to incite fear and confirm prejudice), quite another to argue (in order to defuse prejudice and reduce stigma) that eventually AIDS will, directly or indirectly, affect everybody.”161 Amid 1985’s full-

158 Jennet Conant, “AIDS: A Link with Poverty,” Newsweek, June 24, 1985, 37. 159 P. Gadsby, “Blood transfusions & AIDS: the facts,” Good Housekeeping, June 1985, 222. 160 Edward Barnes and Anne Hollister, “The New Victims,” LIFE, July 1985, cover, 12. 161 Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 64. 66 fledged return to panic, stories inciting fear and confirming prejudices dominated and no news about HIV/AIDS garnered more media attention, or more greatly influenced how heterosexual

Americans thought about AIDS, than the death of actor Rock Hudson.

Hudson, who had been unwell since undergoing heart bypass surgery in 1981, flew to

France that summer under the guise of receiving treatment for what he initially claimed was liver cancer.162 Falling gravely ill not long after his arrival, Hudson was rushed to the American

Hospital in Paris. Soon after, an announcement was made that Rock Hudson, movie icon and household name across America and around the world, had AIDS.163 When Hudson’s condition stabilized, he flew back to Los Angeles where an awaiting American news media pounced on both Hudson’s story and the much bigger story of the expanding AIDS epidemic.164 After languishing for two months, Hudson died in his sleep on October 2, 1985.165 In the six months that followed Hudson’s death, stories about HIV/AIDS in the American print media tripled.166

Hudson’s health disclosure and death forced heterosexual Americans to confront the subject of HIV/AIDS in ways which they never expected. As scholar Marita Sturken claims, “for the American public at large, the response to the AIDS epidemic shifted in 1985 from a fear of the infectious gay plague to a panic over heterosexual sex.”167 Sturken believes that shift was

“precipitated in part by the announcement that one of America’s icons of middle-class masculinity…was dying of AIDS.”168 Rock Hudson was the first American, “with a face

162 The New York Times, “Rock Hudson Is Ill with Liver Cancer in Paris Hospital,” July 24, 1985, pg. C16. 163 The New York Times, “Hudson Has AIDS, Spokesman Says,” July 26, 1985, pg. C3. 164 The New York Times, “Rock Hudson Leaves Paris for U.S. on Chartered Jet,” July 30, 1985, pg. C10. 165 Joseph Berger, “Rock Hudson, Screen Idol, Dies at 59,” The New York Times, October 3, 1985, pg. D23. 166 Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 202. 167 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 150. 168 Ibid., 150-151. 67 everyone could recognize,” to be publicly identified as a person with AIDS.169 The patina of wholesome heterosexuality that surrounded Hudson due to his career as a Hollywood leading man marked his death, in the minds of heteronormative Americans, as something more substantial than another anonymous gay man dying of AIDS.170 Although stories of heterosexuals diagnosed with AIDS had appeared in major news outlets since 1982, it was the death of the closeted, at least in terms of his public image, Hudson that caused heterosexual

Americans to take universal notice of the epidemic as it galvanized media attention and saturated the news.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of Hudson’s disclosure on the national conversation about AIDS. The media response was deafening and, according to Time magazine, Hudson’s announcement “brought home for the first time the grim reality that AIDS [was] spreading unabated.”171 Although it ushered in a period of intense heterosexual panic, Hudson’s disclosure drew journalistic coverage that displayed qualities from both ends of Sontag’s spectrum of media analysis; alternately inciting and diffusing citizens’ fears and prejudices. Hopes were high that the “shockwave of new interest in the deadly disease” would help drive governmental action from the municipal to the federal level in order to stem the rising tide of HIV/AIDS diagnoses. 172

One AIDS educator in Los Angeles was quoted as saying, “‘[r]egardless of how he came down with it, I think the publicity will make people take notice’” of the need to address the epidemic as a national crisis.173 Heterosexual Americans certainly did take notice and were goaded into a panic-stricken awareness as much by the sheer volume of coverage as by the question posed in

169 LIFE, “AIDS First,” September 1985, 63. 170 Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 259-260. 171 Claudia Wallis, “AIDS: A Spreading Scourge,” TIME, August 5, 1985, 50. 172 U.S. News and World Report, “Rock Hudson AIDS Case Sends a Message,” August 5, 1985, 12. 173 David Gelman, “AIDS Strikes a Star,” Newsweek, August 5, 1985, 69. 68 one TIME cover story; “Now that the disease has come out of the closet how far will it spread?”174

Despite the attention that Hudson’s death focused on HIV/AIDS, a pervasive lack of knowledge, especially concerning how HIV could be spread, continued to exist in the minds of many Americans. For every article that attempted to calm the public by reminding them of the biological facts of transmission, like one in Newsweek informing readers that “being in the same room with an AIDS victim, sharing a meal or a bathroom, being sneezed on, even hugging and socially kissing” them could not transmit the virus, there was another that implied a higher risk of contagion.175 In the fall of 1985, a poll conducted by the New York Times in conjunction with

CBS News reported that a full 47 percent of Americans believed that HIV could be transmitted by sharing a drinking glass with an infected person. Another 34 percent believed that it was unsafe to “associate” with a person with AIDS even when no physical contact was involved.176

Another poll, conducted by the Los Angeles Times, revealed that “a majority of Americans favor the quarantine of AIDS patients, and some would embrace measures as drastic as using tattoos to mark those with the deadly disorder.”177 Those polls help to explain why some Americans began demanding the screening of all “doctors, nurses, teachers, food handlers, and prostitutes” for

HIV.178 The poll findings also help explain why a great number of parents with children who attended public school worried that their sons and daughters might get exposed to HIV through casual classroom contact.

174 Claudia Wallis, “AIDS: A Growing Threat,” Time, August 12, 1985, 40. 175 George J. Church, “‘Not an Easy Disease to Come By,’” Newsweek, September 23, 1985, 27. 176 Brandt, “AIDS: From Social History to Social Policy,” 153. 177 The New York Times, “Poll Indicates Majority Favor Quarantine for AIDS Victims,” December 20, 1985, pg. A24. 178 The New York Times, “AIDS and the New Apartheid,” October 7, 1985, pg. A30. 69

At the start of the 1985/86 school year, battles raged in New York City and across the nation over admitting HIV-positive children into public school classrooms.179 In New York, eleven thousand public school students missed the first day of classes because of protests over a

New York City Board of Education policy which allowed children with AIDS to attend public schools.180 In Kokomo, Indiana, school officials, ignoring medical facts, refused to allow Ryan

White, a hemophilic seventh grader who became infected with HIV via a blood transfusion, to attend classes out of the fear that he might infect the other students. Eventually, school officials suggested that he receive his schooling through a telephone hookup.181 White went on to become a globally recognized advocate for persons with AIDS and his struggle to manage his HIV- positive status, as a straight, white, teenager from America’s heartland, generated a great deal of empathy from the American public and helped to redirect the national conversation about AIDS away from stereotypical understandings of it as a gay disease.

Disregarding scientific findings that the virus “is apparently not transmissible through casual household contact and hence not among school children,” concerned parents responded with irrational fear to the possibility that their child might share a classroom with an HIV- positive classmate.182 Parents of school age children were not alone in their groundless fear of casual transmission. A large portion of the American workforce was “so afraid of AIDS that they resist[ed] working with suspected carriers.”183 As they had with K-12 classrooms, Americans concerned about contracting HIV on the job willfully ignored or disbelieved the conclusions of

179 Robert D. McFadden, “2 Experts Testify They Oppose Allowing AIDS Child in School,” The New York Times, September 14, 1985, pg. 27. 180 Jennifer Brier, “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out:’ Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York,” Journal of Social History vol. 39, no. 4 (2006): 965. 181 The New York Times, “Boy with AIDS to Get Schooling by Telephone,” August 25, 1985, pg. 22. 182 Joanne Silberner, “AIDS: Casual contact exonerated,” Science News, October 5, 1985, 213. 183 Irene Pave, “Fear and Loathing in the Workplace: What Managers Can Do About AIDS,” Business Week, November 25, 1985, 126. 70 health experts who assured them that “AIDS is not spread by the kind of daily contact that occurs in offices, schools, or factories.”184 Induced by fear and prejudice, Americans’ unwillingness to accept the biological facts of the epidemic were bolstered every time an editorialist posited that

“[m]edical authorities tell us there is abundant evidence that AIDS is not communicated through casual contact....But still…no one is absolutely sure.”185 Planting doubt in the minds of

Americans, editorials that raised the possibility of casual transmission, like articles that preyed on heterosexuals’ fears of contracting AIDS through sexual intercourse, generated an atmosphere of uncertainty and social unrest during the final months of 1985.

Having personally maintained clipping files on national AIDS news since March, journalist David Black lamented in a late-December issue of Rolling Stone that he had “a fat folder with over a hundred articles on Hudson, Hollywood, and AIDS, and a thin folder – fewer than a dozen articles – on significant advances in our understanding of the disease.”186 Months earlier, in an opinion piece for Newsweek, Jonathan Alter identified the reason for that disparity and the magnitude of lopsided journalistic attention when he suggested that “[i]f AIDS didn’t exist, yellow journalism might have invented it. The story has every ingredient: sex, drugs, death and panic.”187 Attracted to the taboo and salacious topics at play within the evolving narrative of the epidemic, journalists emphasized those elements as part of their reporting in order to attract and maintain readers’ attention. In their chronicling of the AIDS epidemic, journalists wove exploitative tales that played a role instigating what had, by the summer of 1985, become a grave social crisis in part because the fears and homophobic prejudices of America’s vast, heteronormative majority were roused by coverage that brokered in the thrill of the epidemic’s

184 Newsweek, “AIDS: No Need for Worry in the Workplace,” November 25, 1985, 51. 185 David R. Gergen, “What Answers for AIDS?” U.S. News and World Report, September 23, 1985, 78. 186 David Black, “The Story of the Year,” Rolling Stone, December 19, 1985/ January 2, 1986, 123. 187 Jonathan Alter, “Sins of Omission,” Newsweek, September 23, 1985, 25. 71 uncertainty, the supposed mysteries of its continued spread, and its titillating linkages with gay sex and certain death. Given that wealth of dramatic material, it is no surprise that during the heterosexual AIDS panic of 1985 the creative industries of both high culture and American popular culture began producing products of narrative art that addressed the subject of AIDS. By the close of the year, stage plays would be produced, movies would be released, and the first mainstream American comic book to tackle the topic of AIDS would be published.

CHAPTER II. AIDS, AMERICAN CULTURE, AND COMIC BOOKS, 1985-1986

Writing in the mid-1980s, philosopher John Hospers published an article pondering the origins of artistic creativity. After reviewing the existent literature and discovering no compelling answers, Hospers determined that the only totalizing statement he could make about creativity was that “[i]t is a subject about which all-encompassing theories are eternally tempting, and eternally unsuccessful.”188 In assessing why works of art speaking to the AIDS epidemic emerged during 1985, it is tempting to seek a single totalizing interpretation of that outpouring of creativity. Given the panic of that year, caused by heterosexuals’ surging fear of mass infection via sexual or casual transmission, fears that were amplified by Rock Hudson’s disclosure of his AIDS diagnosis, analysts might be tantalized by platitudinous notions about times of great crisis inspire works of great art.

While a degree of truth lies in that assessment, the historical record also shows that a similar, albeit less severe, panic occurred in 1983 and, while it inspired artists to formulate future projects, produced few popular cultural offerings in its immediate aftermath. Why, then, did artists working across various mediums and for audiences ranging from connoisseurs of high culture to consumers of popular culture appear, seemingly suddenly, in 1985? Moreover, what factors compelled comic book creators to incorporate the AIDS epidemic within their medium specifically? To answer those questions, a look at the origins of the epidemic’s depiction in

American arts and entertainment, as well as an understanding of evolutions within the comic book industry of the early 1980s, are required.

188 John Hospers, “Artistic Creativity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 34, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 254. 73

1985: AIDS on Stage and Screen

For the majority of Americans, it looked as if popular cultural products addressing the

AIDS epidemic materialized abruptly in 1985. Yet, there were significant precursors to their emergence during the preceding years. Adding credence to the aphorism that crises enflame creative passions, the most widely recognized, and among the earliest, allusions to AIDS in

American popular cultural came from comedian Eddie Murphy who, in 1983, started incorporating a joke about his pathological fear of gay men into his stand-up routine.

Immortalized as “Faggots Revisited/Sexual Prime,” the first track on his 1983 comedy album

Eddie Murphy: Comedian, Murphy’s jokes propagated urban legends of casual transmission and relied heavily on the homophobic stereotyping of gay men as inherently infected and, therefore, inherently dangerous to heteronormative Americans, for many of their punchlines.189

Modifying one of his earlier routines, simply called “Faggots,” included on his self-titled

1982 debut album, Murphy eschewed his previous banter about harassing gay men in public in exchange for flippant explanations of how heterosexual men might become infected.190 Recorded live in August of 1983, at the height of the first heterosexual panic, Murphy professed, to the sounds of uproarious laughter, that AIDS “petrifies me cuz girls be hangin’ out with ‘em [gay men]. And, one night they could be in the club having fun with their gay friend and give ‘em a little kiss [makes kissing sound] and go home with that AIDS on their lips” to later infect their boyfriends.191 A degree of protest followed, and activists jested that homophobia should be rechristened Eddie Murphy’s Disease.192

189 Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy: Comedian, Columbia LP FC 39005. 190 Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy, Columbia LP FC 38180. 191 Murphy, Eddie Murphy: Comedian. 192 Ashley Fetters, “From Haight Street to Sesame Street: The Evolution of AIDS in Pop Culture,” The Atlantic, December 4, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/from-haight-street-to-sesame-street- the-evolution-of-aids-in-pop-culture/265872/. 74

Nevertheless, Murphy had no monopoly on homophobic humor and in many respects his comedic stylings only reflected the pervasive homophobia of countless Americans who indulged in cracking jokes about AIDS and gay men. “As news of AIDS spread,” observed journalist

David Black, “so did the jokes. Most were not funny, and many betrayed not merely insensitivity, but hostility.”193 According to scholar Casper G. Schmidt, homophobic jokes

“revealed, with amazing lucidness, the underlying group dynamics” of the AIDS epidemic and served as a “scapegoating ritual” performed by heteronormative Americans in opposition to gay citizens who were considered not only the incarnate representation of AIDS, but the symbolic representation of Americans’ doomed “search for pleasure during the 60s and 70s” that, having gone awry, elicited a gay plague.194

Unmasking longstanding social fissures and baring underlying antipathies between heterosexual and homosexual Americans, AIDS jokes also highlighted racial bigotry and xenophobic hostilities. Arising from the classification of Haitians as a high-risk group, racism, and its consequent racist humor, operated in tandem with AIDS-based homophobia and manifested itself in jokes like “[w]hat’s the hardest thing about getting AIDS? Trying to convince your parents that you’re Haitian.”195 Constructed on the premise that AIDS is, in the main, a gay disease, the joke operates under the supposition that being viewed as black and foreign, while shameful and embarrassing, is much preferred over being viewed as gay. That is, if a person can only persuade their presumably white and native-born parents to accept such an implausible new identity.

193 David Black, “The Plague Years Part Two,” Rolling Stone, April 25, 1985, 57. 194 Casper G. Schmidt, “AIDS Jokes Or, Schadenfreude Around an Epidemic,” Maledicta VIII (1984-1985): 69-70. 195 Black, “The Plague Years Part Two,” 57. 75

Even so, humor, being a dialectical endeavor, allowed for the creation of counternarratives when “antigay AIDS jokes were joined by jokes that made fun of the straight public’s fear of AIDS and gays.”196 Lampooning heteronormative paranoia and prejudice, early examples of such counternarratives appeared in the political cartoons of illustrator Tom Toles whose work skewered homophobia and the belief that God, in his vengeance, manifested AIDS to punish gay men for their sins.197 Working for The Buffalo News, a Buffalo, New York newspaper with a history of publishing trailblazing political cartoonists, Toles belonged to the first cohort of editorial illustrators to confront the AIDS epidemic and challenge prevailing

AIDS-based stereotypes in major American newspapers during the heterosexual panic of the mid-1980s.198 Toles’ editorializing provided a counternarrative to the homophobic histrionics of both well-known entertainers, like Murphy, and unknown Americans whose colloquial humor trafficked in AIDS myths. Toles’ single-panel, political cartoons represent early instances of the epidemic’s depiction in narrative art, however, the most influential products of American culture produced during the formative years of the epidemic came from the high-art world of stage theater.

The proliferation of cultural products confronting the subject of HIV/AIDS, especially works of popular, narrative art like television programs, movies, and comic books, began in earnest during the final months of 1985, but their creation and distribution came on the heels of successes in the realm of high art, specifically those from the world of stage theater. In the spring of 1985, Newsweek critic William A. Henry III wrote that “the theater is ablaze with social

196 Ibid. 197 Ibid. 198 Maury Forman and David Horsey, eds., Cartooning AIDS Around the World (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 1992); This survey of political cartoons chronicling the first decade of the epidemic was produced in conjunction with the traveling exhibition of the same name that toured select U.S. museums from 1992- 1999. 76 concern [over] the deadly viral disease known as AIDS” noting that “[a]t least seven productions from around the country have dealt with its impact, particularly on the major risk group, male homosexuals.”199 Like products of popular culture that started being disseminated widely in the final months of 1985, but had precursors in the standup comedy and political cartooning of

1983/84, theatrical productions trace their roots back to those years as well. Jeff Hagedorn’s

One, a one-man play about a gay man’s struggle to cope with his AIDS diagnosis, began making its rounds across the country in 1983 generally mounted by small theater groups who occasionally, as was the case with one production from 1985 by The Group Theater Workshop in

Houston, Texas, used its staging as a fundraising opportunity to assist a local AIDS charity. 200

Other plays such as Warren, produced by the Seven Stages Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, and The

AIDS Show, produced by Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, California, debuted in 1984, were more elaborate productions that considered individual resolve and community responsibility respectively.201 Given New York City’s twofold status as the cynosure of stage theater in the United States and the global epicenter of AIDS in the mid-1980s, it is unsurprising that theatrical productions pertaining to the disease found their way to Broadway in 1985, garnering critical acclaim and audience attention.

The first plays about AIDS to spring from New York City’s theatrical community, Robert

Chesley’s Night Sweat and Stephen Holt’s Fever of Unknown Origin, debuted in small, off-

Broadway productions in 1984 but it was the critical and financial successes of William

Hoffman’s As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart that piqued wider interest.202 In 1985, As

199 William A. Henry III, “A Common Bond of Suffering,” Newsweek, May 13, 1985, 85. 200 Program for Jeff Hagedorn's play “One,” ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles, CA. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll4/id/3354. 201 Henry, “A Common Bond of Suffering,” 85. 202 Samuel G. Freedman, “AIDS Deaths Prompt Wave of Plays,” The New York Times, March 28, 1985, pg. C17. 77

Is debuted off Broadway in February then swiftly moved to a Broadway theater in May to became a favorite of theater critics and high-art coinsurers, eventually winning the 1985 Drama

Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Play of the

Year in 1985, and sparking rumors that Richard Dreyfuss and Richard Thomas would star in a

Los Angeles production planned for later that year.203

As Is revealed that, by the middle of 1985, the arbiters of high culture in the United States desired, and would respond positively to, AIDS-inspired, fictional narratives. Furthermore, plays based on the AIDS epidemic offered creators the opportunity to produce counternarratives that challenged pervasive AIDS myths and the rampant homophobia they inspired. Impelled by a desire to counteract the castigation of persons with AIDS, and the discourses of heteronormative paranoia then circulating the country, using engrossing stories of humanizing drama, the earliest representations of AIDS in stage theater emerged from within the urban, gay communities hit hardest by the epidemic. Drafted by gay playwrights, who witnessed the suffering and death of loved ones, and often staged first by gay theater companies against the backdrop of their queer communities being radically transformed by the devastation wrought from the disease, some plays about AIDS included political messaging that questioned the governmental response to

AIDS alongside their compassionate portrayals of individual suffering.204

No play from 1985 better represented that ethos than The Normal Heart by author and activist Larry Kramer. As Is may have been a critical darling, and reviewers have observed that

“[t]he silence and stigmatization that marked the early AIDS crisis had previously been cracked by a handful of other plays created at community-based gay theaters around the country…[b]ut

203 Publishers Weekly, “New Books Examine the Social and Scientific Issues Surrounding AIDS,” September 13, 1985, 100. 204 Freedman, “AIDS Deaths Prompt Wave of Plays,” C17. 78

Kramer’s passionate tirade of a play reached a wide audience over a long run in New York, followed by productions around the country and the world, sparking outrage and debate and arguably influencing the national conversation around AIDS.”205

The most influential AIDS activist in American history, Kramer, a novelist and screenwriter based in New York City, organized in 1981, the first meeting of the grassroots organization that became Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Inc. (GMHC), the earliest collective mobilization against AIDS in the nation.206 At a time when the disease was unidentified and still informally referred to as “gay cancer,” Kramer became a vocal advocate, raising awareness in

New York’s gay community, agitating for better care and treatment programs, and throwing himself into coordinating GMHC with a vigor that he called a “consuming passion.”207 After a falling out with GMHC in 1983, predicated on the organization, which by then had become wholly service oriented, rejecting his calls for non-violent demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to pressure elected officials into taking decisive action to combat the spread of

AIDS, Kramer began writing The Normal Heart, his first play.208

Based on his ousting from GMHC and the death of his lover from AIDS, Kramer approached writing his play from the vantagepoint of a crusader endeavoring to waken

Americans to the fact that “gay men in love and gay men suffering and gay men dying are just like everyone else” and that the time for drastic, governmental action had come if further tragedy was to be avoided.209 Kramer’s appeal struck a chord with critics and audiences who, according

205 Jordan Schildcrout, review of The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer, Theatre Journal vol. 56, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 678. 206 Philip M. Kayal, Bearing Witness: Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Politics of AIDS (New York: Routledge, 2019), 1. 207 Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist, Stonewall Inn Editions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 23. 208 Ibid., 50-51, 65-67, 77. 209 Ibid., 94. 79 to playwright and scholar Jacob Juntunen, understood The Normal Heart “more as activist journalism than theatre.”210 Even his detractors, like dramatist and Yale University professor

Gordon Rogoff, who claimed that he “can’t quite believe that a play is likely to be an effective weapon in any of our [the gay community’s] dolorous battles,” nevertheless commended

Kramer’s “lonely frontline commitment not only to politics but to theater as a political instrument.”211 While Kramer leveraged his play’s momentum to push for increased action from federal, state, and municipal governments, the AIDS crisis was drawing serious attention from another quarter, big business.

In 1985, with diagnoses rising around the world and across all U.S. demographic groups, commercial interests saw that AIDS threatened the global population on a scale they had not previously considered. Opening lucrative, new markets in the realms of testing and medical treatment, the expanding AIDS epidemic offered a host of healthcare companies and attendant industries in the sciences the chance to capitalize on the crisis. Lucrative opportunities abounded and entrepreneurs, from “quacks, peddlers of questionable treatments—even psychic healers” to the world’s the most distinguished biomedical companies, competed for a piece of the action.212

Beginning with the identification of HIV in 1984, it became clear that future opportunities abounded in the medical diagnostics businesses. Grabbing the brass ring on diagnostics and developing a reliable HIV antibody test would ensure a steady stream of revenue for any company bold enough to successfully make their play. Vying for what Forbes identified as “a $70 million U.S. market with another $100 million overseas,” Electro-Nucleonics, Inc., a

Fairfield, Connecticut-based company that posted revenues in 1984 of $45.8 million, went toe-

210 Jacob Juntunen, Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable, Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies (New York: Routledge, 2016), 9. 211 Gordon Rogoff, Vanishing Acts: Theater Since the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 111. 212 Scott Ticer, “‘Fast-Buck’ Artists are Making a Killing on AIDS,” Business Week, December 2, 1985, 85. 80 to-toe with Abbot Laboratories, a Chicago-based industry giant, with revenues over $3 billion, in a David-and-Goliath contest to see who could secure the license for U.S. blood bank testing.213

Fortune believed the market to be even larger and estimated the yearly gross revenues from global HIV antibody testing at $180 million.214

Along with testing, prevention became a booming new market in the aftermath of HIV’s identification as well, when condoms became widely recognized as an effective tool for blocking the virus’s transmission if used properly. In an article about incipient opportunities in condom manufacturing and sales, Forbes informed investors that “[i]n a world without cures, prevention is a good business getting even better.215 Although condoms were available at pharmacies long before the AIDS epidemic, their use as a prophylactic expanded greatly during the mid-1980s when “safe sex” entered the American lexicon and the notion of adhering to safe sex practices to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections like herpes, entered the public consciousness. Originating from the heuristic knowledge of urban, gay communities, the tenets of safe sex, specifically condom use, were first communicated by AIDS activists within their urban localities and only became a national, cottage industry after heterosexual fears of mass infection flared in 1985.

The practices of safe sex were originally codified inside independently published healthcare flyers created and distributed by queer organizations like San Francisco’s Sisters of

Perpetual Indulgence, a group of activist drag queens who drafted the safe-sex brochure Play

Fair! in 1982, and the duo of Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz who wrote the safe-sex pamphlet How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach and shared it throughout New York

213 Robert Teitelman, “Leveraging AIDS,” Forbes, April 8, 1985, 115. 214 Jaclyn Fierman, “Helping Battle AIDS,” Fortune, April 15, 1985, 57. 215 Lisa Gubernick, “Protection Money,” Forbes, November 4, 1985, 216. 81

City’s gay nightclubs and neighborhoods in 1983.216 When the viral cause of AIDS was discovered, their folk wisdom was borne out through scientific testing. Soon it was packaged and sold by major publishing houses in the form of paperback books, like The AIDS Epidemic: How

You Can Protect Yourself and Your Family—Why You Must, geared toward heterosexual readers looking for documented medical facts about AIDS and how to avoid contracting HIV amid

1985’s growing panic.217 Usually written or co-authored by medical doctors, such publications helped disseminate information about safe sex practices to a large number of Americans. By

1986, The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a for-profit center for sex education and research in San Francisco, had published a comprehensive book on the subject and the tenets of safe sex, especially those eliminating or reducing the exchange of bodily fluids through condoms use, become part of the nation’s health, as well as economic, conversations about AIDS and inundated Americans’ cultural consciousness.218

With the scent of profits in the air, and a patina of artistic legitimacy surrounding AIDS- based fiction due to the critical and commercial success of As Is and The Normal Heart, it was inevitable that popular culture mediums would begin capitalizing on national interest in the subject. The first significant artifact of mainstream American popular culture to address

HIV/AIDS appeared in the form of the made-for-television movie An Early Frost and told the story of a young, gay man’s return to his boyhood home and the familial conflict that followed after he simultaneously come out to his parents and revealed his status as a person with AIDS. 219

After the first heterosexual panic in 1983, the NBC television network aired an episode of its

216 Anthony M. Petro, “Celibate Politics: Queering the Limit,” in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, eds. Kathleen L. Talvacchia, Michael F. Pettinger, and Mark Larrimore (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 37. 217 James I. Slaff and John K. Brubaker, The AIDS Epidemic: How You Can Protect Yourself and Your Family— Why You Must (New York: Warner Books, 1985), 94-108. 218 Robert Theodore McIlvenna and others, Safe Sex in the Age of AIDS (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1986). 219 An Early Frost, DVD, directed by John Erman (1985; New Almaden, CA: Wolfe Video, 2006). 82 fledgling medical drama St. Elsewhere, that tackled a closeted politician’s AIDS diagnosis, fears of casual transmission, and transfusion-based risks.220 Until late 1985, television networks, including NBC, remained reticent to address the AIDS epidemic further in their fictional programming. That changed, however, on November 11, 1985 when NBC aired An Early Frost.

The movie had been in development prior to Rock Hudson’s AIDS disclosure, but his death, only a few weeks before, peaked public interest and contributed to An Early Frost garnering the lion’s share of that evening’s viewing audience, beating out CBS’s Cagney and Lacey and, more tellingly, ABC’s Monday Night Football.221

By dethroning Monday Night Football, the perennial winner of its primetime slot, An

Early Frost became a major success for NBC commercially as well as artistically. Earning fourteen Emmy Award nominations, and ultimately winning four, An Early Frost raked in accolades for NBC at the 1986 awards ceremony.222 Yet, An Early Frost was marked, as AIDS scholar Paula Treichler notes, by “television’s well-established narrative conventions and uniquely overt commercial context,” that prevented it from “politicizing the disease, to make it social and collective, to show the intrigues and bureaucratic failures of medicine, science, and public health.”223 Instead, she argues that the film resorted to a portrayal of AIDS that deploys the standard conventions of made-for-tv movie narratives and emphasizes “drama, death, pathos…and social conflict only when it means interpersonal conflict” at the expense of engaging with more controversial issues.224

220 St. Elsewhere, season 2, episode 9, “AIDS & Comfort,” directed by Victor Lobl, aired December 21, 1983, on NBC. 221 Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999): 177-178. 222 The New York Times, “NBC Again Tops Emmy List,” August 1, 1986, pg. C26; The New York Times, “NBC Dominates Emmy Awards,” September 22, 1986, pg. C22. 223 Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 177, 182. 224 Ibid., 182. 83

Even before its public broadcast, An Early Frost drew the ire of critics who accused NBC of exploiting public interest in AIDS. In Channels of Communication, an influential television industry trade magazine, Vito Russo stated that “networks want to make use of the timely and dramatic subjects of AIDS and homosexuality, but because audience opinions on both subjects are explosive, producers can’t seem to find a safe and sure way to do it.”225 After its airing, film studies scholars like Andrea Weiss expounded on that sentiment when she wrote that the movie’s main character Michael (Aiden Quinn) “is shown removed from his gay community and as having ‘risen above’ qualities common to that community. We know he is gay because he tells his disbelieving parents so, but his lack of gay sensibility, politics and sense of community make him one of those homosexuals heterosexuals love.”226

Weiss juxtaposed the depictions of gay identity and AIDS illness presented in An Early

Frost against those found in Buddies, the first feature film about AIDS that played on the bill of numerous film festivals and received a limited theatrical release in the fall of 1985. A small, independent film, Buddies, told the story a gay graduate student volunteering to assist a gay man dying of AIDS whose family had disowned him following his AIDS disclosure.227 Inspired by

GMHC’s real-life Buddy Program, an initiative that paired healthcare volunteers with AIDS patients as a form of hospice care, Buddies bore more similarities to The Normal Heart, with its firebrand politics and unflinching depictions of queer love and evocations of the gay community’s outrage over apparent social and political apathy, than the staid An Early Frost.

Weiss called Buddies “a disturbing film that rails against a cruel healthcare system and a society indifferent to the survival of some of its members; An Early Frost pleads for tolerance and

225 Vito Russo, “AIDS in ‘Sweeps’ Time,” Channels of Communication, September/October 1985, 6. 226 Andrea Weiss, “From the Margins: NEW IMAGES OF GAYS IN THE CINEMA,” Cinéaste vol. 15, no. 1 (1986): 6. 227 Buddies, Blu-ray, directed by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. (1985; Bridgeport, CT: Vinegar Syndrome, 2018). 84 understanding of homosexuality in the face of such tragedy, allowing sympathy to take the place of responsibility.”228 Because of those qualities Weiss believed that it was “obvious why one made it onto network TV and the other didn’t.”229

Weiss’s criticisms of An Early Frost, for not coding the character of Michael to make him more readily identifiable as a gay man, and for not containing a more bellicose, socially conscious narrative, might initially seem warranted, but, upon further inspection, Weiss’s arguments begin to erode. Firstly, the lack of gay coding that Weiss laments in Michael’s character could, when viewed from another perspective, be interpreted as a progressive decision to avoid stumbling into the pitfalls of stereotyping gay men as inherently emotive, flamboyant, or even, as Weiss seems to argue, politically active. Actor D.W. Moffett, who played Michael’s lover in An Early Frost, and had previously starred onstage in Kramer’s The Normal Heart, was quoted in People Weekly explaining that conscious decisions were made by the production to avoid stereotypical attributes that would “‘give the audience an opportunity to dismiss our characters as ‘faggots.’”230

The character of Michael may be, as Weiss asserted, “one of those homosexuals heterosexuals love,” because affectations differ little from the identity performance of the film’s heterosexual characters, but the straight-laced exterior of middle-class heteronormativity that his character exudes, especially when in his parents’ presence, adds to the believability of the movie’s coming-out storyline while persuading the broadest possible audience to reflect on the overarching themes of tolerance and empathy for persons with AIDS. Amid the heterosexual

228 Weiss, “From the Margins,” pg. 6 229 Ibid. 230 Jane Hall, “A shattering AIDS TV Movie Mirror’s a Family’s Pain,” People Weekly, November 18, 1985, 145. 85 hysteria surrounding gay sexuality, gay men, and AIDS during the fall of 1985, that was no small achievement.

1986: AIDS and the Courting of Adult Comic Book Readers

In September of 1985, Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter supposed that “[i]f AIDS didn’t exist, yellow journalism might have invented it. The story has every ingredient: sex, drugs, death, and panic.”231 Displaying a comparable interest in yellow journalism’s archetypal preoccupations, the comic book medium, and its exploration of the AIDS epidemic by way of focusing on the scintillating and associated topics of sex and death, could be similarly disparaged by indiscriminating critics as products that existed only to generate a profit for their publishers by exploiting a frightening public health crisis. However, the observations of media historian

Will Irwin remind us that the monetary incentives of muckraking yellow journalists were only one facet of a more complex identity which also included, through the innovative contributions of pioneering newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer, “the means of fighting popular causes by the news.”232 Likewise, underlying principles that drove comic book creators to incorporate representations of HIV/AIDS into their work ran the gamut from base, economic motivations to the belief that their work could serve a greater good by establishing counternarratives to dominant public discourses of homophobia and heterosexual panic.

Cultural historian Michael Denning in Mechanic Accents, his landmark monograph on dime novels in nineteenth century America, proposed that the history of dime novels is not purely the story of the industry that created them, but a narrative that “encompasses a history of

231 Alter, “Sins of Omission,” 25. 232 Will Irwin, “Yellow Journalism,” in Highlights in the History of the American Press: A Book of Readings, eds. Edwin H. Ford and Edwin Emory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 269; It is worth noting that in 1896 Pulitzer’s New York World published cartoonist Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid. Widely regarded as the first modern, newspaper comic strip, The Yellow Kid launched a thousand funny pages and became the source from which yellow journalism derives its name. 86 their place in working class culture, and of their role in the struggles to reform that culture.” 233 In the same way, the history of comic books that addressed the HIV/AIDS epidemic is not only the story of the comic-book industry of the 1980s and early nineties, but the story of how the ideas espoused by those comics revealed wider societal beliefs regarding HIV/AIDS. Most pronounced are the beliefs of the principally heterosexual, male readers that comprised the bulk of comic book buyers at the close of the twentieth century.

According to comic book scholar Paul Lopes, the readers that saved the comic-book industry during the 1980s were “not a particularly a diverse community, as white heterosexual males from their teens to early thirties made up the vast majority of [that] subculture.”234

Because of that demographic makeup, this study of how HIV/AIDS was represented within comic books yields an unparalleled glimpse into the mindset of heteronormative Americans and their thoughts about the epidemic, its victims, and the future of AIDS in the United States.

Representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comic books delineate the place of the disease in the minds of heterosexual Americans, specifically heterosexual men, and reveal the myriad ways whereby comic book creators either reinforced or challenged the prevailing beliefs of patriarchal heteronormativity that checkered personal attitudes about the illness. Furthermore, they demonstrate how the ideas espoused within those comic books, and subsequently consumed by their readership, reflected or refuted mainstream public discourses surrounding AIDS.

According to cultural historian Sander Gilman, “art, whatever form it is given, is an icon of our control of the flux of reality.”235 Previously deemed a concern of only those Americans

233 Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), 26. 234 Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009), 122. 235 Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 2. 87 who could be placed in one or more of the 4-H club’s high-risk groups, by 1986, public considerations of whose life might be impacted by the AIDS crisis expanded to encompass all citizens. Consequently, artists across all mediums increasingly utilized their craft as a tool for exerting personal agency and a measure of control amid a health crisis that had thrown U.S. society into turmoil. Raising serious questions about the future of sexual relationships, the place of homo and bisexual citizens in a heterosexual society, workplace safety, government responsibility, human rights, and scores of other topics too numerous to list, Americans of the mid-1980s recognized the AIDS epidemic as a catastrophe whose resolution would not emerge swiftly and, certainly, not before it had profoundly affected the nature of American life.

Because, as scholars Nickie Phillips and Stacy Strobl remind us, the comic-book industry, the universes it engenders through the panels of its products, and the readership it attracts with those products is “a world dominated by heterosexual, white males,” the development of comic book depictions of AIDS offers a unique glimpse into the mindset of an identity group whose reactions to the AIDS epidemic dominated the mainstream, national discourse of America’s patriarchal, heteronormative social structure.236 Phillips and Strobl contend that “comic books can be considered a reflection of broader social contexts—gendered and hierarchical patterns that are particularly pronounced due to the graphic nature of the medium.”237 As a result, comic books, through their artistic adjudication of the AIDS epidemic, offer a wealth of primary sources signifying heteronormative American males’ manifold and constantly evolving understanding of the crisis and its ramifications on public and private life.

236 Nickie D. Phillips and Stacy Strobl, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 141. 237 Ibid. 88

Cover-dated January 1986, Tales of Terror, a horror anthology series published by

Eclipse Comics, was the first widely disseminated American comic book to address the AIDS epidemic when it featured a story called “Last Laugh” about a deranged serial killer.238 Written by Bruce Jones, HIV/AIDS is not a component of the story’s plot although the comic’s artwork features a prominent reference to AIDS and AIDS-based discrimination in public schools. As part of the comic’s opening panel, rendered to mimic a first-person view of a newspaper front page, seven paragraphs of small, but clearly legible text document the ordeal of two children barred from attending a public school because of their illness. At first glance, the newspaper’s text appears like an unremarkable example of visual filler only included to enhance the realism of the illustration. But, when readers took a closer look, they discovered that the newsprint contained a miniaturized article on AIDS discrimination.239

A “photo” of a murdered woman is the main focus of the front page and relates to the comic’s serial-killer-on-the-loose storyline. Like the multitude of newspaper and magazine articles that anthropomorphized AIDS as a killer bent on the destruction of its victims, an analogy that appeared consistently over the course of the previous five years and remains in use even in the present day, Jones’s equivalency took that assessment to its ultimate conclusion by incarnating AIDS as his story’s villainous, jilted-lover-turned-murderer. The fact that the fictional story takes place in San Francisco, one of the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic, is not a coincidence either. Illustrator Gray Morrow, either independently or in consultation with Jones, deliberately constructed the first panel, which takes up two thirds of the comic’s first page, to make a subtle statement AIDS and current events.

238 Bruce Jones, “Last Laugh,” in Tales of Terror, no. 4, ed. Cat Yronwode (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, 1986), 1. 239 Ibid. 89

With its Northern California headquarters just seventy-five miles outside of San

Francisco, news of the epidemic’s devastating effects would not have been unfamiliar to anyone working in the office of Eclipse Comics. Through a juxtaposition of the faux newspaper’s three components, the serial killer headline, the photo of the murdered woman, and the text about

AIDS discrimination in public schools, Morrow and Jones made a subtle comparison, likening the tragedy of AIDS to the senseless violence of mass murder in a manner similar to analogies that journalists had used for years in covering a story brimming with fear and death. Through their novel use of the visual and textual qualities offered by the medium of comic books, Morrow and Jones played to the sensibilities of an adult audience for whom the comic was produced and whose everyday lives were becoming increasingly effected by the developing epidemic.

It is unsurprising that Jones and Morrow chose an article about barring HIV-positive students from public schools because that was one of the most hotly contested civic issues to emerge from the heterosexual panic of 1985. Hudson’s disclosure of his HIV-positive status impelled a tsunami of media attention that induced widespread social concern during the summer months. By the fall, tensions had risen to such a fevered pitch that fears of viral transmission from casual contact in the classroom permeated the thinking of many parents, teachers, and administrators. Throughout the entirety of the 1985/86 school year, the debate over allowing

HIV-positive students int public school classrooms raged. The ongoing saga of seventh-grader

Ryan White’s legal battle to attend middle-school in Kokomo, Indiana continued to unfold before a nation whose attention was rapt and whose opinions were divided. The White family was not unique in their encounters with prejudice, “hundreds of AIDS victims” were “being discriminated against in jobs schools and on insurance policies.”240

240 Ted Gest, “AIDS Triggers Painful Legal Battles,” U.S. News & World Report, March 24, 1986, 73. 90

The White family’s struggle played in the national press as a microcosm of events occurring all over America that year, throughout school districts large and small. And, when 151 students from a total of 360 failed to attend classes on the first day of White’s return to Western

Middle school in the spring of 1986, school officials could not hide the fact that their absences had more to do with unfounded fears of casual transmission than the previous evening’s snowfall or the seasonal flu.241 Belief in causal contagion was prevalent across broad swaths of the U.S. population and a significant portion of Americans believed that merely standing close to an HIV- positive person put them at risk.242

Articles written to assuage parents’ fears became a regular feature of popular periodicals aimed at middle-class mothers with school-age children. However, those same articles often conveyed messages that roused parents’ concern instead of bedding it down. One article by

Helen Singer Kaplan, a woman who held both an M.D. and a Ph.D., made a point of communicating that “the AIDS virus is not spread by casual contact, food, or toilets,” yet encouraged fear by suggesting that HIV-positive students should be placed in separate classrooms because there they would receive “the benefit of special education that is geared to their needs and condition.”243 Arising less from a sense of altruism than a desire for personal comfort, the disingenuousness of Kaplan’s proposal is evident in her remark, made only paragraphs earlier, that “I have three children, and although as a scientist I know that they would not be in any significant danger, I also know that it is natural to worry if one of their classmates has AIDS. And this makes unnecessary problems for everyone.”244 So, to keep parents from fretting over an occurrence that, by Kaplan’s own admission was a biological impossibility, she

241 Jennet Conant, “AIDS in the Classroom,” Newsweek, March 3, 1986, 6. 242 Newsweek, “Reassuring the Families of AIDS Victims,” February 17, 1986, 78. 243 Helen Singer Kaplan, “Can Kids Cath AIDS in School?” Redbook, February 1986, 12. 244 Ibid. 91 advocated sequestering HIV-positive students away from their peers. If a learned doctor feared for her children’s lives, Americans lacking such credentials must have lived in abject terror. It is no wonder, then, that many parents thought that through causal, classroom contact transmission might occur, if only out of an abundance of caution.

As a hot button issue and major focus of public attention, Morrow and Jones’ inclusion of the news story about AIDS discrimination in their comic’s first panel did not go unnoticed.

Months later, in the letters-to-the-editor section of Tales of Terror no. 6, Gary P. Raber, a reader from Bethel, Pennsylvania, wrote that the “AIDS article…was quite effective.” Raber also mentioned that he “would like to see a comic book dealing with AIDS in a story as long as it was done right.”245 Raber did not elaborate on what having an AIDS story “done right” would mean, but his letter denotes the degree to which some comic book readers appeared interested in seeing the medium address the issue of AIDS. In response, editor Beppe Sabatini thanked Raber for his letter saying “It’s fans like you who make it all worthwhile.” Sabatini did not expressly refer to

Raber’s comments about the inclusion of AIDS-related subject matter in comic books, regardless, it seems that Tales of Terror lived up to its tagline as “The Illustrated Horror

Magazine for Mature Readers” in its willingness to engage with a serious subject through the genre conventions of horror fiction.246

The mid-1980s was an era when comic books designed and marketed for “mature readers” were the order of the day. During the 1980s, “comics found a wide market among older readers for the first time since the First World War,” but the seeds which blossomed into an expanding adult audience were sown, decades earlier, during the 1960s.247 Inspired by the

245 Gary P Raber, “‘…Fear Itself,’” in Tales of Terror, no. 6 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, 1986), 29. 246 Tales of Terror, no. 1-13 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, July 1985-July 1987). 247 Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1993), 87. 92 success of the underground comics movement, which flourished as part of the late-1960’s countercultural trends, mainstream comic book companies tried to cultivate a larger adult readership through “tackl[ing] such problems as ecology, racism, the Vietnam War, frigidity, and alienation.”248

According to scholar Ronald Schmitt, underground and mainstream comics books first became “overtly political, sexual and even radical, insisting on a ‘relevance’ in which even the most escapist comics involve[ed] themselves in social issues” during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.249 In concert with the struggle for civil rights, the second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and the drug-fueled counterculture of the hippies, a generation of creators, who came of age reading pre-code comic books from publishers like

William Gaines’s E.C. Comics began working within the industry and reinvigorating it through their inclusion of socially relevant themes.

By the early 1970s, comic books were drawing a certain amount of attention from adult- oriented publications such as Playboy because of their willingness to confront socially relevant issues.250 Linkages between comic books and America’s cultural transformation were further publicized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of author Ken Kesey’s

Merry Pranksters who championed comic books as the new, national mythology for the psychedelic-era.251 During the early-1970s, underground comics and increasing numbers of mainstream comic book creators dealt with racism, overpopulation, pollution, and drug addiction within the panels of their work.252 Despite the creative trends begat by the underground comics

248 Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic-Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: Walker and Company, 1973), 197. 249 Ronald Schmitt, “Deconstructive Comics,” Journal of Popular Culture vol. 25, no. 4 (1992): 155. 250 Jacob Brackman, “The International Comix Conspiracy,” Playboy, December 1970, 195. 251 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1968). 252 Ron Goulart, Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books: The Definitive Illustrated History from the 1890s to the 1980s (Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1986), 297. 93 movement, as the radical politics of the 1960s petered out, giving way to much less socially conscious and far more self-interested cultural currents, a transition that inspired Wolfe to dub the 1970s “The ‘Me’ Decade,” the comic-book industry’s enthusiasm for articulating issues of social significance diminished too.253 As comic book historian Amy Nyberg lamented, “the push for ‘relevance’ in comics died not long after being introduced.”254 However, just as underground comics creators of the late 1960’s were inspired by the pre-code comics of the early 1950s, many comic book writers and artists of the 1980s drew inspiration from the work of countercultural auteurs and started featuring adult-oriented, socially relevant topics in their own work.

At the end of the 1970s the first years of the 1980s, comic books possessed little cultural capital in the estimation of most U.S. adults and were derided by mainstream journalistic outlets as juvenile tripe. Displaying a habitual ignorance of comic book history, an obliviousness that disregarded their widespread adult consumption from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, as well as the adult-oriented, underground comics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, any mention of comic books by the mainstream press at the decade’s inception usually resulted from reporters’ desire to blanketly disparage the medium and its fans. Emblematic of that is an article from USA

Today magazine that referred to adult consumers of comic book culture, whether in print or on film, as “sophisticated toddlers.”255 Another example can be found in a Newsweek review of a comic book adaptation of Macbeth, wherein the reviewer holds such contempt for the publication under consideration that they offered their assessment using a mocking pantomime of the play’s blank verse.256

253 Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, by Tom Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 126-167. 254 Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 142. 255 Joe Saltzman, “Hollywood’s Comic-Strip Mentality,” USA Today (periodical), January 1981, 33. 256 Jack Kroll, “How Now, Macbeth? Lay Off,” Newsweek, September 13, 1982, 11. 94

In spite of the critical scorn heaped on comic books, disparagement that pigeonholed the medium and its fans as inherently puerile, significant alterations to that assessment occurred as the decade progressed. It seems a truism of American culture that the greater an object’s monetary value the greater the deference accorded to it in the eyes of both critics and the public writ large. That axiom holds especially true in the case of comic books. During the early 1980s, cultural arbiters awakened to the fact that comic books, long the epitome of cheap and disposable entertainment, were becoming highly desirable artifacts of Americana. For example, Money magazine ran an article summarizing the burgeoning collector’s market where prices had skyrocketed and comic books, in some cases, could “sell for sums normally associated with higher art forms.”257 The surprisingly high cost of certain comic books was not the only thing

Money emphasized, it also trumpeted comics’ utility as a lucrative investment opportunity.

Exorbitant returns, often as great as “16,000%,” were reported by some sellers and heralded by

Money as indicators of a market yielding a better return on investment than stock or real estate speculation.258 From reports like that came folktales that continue to circulate about people selling their old comic books and putting their children through college, or using their earnings to retire to some far-flung, tropical clime.

A decade earlier, amid underground comics’ fleeting heyday and the brief revival of adult comic book consumption it inspired, the first pieces of mainstream journalistic reporting on comics as valuable commodities appeared.259 As comic books once again began attracting large numbers of adult readers, news reports of their monetary value once more served as indicators of, as well as a goad for, increasing adult interest in the medium. Additional evidence of how

257 Jonathan Greenberg, “Investments That Are More than Kid Stuff,” Money, April 1982, 171. 258 Ibid., 172. 259 Dan Carlinsky, “Comic Books Can Prove Super Investment,” The New York Times, January 1, 1973, pg. 22-23. 95 critical and popular perceptions of the comic book medium were changing can be seen in the high-art world’s desire to canonize underground comic book creators like Robert Crumb within the pantheon of 1960’s avant-garde artists. Crumb, an illustrator formerly denounced as a sexist, a racist, a pornographer, and a countercultural corruptor of the nation’s youth, saw his work displayed in forums as esteemed as New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and exclusive galleries in San Francisco where his pieces sold to an elite clientele of fine-art collectors for grossly inflated prices much higher than what fans of comic art had previously paid for them.260 Reifying comic art’s status as quintessential Americana, Newsweek decreed that

“[a]nyone who loves God and country, Mom and apple pie can’t be taken seriously—unless he also loves that other mainstay of the American imagination, the comics.”261

Fueled by nostalgia for an idealized and bygone era, in light of an ever more techno- driven and dislocated society, some collectors of the early 1980s perceived comic books and comic strips as “very collectable and highly regarded…reminders of the past, a forgotten past.”262 Creators on the vanguard of their industry’s rebirth in the 1980s exploited the medium’s antiquated charm by including issues of contemporary, adult relevance, like the AIDS crisis, into a format that was epitomized in the popular imagination by sedate and nostalgic conventions.

Using a practice that art historian Kate Linker has called “seduce, then intercept,” readers became drawn into stories that, on the surface, appeared to be conventional superhero yarns or other forms of genre fiction, only to encounter deeper and more substantive messages not typically associated with the medium.263 That bait-and-switch tactic can be seen in Tales of

260 George Hackett, “R. Crumb Keeps on Drawing,” Newsweek, July 25, 1983, 9. 261 Mark Stevens, “Comics and Not-So-Comics,” Newsweek, August 22, 1983, 71. 262 Roy Nuhn, “The Earliest Comic Books 1897-1930,” Hobbies, November 1982, 83. 263 Kate Linker, Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 17. 96

Terror no. 4, discussed earlier, and would be routinely implemented by creators laboring to infuse their comic books with a more grown-up sensibility by considering the sobering adult themes of sexual desire, disease, and death.

One of the noteworthy books epitomizing such trends and fueling adult interest in comics was The Death of Captain Marvel. The Death of Captain Marvel featured the demise of the well- known hero, not in an epic battle with an arch nemesis, but from cancer.264 In the comic, Captain

Marvel gives a soliloquy about how he never suspected that his “own body would turn on

[him].”265 Such stories opened the door to medical-related topics, like HIV/AIDS, in popular comic books. 1982 also witnessed DC Comics’ publication of Camelot 3000.266 Like The Death of Captain Marvel, Camelot 3000 epitomized the comic-book industry’s shift toward creating comics designed to satisfy the more discerning tastes of adult readers.

Within his science fiction adaptation of Arthurian legends, author Mike W. Barr showcased a genderbending storyline that recurrently addressed homosexual attraction in its depictions of a lesbian love affair between two Knights of the Round Table. In their introduction to the first collected edition of Camelot 3000, Comics Buyer’s Guide co-editors Don and Maggie

Thompson refer to Barr’s work as “DC Comics’ first comic book for mature readers.” 267 DC

Comics was not alone in its aspirations of attracting as many “mature readers” as possible.

Garnering as large a share of the budding adult market influenced the creative output of numerous other companies. From industry-giants like Marvel Comics to the operations of diminutive publishers like Eternity Comics, addressing AIDS became a way of signifying that

264 Jim Starlin, The Death of Captain Marvel (New York: Marvel Comics, 1982). 265 Ibid., 34. 266 Mike W. Barr, Camelot 3000, no. 1 (New York, DC Comics, 1982). 267 Don and Maggie Thompson, “Epic Beginnings,” in Camelot 3000, by Mike W. Barr (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1988), iii. 97 their companies’ comic books were geared toward an adult audience as opposed to a juvenile one. Throughout the early 1980s, a steady stream of articles in major American newspapers and magazines took notice and declared, as one Chicago Tribune article from 1982 did, that “comic books are not just for kids.”268

Along with publishers’ nascent efforts to present more adult-themed stories, the number of bricks-and-mortar comic book specialty shops then multiplying across the nation worked in concert with industry-wide aspirations to attract more adult readers. Like the headshops of the

1960s that sold underground comics and supplied countercultural customers with wares ranging from blacklight posters to roach clips, comic book specialty shops had something of “a pothead sensibility which reveled in bright colors and ‘cosmic’ adventure… catering to a much older and somewhat more sophisticated reader than the 10-year-old gum-chewer.”269 According to

Business Week, during the late 1970s, when comic book sales were imploding, “specialty shops came to the rescue” because they “attract an older and wealthier clientele for 65¢ and 75¢ comic books.”270

The traditional form of selling comics, that is at newsstands alongside magazines and other periodicals, or on spinner racks at drugstores and supermarkets, began evaporating during the 1970s because those retailers believed, in light of collapsing sales, that comic books’ inherently slim profit margin made their stocking and sale simply not worth the effort. Comic book specialty shops stepped in to fill that gap and sold new comic books together with back issues and other merchandise to readers and fans. In addition to establishing a bricks-and-mortar environment that enticed older customers, “shifting sales of comics from newsstand distribution

268 Chicago Tribune, “The World of Clark Kent and Friends,” January 17, 1982, pg. J3. 269 David Gates, “Comic-Book Heroes to the Rescue,” Newsweek, December 12, 1983, 27. 270 Richard W. Anderson, “Biff! Pow! Comic Books Make A Comeback,” Business Week, September 2, 1985, 60. 98 to specialty shops significantly weakened the enforcement mechanism of the [comics] code” and was “good for the aesthetic development of comic books…encouraging experimentation with new techniques and subject matter.”271 Unlike newsstands, specialty shops could sell comic books, like The Death of Captain Marvel or Camelot 3000, that were not approved by the

Comics Code Authority (CCA), the industry’s self-censorship board, thus opening the door to comic book stories that dealt with prohibited topics indissoluble from discussions of the AIDS epidemic such as sex, both gay and straight, and drug use.

Publishers Weekly calculated, in December of 1985, that direct market comics accounted for “50% of all comic-book sales and [was] the fastest-growing segment of the market.”272 With the direct market constituting the bulk of retail sales, publishers, especially the smaller publishers competing against the industry’s Big Two companies, Marvel and DC, began churning out material, like comics that spoke to the AIDS epidemic, that would never have passed muster nor received newsstand distribution under the strict censorship guidelines of the CCA. Opening the door to a vast realm of heretofore prohibited subject matter, direct market distribution enabled the creation of comic-book content long forbidden by the CCA. The success of the direct market revived an enormous adult readership that had once been bustling but had laid dormant since the mid-1950s and was essentially ignored by the industry for nearly three decades. Adult readers’ pockets were far deeper than the adolescent customers the industry had formerly targeted and they were ravenous for comic books that interrogated adult themes.

By 1984, one comic shop owner in Chicago reported that half of his customers were over twenty-two years old.273 Other articles applauded comic books for their “more adult” stories that

271 Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 161. 272 Sonja Bolle, “Comic Books Regain Their Readership—And Outlets,” Publishers Weekly, December 6, 1985, 34. 273 Steven Fuller, “Wall-to-Wall Comics: Store Puts Stock in Superhero Fans,” Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1984, pg. NS5. 99 did not revolve around “two guys in long underwear punching each other in the face.”274 DC

Comics’ editor-in-chief, Jenette Kahn, echoed that sentiment and believed the boom in adult comic book consumption came as a byproduct of stories that “stayed within the realm of fantasy, but were still relevant to modern life.”275 One reporter lauded comics of the 1980s for their

“existential plots, colorful explanations of nihilism, four and even five-syllable words that mandate dictionaries, and characters from obscure places such as Boukara [sic], that send readers scrambling for geography texts.”276 Other articles drew transnational comparisons between

America’s fledgling adult comic book market and the omnipresent consumption of comic books by adults in Japan where comics were viewed as simply the products of one of many legitimate communications mediums, like television, feature films, or prose literature, judged on their individual merits, and reading them was understood as an appropriate pastime for all citizens regardless of age.277 Even high-brow arbiters of culture like The New Yorker took notice of transitions in the medium and lauded new titles like Zot!, written and illustrated by Scott

McCloud under the auspices of up-and-coming publisher Eclipse Comics, for its innovative worldbuilding, eye-catching villains, and general adult sensibility.278

Despite a groundswell of unit sales, positive critical attention, and increasing public recognition of the medium during the early 1980s, comic books retained many of their former detractors. Foremost among them were art historians who resented trends to sanctify comic book and comic strip illustrators as artists worthy of inclusion alongside high-art practitioners within

U.S. galleries and museum spaces. In a scathing review of the Whitney Museum’s “The Comic

274 Robert Ferrigno, “New Comics No Longer Kids’ Stuff,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1984, pg. S2. 275 Philip S. Gutis, “Turning Superheroes into Super Sales,” The New York Times, January 6, 1985, pg. F6. 276 Richard Phillips, “The Comics Craze: Profit Potential is a Lulu!” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1984, pg. WC4. 277 Ronald E. Yates, “Japanese Readers Get Comic Relief from Hectic Life,” Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1986, pg. D1-2. 278 The New Yorker, “Sketches,” June 11, 1984, 32-33. 100

Art Show,” an exhibition that featured the work of Robert Crumb and other revolutionary cartoonists’ work showcased beside such stalwart representatives of 1960’s high culture as

Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, David Deitcher, writing for Art in America, sneered at the childish nationalism of critics who regarded comic books as unique ambassadors of American culture and scoffed at the exhibition’s “few scatterbrained attempts to assess the comics’ ‘social function.’”279 Believing that all comparisons made between the comic books and fine art only served to underscore the indispensable distinctions between high culture and lowborn popular culture, Deitchler’s bile was on full display when he castigated curators’ “will to transform comics into art,” scholars’ budding “academic institutionalization of the comics,” and, most infuriating to him, original comic book illustrations’ “ever increasing desirability as

‘collectables’” within a fine art marketplace.280

Other critics framed their condemnations less on comic books’ low culture status and more on what they considered the damaging, adult-oriented topics being presented by a medium they considered fit only for considerations of the most innocuous subject matter. Unlike other popular narrative forms like feature films and prose literature, two mediums whose vast output, ranging from children’s fare to adult material, was accepted unquestioningly, detractors of adult comics promoted the belief that the medium’s only appropriate content was children’s stories.

Granting that a “national market is emerging, made up of young males in their late teens and early 20s [who] patronize an estimated 3,000 specialty outlets…spending up to $50 a month to stay abreast of such current adult comic book favorites as…Camelot 3000,…American Flagg, and Jon Sable, Freelance,” Amhurst College instructor Benjamin DeMott, writing in Psychology

Today, appeared dismayed by adult comic books’ “eagerness to play pedagogue” via their “mini-

279 David Deitcher, “Comic Connoisseurs,” Art in America, February 1984, 101. 280 Ibid., 105. 101 lectures on topics ranging from cultural relativism to existential despair, from fluorocarbons to data banks.”281

DeMott’s article commences with mannered disapproval of adult comics based on their

“frankness about sex” and their overwhelming “pessimism about the engulfing forces of thievery and injustice,” yet its conclusion reveals such denunciations as chiefly the byproduct of

DeMott’s disdain for the comic book medium in general and the adult readership that propelled its resurgence specifically.282 On the article’s final page, DeMott’s genteel criticism devolved into name-calling and a naked display of elitist condescension toward “the dropouts and community-college students, uncertain of their direction [who] constitute the bulk of the readership.”283 Labeling such fans as “the country’s young losers” DeMott opined that “[i]s it not proof of the onset of mass adult illiteracy that the new comic-book audience is composed of people who work for a living and drive to malls, at night, to lay out hard earned dollars for junk?”284 How DeMott squared such an assessment with his begrudging acknowledgement that

“the range of allusion and vocabulary in the majority of the adult comics goes beyond that of standard daily newspapers” remained unexplained.285

Condemnation of comic books as products consumed only by America’s most ignorant or puerile adults has never fully abated, but even the medium’s most vociferous critics acknowledged, as Mark Perigard in a Newsweek editorial did, that since the early 1980s comic books had “changed dramatically,” and in his opinion not for the better, by “[a]ppealing to an older, more literate crowd…becom[ing] glossier and more artistically detailed” and presenting

281 Benjamin DeMott, “Darkness at the Mall,” Psychology Today, February 1984, 48, 50. 282 Ibid., 50-1. 283 Ibid., 52. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. 102 stories that are “larger in scope and darker in substance.”286 An essential ingredient of the adult- comics recipe was creators’ willingness to engage with the most traumatic and distressing fundamentals of the human condition. Observing that tendency, Perigard ruefully pronounced that “[d]eath is the hottest trend in today’s comics.”287 No comic book embodied that trend more fully, did more to elevate the status of the American comic book medium in the eyes of both critics and the lay-public, and pave the way for comic-books ruminations on the HIV/AIDS epidemic than Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.

Serialized in yearly installments, beginning in 1980, within the groundbreaking, independently published graphic arts magazine Raw, Spiegelman’s gut-wrenching chronicle of his parents’ travails during the Holocaust had long been acclaimed within the world of comic book fandom, but, in 1985, with the publication of its sixth chapter, and their subsequent collection in trade-paperback form in 1986, Maus drew the attention of mainstream literary critics and cultural tastemakers.288 Having cut his teeth in the underground comics scene of the late 1960s, Spiegelman never shied away from pushing the envelope of the medium’s conventions and in Maus his experimentations with the form struck a powerful chord in the midst of the booming comic book market of the 1980s. Erroneously referring to Maus as a comic strip, presumably because, as an article in Esquire noted, “comic books seem less…elegant than strips,” a writeup in The New York Times Book Review brought Spiegelman’s opus to the attention of Americans outside the realm of comic book readers and collectors.289

286 Mark A. Perigard, “Death of the Superheroes,” Newsweek, November 11, 1985, 15. 287 Ibid. 288 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 289 Kenneth Miller, “A Feel for the Funnies,” Esquire, May 1985, 25; Ken Tucker, “Cats, Mice and History—The Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip,” The New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1985, BR3. 103

Drawing inspiration from animated, funny animal cartoons of the 1930s, Spiegelman depicted Jews as mice and their Nazi persecutors as cats. As a result, the practice of seduction and interception, which art historian Kate Linker identified as an effective tool for surreptitiously priming consumers, subverting expectations, and, consequently, increasing their receptivity of an unexpected, rebellious, or potentially provocative message stands on full display in Maus. The

New York Times Book Review identifies that tactic immediately stating that Spiegelman “tempts sentimentality by suggesting a pop-culture cliché—wide-eyed mice menaced by hissing cats— and then thoroughly denies that sentimentality with the sharp, cutting lines of his drawing and the terse realism of his dialogue.”290 Through employing that tactic, Spiegelman imbued Maus with the authority necessary for communicating its themes of humans’ inhumanity and the imperishable dignity of all who struggle to survive in the face of death. Other comic book authors and illustrators took cues from Spiegelman’s success and consistently utilized that technique when speaking to issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic in their work.

Beyond the desire to tell a captivating story about his parents’ experience being ensnared by the largest project of industrialized murder in the history of mankind, Spiegelman wanted “to expand the very notion of what a comic strip can do, to make intelligent readers reconsider—and reject—the widespread notion of…‘comics-as-kid-culture.’”291 Maus was a rousing success on both fronts and praise came in from all quarters of the mainstream print media. Comparing Maus to Claude Lanzmann’s seminal Holocaust documentary Shoah, Newsweek claimed that the comic book “compels us to bear witness in a different way: the very artificiality of its surface makes it possible to imagine the reality beneath.”292 Rolling Stone described Maus as filled with “imagery

290 Tucker, “Cats, Mice and History,” BR3. 291 Ibid. 292 David Gates, “The Light Side of Darkness,” Newsweek, September 22, 1986, 79. 104 that leads us on, invitingly, reassuringly, until suddenly the horrible story has us gripped and pinioned.”293

Juxtaposing Maus against other examples of narrative art, People Weekly asserted that

“many readers have found that there is more humanity, terror, truth, and even humor in

Spiegelman’s animal cartoon than a dozen docudramas or TV movies.”294 Even assessments, like one from Vogue, that mentioned “it unnerves one to use the term [comic book] in tandem with the Holocaust,” conceded that “the comic book can go beyond our escapist fantasies to reveal our individual fears and our collective histories.”295 Throughout 1986 and beyond, the success of Maus elevated the artistic status of comic books in the minds of critics and consumers and fortified comic book creators’, and their publishing houses’, commitments to engage with the distressingly adult and death-filled topic of HIV/AIDS.

Within the social, cultural, and political discourses of 1980’s America, the omnipresence of the AIDS epidemic ran concurrently with the flourishing of the adult comic book market.

Comic book creators, looking to keep step with the concerns of their readers, responded by incorporating the HIV/AIDS epidemic within their books. Ironically, not long before comic books began addressing HIV/AIDS, some gay men accused others in the gay community of relying on comic books for escapism instead of becoming involved in AIDS activism or prevention. In 1985, one gay businessman from Brooklyn accused some gay men of “living their lives as if AIDS doesn’t exist…[t]hey say, ‘I got my motorcycle, my Batman comic books, I go to the gym and I go to the baths and that’s all I ever want to do.’”296 Although it would take

293 Lawrence Weschler, “Mighty ‘Maus,’” Rolling Stone, November 20, 1986, 104. 294 David H. Van Biema, “Art Spiegelman Battles the Holocaust’s Demons—and His Own—in an Epic Cat-and- Mouse Comic Book,” People Weekly, October 27, 1986, 99. 295 Margo Jefferson, “Drawing Blood,” Vogue, September 1986, 418, 424. 296 Glenn Collins, “Impact of AIDS: Patterns of Homosexual Life Changing,” The New York Times, July 22, 1985, pg. B4. 105 several more years for AIDS to receive attention in the titles of flagship superhero characters like

Batman, new characters from upstart publishers, like the titular hero of Scout from Eclipse

Comics, were unburdened by decades’ worth of history, not to mention the weight of multi- million dollar licensing deals, and could, therefore, readily engage with the controversial topic.

In 1986, author and illustrator Timothy Truman used the fear of contracting AIDS to describe why a character in Scout, a dystopian adventure series, abstained from sex. Set thirteen years in the future, during the then-distant year of 1999, Truman has one of his series’ lead characters, Rosa Winter, a Latina noncommissioned officer and former child soldier, explain during a flashback sequence to the early 1990s that “celibacy was still pretty ‘in’ at that time because of the big AIDS Epidemic.”297 Much of the issue takes place in a government-operated outpost called “Falwell Camp” where Scout’s main characters had been taken as youthful conscripts to train for service in special forces units tasked with shoring up the power of a corrupt, theocratic federal government staking its claim over a fragmented American republic.298

Truman’s decision to name the military base “Falwell Camp” is a blatant critique of evangelical leader Jerry Falwell whose rhetoric demonizing persons with AIDS during the mid-1980s and regularly carried an “apocalyptic tenor.”299 Founder of The Moral Majority, a right-wing religious organization, Falwell spent the decade of the 1980s vilifying persons with AIDS and suggesting a widespread homosexual conspiracy through his television ministry and newsletters

“warning that ‘homosexuals and the pro-homosexual politicians have joined together with the liberal, gay-influenced media to cover up the facts concerning AIDS.’”300

297 Timothy Truman, Scout, no. 7 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, May 1986), 6. 298 Ibid., 5. 299 Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, 22. 300 Michael Doan, “Jerry Falwell’s anti-AIDS dollar drive,” U.S. News & World Report, May 4, 1987, 12. 106

The responsibilities of religious leaders during times of national crisis is one of Scout’s recurring themes and Truman created fictional characters to compare and contrast the range of

Christian behavior on display within the real-world of 1980’s America. He placed characters like a virtuous preacher, C.W. Deluxe, who “decided to ditch his Cadillac and walk amongst the people,” alongside false prophets, like the venal, power-hungry televangelist-turned-politician

Bill Loper, in order to critique the increasingly politicized, and polarized, nature of Christian practice in the late twentieth-century.301 The AIDS epidemic bifurcated U.S. Christians across all denominations, even evangelical ones, as questions of sexual sin and individual culpability were debated in a milieu where the jeremiads of the most uncompromising right-wing believers promoted an interpretation of the epidemic that characterized AIDS as God’s judgement enacted against homosexuals in the same way that seventeenth-century clerics viewed London’s bubonic plague as divine retribution unleashed upon a wicked world.302 However, with the Centers for

Disease Control (CDC) documenting not a single case of AIDS in a lesbian patient, as of 1986,

Dr. Mathilde Krim of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was “fond of telling interviewers that if…AIDS is God’s plague on gay men ‘lesbians must be his chosen children.’”303

Beyond his observations on religion, Truman made a rational prediction about the sexual customs of a near-future United States whose citizens were well acquainted with the dangers of

HIV/AIDS and adjusted their behavior accordingly. Commendable for its thoughtful and direct approach, Truman’s prediction was plausible given that, for many young people living in 1986, the fear of contracting a sexually transmitted disease prompted them to abstain from sex

301 Timothy Truman, Scout, no. 3 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, January 1986), 7. 302 Philip Yancey, “Jogging Past the AIDS Clinic,” Christianity Today, March 7, 1986, 64. 303 Lindsy Van Gelder, “Women of Excellence: Mathilde Krim,” Ms., January 1986, 97. 107 entirely.304 Fear of sexually contracting “AIDS,” the term preferred by the popular press despite the discovery of LAV/HTLV-III two years prior, increased public and medical attention on a range of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), namely genital herpes, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, whose number of diagnoses rose steadily during the late 1970s and early 1980s.305

Stories on the nation’s changing sexual habits appeared regularly and U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story declaring that “America’s affair with casual sex, that two-decade adventure launched by the Pill, is giving way to a time of caution and commitment.”306 Peppered throughout the article were alarming admonitions from health experts, like the director of

UCLA’s Student Health Center, who warned that “one chance encounter can infect a person with as many as five different diseases.”307

Truman’s decision to have one of his heterosexual female characters address the subject of AIDS, and its specific impact on sexual mores, reflected the rising concerns of increasing numbers of heterosexual American women who were reconsidering how they managed their sex lives in light of the epidemic. The identification of AIDS in 1981 begat years of journalistic coverage that instilled the impression that only members of high-risk groups need concern themselves with the possibility of contracting the disease, specifically people from the four, othered identities encompassed in the 4-H club, homosexual men, heroin users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. When coverage switched gears drastically during the heterosexual panic of 1985, to promote the belief that HIV/AIDS would soon decimate the general population, heterosexual

304 Lindsy Van Gelder and Pam Brandt, “AIDS on Campus,” Rolling Stone, September 25, 1986, 89-90. 305 Barbara Kantrowitz, “More Bad News About Sex,” Newsweek, April 21, 1986, 70. In May of 1986, LAV/HTLV- III were officially renamed HIV. However, for years afterward, nearly all popular press publications made no distinction between the infectious virus, HIV, and AIDS, the condition that resulted from HIV infection and, over time, manifested itself symptomatically through an individual’s collapsing immune system, opening the immunocompromised person to a range of opportunistic, and almost invariable deadly, infections. Differentiating between HIV and AIDS would not become a regular occurrence in the popular press until the 1990s. 306 Lewis J. Lord, “Sex, with Care,” U.S. News & World Report, June 2, 1986, 53. 307 Ibid., 56. 108 women became especially frightened for the reason that they previously considered themselves, like heterosexual men, insulated from infection as a result of their sexual orientation. In some respects, heterosexual women believed themselves to be doubly protected because of their biological sex in addition to their sexual preference. AIDS may have begun its foray into the national consciousness under the homophobic banner of “the gay plague,” but that moniker also made it, in the popular press and the minds of the American public, a men’s disease as well. The fact that, from 1981-1987, men comprised 92% of total AIDS diagnoses supported an understanding of the disease as, first and foremost, a men’s health problem, but the number of

AIDS diagnoses in women rose swiftly and by 1995 women represented 17.6% of all Americans diagnosed with AIDS.308 Newsweek reported that “[u]ntil recently Americans thought of AIDS as essentially a man’s disease.”309

Following the discovery of HIV in 1984 and the heterosexual panic of 1985, women’s apprehension about the possibility of becoming infected through heterosexual intercourse spiked dramatically and corresponded to the increasing quantity of cases documented by the CDC.

During the mid-1980s, while “the rate of increase in the percentage of cases attributed to reported heterosexual contact [had] been greatest for men, the absolute percentage of cases attributed to reported heterosexual contact [was] much greater for women.”310 A survey conducted by Glamour magazine found that 65% of its readers were fearful of contracting

AIDS.311 Articles informing heterosexual women about the dangers of HIV transmission and

308 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “TABLE 1. Number and percentage of persons with AIDS, by selected characteristics and period of report—United States, 1981-2000,” from “HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981—2000,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 50, no. 21 (June 1, 2001) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm#tab1. 309 Matt Clark, “Women and AIDS,” Newsweek, July 14, 1986, 60. 310 King K. Holmes, John M. Karen, and Joan Kreiss, “The Increasing Frequency of Heterosexually Acquired AIDS in the United States, 1983-1988,” American Journal of Public Health vol. 80, no 7 (July 1990): 859. 311 Glamour, “This is What You Thought,” March 1986, 41. 109 how they might protect themselves from becoming infected during intercourse, through practicing safe sex, limiting their sexual contacts, and having frank discussions with their partners about their sexual history, became regular additions in lifestyle magazines targeted to a female audience like Vogue.312

Not all articles about women and AIDS were as educational. Many served as forums for perpetuating the homophobic stigmatization of gay men by scapegoating them for introducing

AIDS to America. That belief circulated throughout all strata of the news media, not just women’s magazines, for years. Investigative journalism in political or general interest newsmagazines, like the article “Inside a Bathhouse” which appeared in a December 1985 issue of The New Republic, described the most extreme fringes of gay culture as the community’s status quo and promoted a tacit understanding that gay men bore responsibility for exporting

AIDS into heterosexual American society. In its lurid accounts of anonymous gay sex, the purple prose of “Inside a Bathhouse” portrayed a hedonistic atmosphere, “thick with longing and dread,” whose denizens willfully ignored safe sex practices when promiscuously coupling amid a steamy world of self-delusion.313

One editorial in Mademoiselle encouraged gay plague stereotypes and accused gay men of endangering the lives of women stating that “their problem is putting us at risk” in an outburst demonstrating that even as heterosexuals grew more aware and personally concerned about

AIDS, longstanding prejudices that surrounded the illness remained just as venomous and just as commonplace as they had been during the years follow its initial identification.314 A personal testimonial in Ladies Home Journal, written by an HIV-positive heterosexual women who

312 Ellen Switzer, “AIDS: What Women Can Do,” Vogue, January 1986, 222-3, 264-5. 313 Philip Weiss, “Inside a Bathhouse,” The New Republic, December 2, 1985, 12-13. 314 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “It’s okay to be angry about AIDS,” Mademoiselle, February 1986, 96. 110 contracted the virus through a tainted transfusion in 1982, blamed the “homosexual male,” who had been one of her blood donors and had since “tested positive as a carrier of AIDS,” for her condition even though, prior to the isolation of LAV/HTLV-III and the development of antibody testing, HIV-positive individuals, whose degree of immunosuppression was small enough for them to remain asymptomatic, were impossible to identify before the appearance of AIDS and its attendant opportunistic infections.315 Still, not all women’s magazines contained such messages.

Ms., the most widely recognized popular periodical of the second-wave feminist movement contained an editorial by AIDS researcher Dennis Altman who wrote that “gay casualties of

AIDS are frequently contrasted with ‘innocent victims’ as if gays (and drug users) deliberately set out to get sick and infect others.”316 Compassion and cold-heartedness were displayed in equal measure in the aftermath of 1985’s heterosexual panic and the task of uncoupling AIDS from the anti-gay stigma that surrounded it remains, to this day, a work in progress.

Truman’s attention and sensitivity toward the subject of AIDS coincides with his deft portrayal of another easily mishandled subject. Throughout the twenty-four issues of Scout,

Truman brings the title character’s Native-American racial background and religious beliefs into play as an integral component of the Scout-saga. That decision could have proven disastrous in the hands of a less skilled author. Instead, Truman’s well-researched portrayal of indigenous

Apache religious practices earned Scout praise and approval from a number of Native American interest and activist groups.317 Testifying to the creative impact of Scout are contemporary comic book researchers, most notably Brian Cremins, who produced scholarship extolling Truman’s

315 Amy Sloan, “‘I’m Fighting for My Life,’” Ladies Home Journal, November, 1986, 24. 316 Dennis Altman, “The Tragedy of AIDS,” Ms., September 1986, 90. 317 Michael Sheyahshe, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008), 85. 111

“sensitivity to his characters and his subject matter” nearly two decades after the comic’s initial publication.318

Scout’s skillful handling of adult subject matter comes, in part, from Truman’s study of the underground comics of the late 1960s. Truman was particularly fond of Spain Rodriguez’s

Trashman, an adventure series about a swashbuckling guerilla waging urban warfare against a fascist government it a dystopian, near-future United States. In an autobiographical essay included in Dragon Chiang, one of his later science-fiction comics, Truman shared his enthusiasm for Trashman calling it “the most honest, brutal, and unapologetic work [he’d] ever seen.”319 Produced during the height of the sexual revolution, when cases of STIs were on the rise, one installment of Trashman found the titular hero contracting a venereal disease.320

Exposure to the adult comics of an earlier era influenced Truman and emboldened him to make equally relevant statements about topical and controversial issues in his own work. The editor-in- chief of Eclipse Comics, Catherine Yronwode, who also served as the editor on Scout, encouraged Truman to draw from his life experiences and artistic inspirations. In a typewritten proposal for Scout, Truman outlined the direction of his series and wrote that much of Scout no.

7 would explain “life in early 90’s, on a sociological level.”321 In her feedback for Scout no. 7,

Yronwode wrote, in the document’s marginalia, that Truman should “Be personal.”322

Truman’s appreciation for the history and craft of sequential art narratives led him to formulate a theory which he believed explained why “comics have seldom been able to rise

318 Brian Cremins, “‘I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)’ Tim Truman’s Scout and Social Satire in the Independent Comics of the 1980s,” International Journal of Comic Art vol. 5, no. 2 (2003): 340. 319 Timothy Truman, “Big Wheels A-Rollin’…,” in Dragon Chiang, by Timothy Truman (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, 1991) 46. 320 Mark James Estren, A History of Underground Comics (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974), 184. 321 Typed proposal for Scout by Timothy Truman, October 1, 1985, MS S 213, Box 56, Folder 14, Eclipse Comics Records, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, East Lansing, MI. 322 Ibid. 112 above an ‘idiot’ or ‘pulp’ medium, story wise.”323 While delivering a lecture at F&M University,

Truman realized that because comic books “have to be cranked out month after month,” the rate of their production left not time for creators to “think and prepare and do long-term planning on plot and theme.”324 Truman believed that the painstaking methods he employed to assemble issues of Scout, as well as its initial bi-monthly schedule, allowed him the breathing room necessary for realizing his creative vision and offered him the option to dispense with the industry’s churn-and-burn ethos responsible for the lackadaisical and formulaic storytelling found in a majority of American comic books.325

Despite Truman’s thoughtful speculative fiction, not all of Scout’s readers found references to AIDS and its sexual transmission acceptable. One reader from Michigan sent a letter to Truman accusing him of “stoop[ing] so low as to put sex” in a Scout storyline.326

Truman responded by saying that he found it unusual that the reader would complain about portrayals of sex in one issue, but not about the graphic violence on display in practically every issue of Scout.327 Working on a series distributed through the direct market of comic book shops and featuring a character he created, afforded Truman greater leeway in terms of what he could and could not include in his stories. Desirous of the adult readers attracted to offerings unencumbered by CCA censorship, the industry’s most prominent largest publishers began offering more direct market titles that did not require CCA approval for distribution.

323 Correspondence from Timothy Truman to Catherine Yronwode and Dean Mullaney, June 19, 1986, MS S 213, Box 57, Folder 25, Eclipse Comics Records, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, East Lansing, MI. 324 Ibid. 325 Ibid. 326 David Dilley, “Lock ‘n’ Load,” in Scout, no. 11, edited by Cat Yronwode (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, September 1986), 20. 327 Ibid., 20-21. 113

During the spring of 1986, DC became the first of the Big Two comic book publishers to print a story that addressed AIDS. Author and illustrator Howard Chaykin, one of the profession’s most popular and controversial creators, included the topic of AIDS in the final issue of his four-issue miniseries, The Shadow, that updated the 1930’s pulp hero for an adult audience of the mid-1980s. Distributed via the direct market, Chaykin’s The Shadow carried a

“For Mature Readers” label on its cover and a lurid tale of sex and death on its pages.328 Sex and death, however, were standard Chaykin-fare. In fact, Chaykin’s consistent focus on those themes rocketed him into the stratosphere of comic-book stardom through his imaginative work on such titles as First Comics’ American Flagg!

Although Chaykin began writing and illustrating comic books in the early 1970s, it was

Flagg! that attracted the attention of cultural tastemakers like Rolling Stone who, in March 1986, explained that “the comic-book field has undergone the most wide-ranging and meaningful creative explosion of its fifty-year-plus history, spawning a new generation of storytellers who are among the more intriguing literary and graphic craftsmen of our day. Among them [is]

Howard Chaykin, whose American Flagg! took a Dashiell Hammett-derived case-hardened hero and replanted him in the ruthless setting of postapocalypse [sic] Chicago.”329 In the debut issue of American Flagg!, Chaykin described the series as “the provocative adventures of a fearless vice cop walking the mean streets of an unnamed, untamed, and sexually transmitted-disease- riddled sector of a great urban metroplex.”330 The Shadow, Chaykin’s next major work, addressed the dangers of sexually transmitted infections in a less tongue-in-cheek fashion.

328 Howard Chaykin, The Shadow, no. 4 (New York: DC Comics, August 1986). 329 Mikal Gilmore, “Comic Genius,” Rolling Stone, March 27, 1986, 56-8. 330 Howard Chaykin, American Flagg! no. 1 (Evanston, IL: First Comics, Oct. 1983), 6. 114

Chaykin said he treated The Shadow mini-series as “an exercise in commercial behavior to see whether [he] could take a character as moribund as [The Shadow] and give it some impetus to sell.”331 Chaykin’s willingness to include AIDS in a comic that he hoped would be commercially viable shows how comfortable vanguard creators of popular comics were with utilizing the contemporary relevance of AIDS as a means of attracting older readers to their comics. Chaykin pushed the boundaries of the medium’s narrative and visual conventions making his work a commercial and artistic success lauded for its graphic design and hardboiled storytelling. The Atlantic, in reviewing what they considered the best adult comic books, praised

Chaykin, whose “pictures have a crisp pop elegance,” for creating the “brutal, porny, stylish worlds of American Flagg! and The Shadow.”332 Noting that in “reworking the old hero of radio fame…[Chaykin] makes the story zing nastily along” the article also remarked that a lot of

Chaykin’s work “is built on exaggerations of present social conditions.”333

Chaykin’s The Shadow addressed AIDS more extensively than both Tales of Terror and

Scout through its depiction of the story’s antagonists, a heterosexual couple comprised of the decrepit, megalomaniacal Preston Mayrock and Mercy Kildare-Mayrock, his sexually adventurous trophy wife, reacting to the news that they “both have AIDS.”334 Like most writers of popular press periodicals at the time, Chaykin never used the term HIV although he did make an insinuation to AIDS’s viral origin, and the anti-body test created to detect it, in a brief statement from Mayrock to his wife that “those tests we took came back positive.” 335 Typical of most fiction and much journalistic or editorial writing from 1984 to 1987, HIV is never

331 Howard Chaykin, interview by Gary Groth, “Howard Chaykin,” in The New Comics: Interviews from the Pages of The Comics Journal, eds. Gary Groth and Robert Fiore (New York: Berkley Books, 1988), 87. 332 Lloyd Rose, “Comic Books for Grown-Ups,” The Atlantic, August 1986, 79. 333 Ibid., 80. 334 Chaykin, The Shadow, no. 4, 8. 335 Ibid. 115 mentioned and the term AIDS is used to encompass both the viral infection and the health outcomes that stem from it. Atypical of both fictional and journalistic stories about persons with

AIDS, Chaykin does not reveal how the couple became infected, but sexual transmission is implied. However, Chaykin raised the specter of AIDS in a more sensationalistic fashion than either the subtle reference to public school discrimination in Tales of Terror no. 4 or the sociocultural speculations in Scout no. 7.

Chaykin’s decision to feature an HIV-positive, heterosexual couple reflected the heterosexual public’s anxiety over the increasing quantities of heterosexual persons with AIDS.

Capitalizing on Americans’ fears of receiving a positive result on an HIV-antibody test,

Chaykin’s eleventh-hour disclosure of the villains’ diagnoses appears, on the surface, included solely for its shock value. The homophobic belief that gay men, broadly speaking, and HIV- positive men specifically, threatened to willfully annihilate the U.S. population through their own wantonness became reversed in The Shadow, and applied to the heterosexual, HIV-positive villains, when they hold New York City hostage with a nuclear warhead during the miniseries’ climax.336

Chaykin’s use of New York City’s potential destruction, at the hands of nuclear-armed terrorists, as a metaphor for the widespread infection of the general, heterosexual population elevates the addition of AIDS to the comic’s narrative above its ham-fisted introduction earlier.

The late-1970’s resurgence in Cold War nuclear brinkmanship rekindled fears of an atomic

Armageddon. Like stories of AIDS spreading through the general, heterosexual population, the popular press had been frightening Americans with tales of a nuclear war’s inescapable lethality

336 Ibid., 14-27. 116 for years.337 In 1986, being diagnosed HIV-positive was tantamount to receiving a death sentence. No effective therapies existed. Once a person’s immune system began collapsing, physicians could only fight opportunistic infections as they appeared using prescriptions of antibiotics, antiviral, and/or antifungal drugs, often in concert with various cancer treatments.

That strategy only worked for so long before a patient succumbed to an infection or one of the many other AIDS-related health complications. At the time Chaykin wrote The Shadow, in 1985,

New York City was the global epicenter of AIDS.338

The story’s conclusion hammers that metaphor home during her first and final confrontation with the Shadow, when Mercy Kildare-Mayrock, in a genre convention typical of hardboiled fiction, betrays her husband and shoots him dead. Chaykin then has his HIV-positive femme fatale turn her gun on the Shadow and, while clutching the warhead’s detonation, expound on her fetish for “sex and death,” in a monologue where she confesses a bizarre lust for him stating that “you and me are going out the way I’ve always dreamed—getting it on in the middle of a nuclear holocaust.”339 Mercy, her thumb poised over the button, explains that the

“one other thing got me as hot as you [the Shadow]—was a school movie about Hiroshima…it was you and mushroom clouds.”340 A nuclear holocaust and the AIDS epidemic are conjoined in

Chaykin’s metaphor because of their mutually terrifying destruction. In a widely read 1987 essay by Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould published in The New York Times, Gould argued that

337 For an overview of thermonuclear tensions of the mid-1980s as they were depicted in the journalistic and other popular press writings of Britain and the United States see, Daniel Cordle, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave MacMillian, 2017); Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, and Jeremy Varon, eds., Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 338 For information regarding the formative years of the AIDS epidemic when New York City had the highest number of AIDS diagnoses in the world see, Jean Ashton, AIDS in New York: The First Five Years (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2015). 339 Chaykin, The Shadow, no. 4, 21. 340 Ibid., 22. 117

AIDS ranked with nuclear weaponry “as the greatest danger of our era.”341 He also criticized

Americans’ response to AIDS by “downplaying the danger because we thought that AIDS was a disease of three irregular groups: minorities of lifestyle (needle users), of sexual preference

(homosexuals), and of color (Haitians).”342 Pervasive indifference to the plight of AIDS minorities caused playwright Larry Kramer to make another holocaust-based comparison.

In 1988, Kramer wrote “Report from the holocaust,” an essay about the ever-rising number of AIDS deaths and what he considered heterosexuals’ alternately apathetic or hysterical and homophobic responses. Likening the ever-growing number gay men dying from AIDS- related complications to the victims of Nazi persecution, Kramer denounced heterosexual

Americans and the governmental entities that represented their interests for engaging in a pattern of willful neglect that jeopardized the futures of America’s gay communities and the men that comprised the overwhelming majority of persons with AIDS. Calls by William F. Buckley, a right-wing pundit and founder of the influential conservative periodical National Review, demanding that persons with AIDS agree to sterilization before granting them a marriage license and for the tattooing of persons with AIDS, inculcated a cultural environment during the mid-

1980s that obliged Kramer’s comparison in spite of Buckley later rejecting those proposals.343

Comparisons were also made between South Africa’s system of Apartheid and the civil rights violations that would occur if forcible testing or quarantining of persons with AIDS became implemented across the United States.344

341 Stephen Jay Gould, “The Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS,” The New York Times, April 19, 1987, pg. SM33. 342 Ibid. 343 William F. Buckley, “Identify All the Carriers,” The New York Times, March 18, 1986, A27; See also, William F. Buckley, “Looking Out for Number Two,” National Review, April 25, 1986, 62-63; William F. Buckley, “What Can We Do About AIDS?” The Washington Post, April 23, 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/04/23/what-can-we-do-about-aids/3a483a13-f97d-42eb- a501-3e24faeaaf72/. 344 The New York Times, “AIDS and the New Apartheid,” October 7, 1985, pg. A30. 118

Kramer drew his inspiration for what he called “the AIDS holocaust” from the Holocaust of World War II, not from the flames of nuclear fire, but the word’s meaning, when capitalized and used as a proper noun, would not have been lost on the ethnically Jewish Chaykin who often made his fictional heroes Jewish, including Reuben Flagg of American Flagg!, and routinely addressed the subject of Jewish identity in his storylines.345 For example, in American Flagg! no.

7, Chaykin placed Reuben in a moral struggle between his libido and his principles when he had the character contemplate, and finally accept, the sexual overtures of an alluring neo-Nazi.346

Chaykin’s work challenged the precepts of the medium with its mixture of sensationalism, skirting the edges of exploitation, and artistic substance. Not all readers welcomed the change. C.C. Beck, an illustrator-turned-critic writing for The Comics Journal, wryly observed that companies have “given up the struggle to produce comic books for children and are aiming their magazines at the least intelligent adults they can find.”347 With great bile,

Beck named Chaykin as one of the “outstanding contributors to the new comic books” that he so distained.348 Beck’s comments, however, must be taken with a grain of salt. Beck got his start in the comic-book industry in 1939 when he worked as an illustrator on Captain Marvel. Changes in comic books’ content, distribution, and consumption, to say nothing of the sweeping, cultural changes that transformed American society during the mid-twentieth century, had altered the landscape of the medium so drastically since the Golden Age of comics when Beck entered the field that it is easy to understand that he might harbor some hostility against the medium’s turn toward adult subject matter controversial subjects.

345 Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 245. 346 Howard Chaykin, American Flagg, no. 7 (Evanston, IL: First Comics, Apr. 1984). 347 C.C. Beck, “Comic Books for Grown-Ups,” The Comics Journal, no. 113, December 1986, 7. 348 Ibid. 119

Don Thompson, co-editor of Comics Buyer’s Guide, did not share Beck’s assessment.

When reviewing The Shadow, Thompson called Chaykin’s work “stunning and warned readers to “not, under any circumstances, miss this one.”349 In his glowing review Thompson asks “Can comic books be art? Can comic books be literature? Does the weed of crime bear bitter fruit?” and then answered his questions with a resounding “You Bet!”350 Whether critics hated his work or loved it, Chaykin’s The Shadow certainly possessed the power to induce strong opinions on both sides of the argument.

Because The Shadow was a miniseries, there was no way to publish a fan mail column.

Nevertheless, The Shadow miniseries was such a success that DC started publishing The Shadow in 1987 as an ongoing series written by Andrew Helfer. Because it picked up roughly where the miniseries left off, fan letters concerning Chaykin’s The Shadow were printed in the back of

Helfer’s new series, but none commented on Chaykin’s use of the AIDS epidemic to enrich his series’ finale.351 It is possible that no letters were written or none were selected for print, but readers might also have become more accustomed to controversial material in comic books produced and marketed to mature readers. Over the course of 1986, Americans, on the whole, become more familiar with the crisis of HIV/AIDS as mass entertainment media, in addition to journalistic offerings, began dealing with the subject following the heterosexual panic of 1985.

American cinema responded slowly to the AIDS crisis, but the independent film, Parting

Glances, earned laurels at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival and became the first feature-length motion picture to address the AIDS epidemic and receive a commercial release.352 Shown in arthouse theaters in major cities, Parting Glances focused on the friendships and romantic

349 Don Thompson, “Comics Guide,” Comics Buyer’s Guide no. 640, January 21, 1986, 43. 350 Ibid. 351 Andrew Helfer, The Shadow, no. 2 (New York: DC Comics, Sep. 1987), 29-30. 352 Parting Glances, DVD, directed by Bill Sherwood (1986; New York, NY: First Run Features, 2000). 120 entanglements of a trio of gay New Yorkers, and, despite screening in a limited number of theaters, helped launch the career of actor Steve Buscemi who played the role of Nick, a person with AIDS, and one of the three leads. David Caplan, the former editor of People Weekly, explained that during the mid-1980s “popular culture considered the AIDS Crisis a ‘taboo’ topic” and that statement is true.353 However, comic books, unlike film, embraced the crisis’s taboo nature, repurposing and commodifying it to enhance the prestige of their products and to adult attract readers.

Hollywood fought its struggles for artistic legitimacy decades earlier and, by the 1950s, was regarded as the most refined of the mass media arts.354 With little cultural capital to be gained, and the chances of incurring an audience backlash relatively high, the mainstream,

Hollywood film industry avoided producing movies that considered the AIDS epidemic until the

1990s. Mediums like comic books, that were already considered somewhat taboo because of their status as low culture, needed to fight for artistic credibility in a way that motion pictures did not. Likewise, broadcast television, unlike film, needed to reassert its identity as a legitimate artform continually because of its unmistakable nature as a commodity sustained by the financial forces of commercial advertising.

After the success of An Early Frost, NBC aired episodes that used the AIDS epidemic as a plot device on two of its critically acclaimed series, the medical drama St. Elsewhere, that previously focused on the crisis for a 1983 episode, and the cop drama Hill Street Blues.355 NBC

353 Jeanne Bonner, “Hollywood's struggle to deal with AIDS in the '80s,” CNN, June 2, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-aids-crisis/index.html. 354 For an illustrative study of motion pictures’ cultural beatification, a process that, during the 1930s and ‘40s, transformed them from products of low culture, as they were understood during the 1910s and ‘20s, into the high culture of filmic art see, Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 355 St. Elsewhere, season 4, episode 15, “Family Feud,” directed by Mark Tinker, aired January 29, 1986, on NBC; Hill Street Blues, season 6, episode 21, "Slum Enchanted Evening," directed by Michael Switzer, aired March 27, 1986, on NBC. 121 continued that practice in 1987 on other popular programs like the detective thriller Miami Vice, which, in what played as a crime-fiction retelling of An Early Frost, featured the story of a mob boss’s estranged, gay son returning home after receiving an AIDS diagnosis.356 To maintain its reputation as the premier network for dramatic television, NBC used the AIDS epidemic in the plotlines of its popular and artistically influential programs. Audiences were accustomed to seeing adult themes and relevant ills, social or otherwise, fictionalized in the episodic, genre television of dramatic programs like police and medical procedurals.

Similarly, CBS aired an episode of Trapper John, M.D., a long running medical drama, where Nurse Libby Kegler (Lorna Luft) learns that a former boyfriend is dying of AIDS and that he concealed his bisexuality during their relationship.357 Because November was a “sweeps” month, one of the four months annually when the Nielsen company surveys U.S. TV viewers “in order to develop the ratings data upon which local advertisers make their commercial buys,” networks regularly showcased controversial, often violent material to attract additional viewers and increase the estimated value of their airtime.358 In November of 1985, NBC and CBS appeared to use the controversial subject of the AIDS epidemic for that purpose. The following year, NBC again featured an AIDS-based storyline during the November “sweeps” when it aired the first half of a two-part story on L.A. Law, about the murder trial of a gay man who assisted in the suicide of his lover who was dying from AIDS.359

356 Miami Vice, season 4, episode 6, “God’s Work,” directed by Jan Eliasberg, aired November 6, 1987, on NBC. 357 Trapper John, M.D., season 7, episode 5, “Friends and Lovers,” directed by Leo Penn, aired November 3, 1985, on CBS. 358 James T. Hamilton, “Private Interests in ‘Public Interest’ Programming: An Economic Assessment of Broadcaster Incentives,” Duke Law Journal vol. 45, no. 6, Twenty-Seventh Annual Administrative Law Issue (Apr., 1996): 1191. 359 L.A. Law, season 1, episode 9, “The Venus Butterfly,” directed by Donald Petrie, aired November 21, 1986, on NBC; L.A. Law, season 1, episode 10, “Fry Me to the Moon,” directed by Janet Greek, aired December 4, 1986, on NBC. 122

Like NBC’s L.A. Law, which was still in its first season, the ABC network broadcast episodes about HIV/AIDS on shows that had not yet found their footing or were less well- known. An episode of the sitcom Mr. Belvedere, that considered pediatric AIDS patients and discrimination in public schools, serves as an example of the network using HIV/AIDS as a plot device to enhance a program’s critical prestige while, hopefully, garnering additional viewers lured into watching because of an episode’s timely or provocative subject matter.360 That assessment can be applied to another ABC series, Hotel, and its 1986 episode about a homophobic bartender who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, but wrongly blames a gay coworker for infecting him.361

CBS followed a similar formula in 1987 and broadcast storylines that utilized the AIDS epidemic in episodes of its newer or less prominent original programs. The CBS series

Designing Women considered the impending death of a gay interior decorator from AIDS when the women of Sugarbaker and Associates designed his funeral.362 The Equalizer featured the extrajudicial justice of Robert McCall (Edward Woodward), a vigilante secret agent, directed against the local tormentors of an HIV-positive child.363 Designing Women went on to a long, successful run and is well remembered today, but The Equalizer got cancelled after its next season and has been mostly forgotten.

When popular comic books began addressing HIV/AIDS in 1986, upstart comic book companies, most notably Eclipse Comics, took an approach similar that of the television networks in that they hoped by speaking to the epidemic they might elevate the critical prestige

360 Mr. Belvedere, season 2, episode 11, “Wesley's Friend,” directed by Noam Pitlik, aired January 31, 1986, on ABC. 361 Hotel, season 3, episode 12, “Scapegoats,” directed by Jerome Courtland, aired January 22, 1986, on ABC. 362 Designing Women, season 2, episode 4, “Killing All the Right People,” directed by Harry Thomason, aired October 5, 1987, on CBS. 363 The Equalizer, season 3, episode 11, “Christmas Presence,” directed by Michael O'Herlihy, aired December 16, 1987, on CBS. 123 of their products and reap economic rewards from enticing more adult readers. Eclipse Comics and other small publishers, like First Comics, challenged the market supremacy of industry powerhouses DC and Marvel, but, more importantly in terms of their artistic contribution to the medium, Eclipse and First Comics offered readers genre alternatives to the inexhaustible stable of superhero titles that comprised the bulk of the Big Two’s output for decades.

Although Marvel’s superhero titles had defined the medium for over twenty years, according to comics scholar Richard Reynolds, “by the 1980s the Marvel phenomenon had gone stale.”364 Outselling all competitors during the 1960s and 1970s, Marvel lost its perch to DC during the 1980s when DC “reasserted itself as the leading comic book publisher, by…the promoting of exciting and innovative work both in the superhero genre…, and in the linked genres of fantasy and horror.”365 Adapting to market trends more swiftly than Marvel, DC’s publication of Chaykin’s The Shadow exemplified the company’s editorial direction through its revamped pulp hero, its innovative graphic design, and its shocking themes of sex and death in the age of AIDS.

Until 1988, smaller publishers were always more eager to utilize the controversial subject of AIDS in order to generate critical esteem, attract adult readers, and chip away at the Big

Two’s stranglehold on the market. Eclipse and First Comics took advantage of consumers’ changing tastes by publishing science-fiction, horror, and adventure titles, alongside more conventional superhero offerings, in a display of genre diversity not put forward since the early-

1950s. Within the office culture of Eclipse Comics, any story that smacked of Marvel’s formulaic, teenage superhero tales was disparaged. That attitude is demonstrated by a Milton

364 Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 9. 365 Reynolds, Super Heroes, pg. 9. 124

Caniff illustration, from an unknown Terry and the Pirates comic strip, that Timothy Truman photocopied and modified, using a red, ballpoint pen, to rename Caniff’s heroes and add speech balloons. In his office doodle, Truman wrote “Dean,” as in Dean Mullaney the co-owner and publisher of Eclipse Comics, below Caniff’s drawing of Pat Ryan, and had “Dean” shout, in a rallying cry that embodied Eclipse’s esprit de corps, “…Now let’s go blow those fuckin’ teen mutants away!”366 Beneath his creation Truman wrote “Something to inspire you all!—T.T”367

Truman’s selection of Terry and the Pirates further exemplified Eclipse’s creative direction.

Since 1934, Terry and the Pirates has been recognized as one of the formative examples of modern sequential art. Caniff’s Terry helped lay the foundation for adult-oriented, genre fiction in comic books and strips.368 “Caniff’s comics were notable for their unique artistry and realistic plotting.”369 Those elements, along with its topical setting amid Japan’s invasion of

China, the shapely figures of its female characters, and Caniff’s willingness to engage with the issue of death by breaking the medium’s conventions and, on occasion, killing his characters made Terry a favorite of adult readers, especially G.I.s, during World War II.370 Looking to revitalize the comic-book industry, Eclipse Comics, and comparable publisher First Comics, aimed to offer readers more than run-of-the-mill superhero stories rendered in an imitation likeness of Marvel’s twenty-year-old house style.

First Comics’ series Shatter epitomized that ethos. A far cry from the superhero genre,

Shatter’s cyberpunk plotlines resembled the prose literature of science-fiction authors like Phillip

366 Correspondence from Timothy Truman to Eclipse Comics Office, May 1986, MS S 213, Box 57, Folder 25, Eclipse Comics Records, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, East Lansing, MI. 367 Ibid. 368 Jeff Nilsson, “Terry and the Pirates: Adventure Comics for Grown-Ups,” The Saturday Evening Post,” December 27, 2016, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/12/terry-pirates-adventure-comics-grown-ups/. 369 Ibid. 370 Collie Small, “Strip Teaser in Black and White,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 10, 1946, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/12/terry-pirates-adventure-comics-grown-ups/. 125

K. Dick and William Gibson. Shatter’s visual style was an even more radical departure from the conventions of comic book storytelling because Shatter was “the first comic book entirely written and illustrated (except for the coloring) on a computer.”371 Created by Peter Gillis along with Mike Saenz, co-creator and illustrator, Shatter depicted a seedy futuristic world rendered entirely on an Apple Macintosh computer.372 Gillis and Saenz originally brought their ideas for

Shatter to Marvel Comics who, after hearing their pitch, declined their proposal.373

First Comics, on the other hand, recognized that the combination of Shatter’s innovative artistry and sheer novelty, as the first digitally rendered comic book, would attract adult readers.

As noted by the Chicago Tribune, First Comics “made a name for itself by applying sophisticated art and quality writing, intended for an older readership, to what traditionally has been considered a rather unsophisticated medium oriented to young readers.”374 In the summer of

1985, First published Shatter as a special, one-shot issue.375 The comic’s novel use of Apple’s

MacPaint software gained the attention of journalists covering personal computing and the digital revolution for The New York Times.376 Writing for The Comics Journal, Carter Scholz commented that “First Comics’ Shatter has been publicized by dozens of media that usually ignore comics. Why? Because it is ‘the first computerized comic.’”377 Marvel’s lose proved an exceptional gain for First when Shatter returned as an ongoing series that winter and became

First’s bestseller.378

371 Jan Strnad, “A Face Only a Hacker Could Love,” The Comics Journal no. 101, August 1985, 53. 372 Ibid. 373 David Prescott, “Comic Books Make the Leap to the Computer Era,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1986, pg. 79. 374 David Prescott, “First Comics Finds Success by Targeting Adult Audience,” Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1985, sec. FRI., pg. 16. 375 Peter B. Gillis, Shatter, special no. 1 (Evanston, IL: First Comics, June 1985). 376 Peter H. Lewis, “Astronomy Software,” The New York Times, May 21, 1985, pg. C7. 377 Carter Scholz, “MacComics,” The Comics Journal no. 100, July 1985, 60. 378 Steve Roth, “First Comics is Still Third, but Has Firsts of Its Own,” Publishers Weekly, December 6, 1985, 41. 126

A hallmark of most adult comic books from the mid-1980s is that they steered clear of the medium’s illustrative conventions and embraced nontraditional styles of art. Saenz, a devotee of underground comics from the late 1960s and early 1970s, embraced the renegade artistic spirit of creative influences like Richard Corban and S. Clay Wilson to produce digital illustrations never before seen in a popular comic book.379 Writing in Step-By-Step Graphics, a trendspotting graphic design trade journal that provided tutorials to industry professionals and aspiring amateurs, Richard Edel observed that “the comic book industry is elbowing into new markets, trying to expand its readership base beyond the limited interests of teenage boys. Along the way, fresh illustrative styles and layout techniques are breathing new life into what some have viewed as a somewhat stodgy art form.”380 Comics scholar Julia Round credited Shatter for going against the grain “[i]n an industry often reluctant to take risks,” pioneering an avant-garde, digital style that inspired the bold designs of future adult comic books, and for using its “obvious computer aesthetic” to complement the comic’s narrative of corporate intrigue in a sordid technocracy.381 Gillis and Saenz envisioned more for Shatter than simply eye-catching artwork,

Gillis wrote that “we deliberately chose our storyline so that the grainlines and the grittiness would be something of an advantage.”382

The gritty qualities of Shatter’s cyberpunk storyline are on full display in the monthly series’ sixth issue when Gillis addressed the use of AIDS as a biological weapon. 383 Amid the chaos of World War III, amnesiac hero Sadr Al-din Morales is captured, interrogated, and beaten as a traitor by an army that he doesn’t recognize, much less remember betraying. Shackled in his

379 Mike Saenz, interview by Charles Meyerson, David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview no. 21, 1985, 7. 380 Richard Edel, “A Novel Approach to Comic Book Art,” Step-By-Step Graphics, September/October 1986, 54. 381 Julia Round, “‘Is this a book?’ DC vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, eds. Paul Williams and James Lyons (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010): 16. 382 Peter B. Gillis, “Shattering Myths,” The Comics Journal, no. 107, April 1986, 27, 94. 383 Peter B. Gillis, Shatter no. 6 (Chicago, IL: First Comics, Dec. 1986). 127 cell Morales bemoans that his captors “haven’t even bothered to feed me anything—except, of course—drugs.”384 Later in the comic, Morales botches an escape attempt and is rescued by a super soldier named Ravenant who absconds with him into the jungle and, while treating his wounds, informs him that “[b]esides the usual interrobang chemicals, they infected you with a whole laundry list: AIDS, malaria, cholera—they even gave you herpes.”385

Gillis’s use of AIDS, instead of HIV, again demonstrates how popular press publications habitually used “AIDS” as a general term encompassing all things related to the virus and its health consequences. More than two years after the identification of LAV/HTLV-III, and over a year since those two viruses were officially recognized as one and renamed HIV, obliviousness to the biology of AIDS cannot explain the ubiquity of the acronym’s use as a catchall term. The word AIDS contained, and continues to contain, an immense power to shock. During the mid-

1980s the word AIDS only meant one thing in the minds of all Americans: certain death. A decade would pass before effective retroviral drugs enabled HIV-positive persons to manage their infection as not an unfailingly lethal illness, but a chronic condition. Peoples’ ears perked up upon hearing the AIDS mentioned and reading it drew their eyes to wherever it was printed.

Like Chaykin’s equation of AIDS with a nuclear holocaust, Gillis used AIDS in conjunction with another technological Sword of Damocles hanging above the heads of the Cold

War’s belligerents; the threat of biological warfare. Plague-inducing biological weapons and the lethality of germ warfare threatened to obliterate humanity as surely, if not as swiftly, as nuclear combat and because of rising Cold War tensions in the early 1980s, bio-war became a matter of

384 Ibid., 3. 385 Ibid., 11. 128 growing diplomatic, military, and civilian concern.386 By the fall of 1986, reports showed that

Soviet propagandists blamed U.S. military laboratories for creating AIDS during experiments gone awry.387 Publications arguing that HIV originated in U.S. laboratories, either deliberately or by accident became a cottage industry in the years that followed.388 Conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific pronouncements about HIV/AIDS still persist, well into the twenty-first century, buoyed by private citizens and, more dangerously, from sources of institutional authority such as religious, academic, or governmental leaders.389

In the mid-1980s, after a decade of economic downturns, a declining industrial sector, loss of face internationally from the Vietnam War, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan, and a string of leaked documents and whistleblowers who laid bare U.S. secrets concerning the federal government’s violation of civil liberties and its complicity in war crimes,

Americans’ trust in their nation’s institutions was at a low ebb. Conspiracy theories about AIDS and the U.S. government’s role in creating it “surfaced in both scientific and popular sectors around 1986,” to become rooted in the American imagination.390 Jad Adams, an AIDS denialist who challenged the link between HIV and AIDS, was dismayed by citizens’ lack of patriotism and remarked “that people gossiping in the US would rather blame their own side than their ostensible enemy [Russia] says a great deal for the esteem in which Americans hold their

386 For an overview of Cold War biological weapons and Americans’ concerns over the U.S.S.R germ warfare program see; David Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Anchor Books, 2010). 387 TIME, “Infectious Propaganda,” November 7, 1986, 64. 388 For a representative sample of influential conspiracy theory and AIDS denialism literature see, Alan Cantwell, AIDS and the Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic (Los Angeles, CA: Aries Rising Press, 1988); Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996); Edward Hooper, The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). 389 Nicoli Nattrass, The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1-2. 390 Diane E. Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus: AIDS legends and Vernacular Risk Perception (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004), 91. 129 political establishment.”391 In a climate of Cold War paranoia, in a nation already terrified of germ warfare and political chicanery, Shatter played on Americans’ fear of HIV’s weaponization, and their post-Nixon distrust of governmental authority, to generate a WWIII science-fiction story that reflected the worries of its adult readers.

After the Cold War ended, a virologist who worked in a Soviet bioweapons lab revealed that, as early as 1985, the Russian’s “determined that HIV’s long incubation period made it unsuitable for military use” using the rationale that “[y]ou can’t strike terror in an enemy’s forces by infecting them with a disease whose symptoms took years to develop.” 392 Weaponizing HIV would not stem the onslaught of an invading army, but the intellectual concept of HIV/AIDS, as a disease heretofore unseen and inescapably fatal, had a potent effect on citizens’ psyches.

Heteronormative Americans’ unfounded fears of casual transmission and the propagation of conspiracy theories proves as much. Seducing readers with its shock value and overtones of sex and death, comic book creators used the AIDS epidemic to gain readers attention in a manner similar to journalists who generated startling newspaper headlines or salacious copy. Once they had it, comic book creators were free to use the topic in whatever manner best suited their story and the artistic directions of a medium reaching out to adult readers. In Shatter, Gillis intercepted readers expectations regarding the inevitability of death after an AIDS diagnosis when he had

Ravenant explain to Morales that it took her “hours” to cure him of his many infections.393

Cultural studies scholar Christopher P. Toumey criticized popular press writers who placed HIV/AIDS alongside other communicable diseases arguing that in the public’s mind “it mattered very little that some were more easily transmitted than others” and that such conflation

391 Jad Adams, AIDS: The HIV Myth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 168. 392 Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, told from the Inside by the Man who Ran It (New York: Dell Publishing, 2000), 19. 393 Gillis, Shatter no. 6, pg. 11. 130 resulted in confusing the national conversation about HIV’s modes of transmission.394 Gillis, however, is more interested in cures than modes of transmission and he placed AIDS alongside other diseases to show how easily they all would be remedied using future technologies. Gillis addressed weaponized transmission, in that all of the diseases were administered to Morales surreptitiously, and the clustering of different diseases together emphasized the miraculous nature of their potential cure. Gillis is more interested in technological advancements so spectacular that they could afford even the renegade heroes of Shatter, on the run and hiding from their pursuers in a vast jungle, the capacity to administer effective treatments for complex viral and bacterial infections while practicing the equivalent of battlefield medicine.

Gillis’s focus on a future cure for HIV/AIDS mirrored coverage of the subject in the journalistic press. Throughout 1986, stories of potentially revolutionary scientific breakthroughs followed new discoveries by the nation’s researchers and medical personnel. Articles about treatments with medicines designed to replicate the performance of antibiotics on a viral level and vaccines inspired by new developments in virology or Old-World methods of inoculation displayed a mixture of hard science and hopeful optimism.395 Miracle cures did not materialize, but a new therapy appeared on the horizon in the form of azidothymidine (AZT).396 An ineffective anticancer drug from the 1960s, AZT became repurposed as the first successful antiviral treatment for HIV-infection.397 Laboratory tests in the spring of 1986 indicated that AZT might hold considerable therapeutic promise and debates raged over whether or not to put it on

394 Christopher P. Toumey, Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 82. 395 Matt Clark, “AIDS Therapy: A Step Closer?” Newsweek, February 24, 1986, 60; L. Davis, “AIDS Vaccine Research: Promising Protein,” Science News, March 8, 1986, 151; Claudia Wallis, “Closer to an AIDS Vaccine?” TIME, April 7, 1986, 44; Matt Clark, “An Old Cure Points to an AIDS Vaccine,” Newsweek, April 21, 1986, 71. 396 Jean L. Marx, “AIDS Drug Shows Promise in Preliminary Clinical Trial,” Science, March 28, 1986, 1504-5. 397 Erik Calonius, “The Stock Play in AIDS Drugs,” Newsweek, November 3, 1986, 49. 131 the fast-track for clinical trials in human subjects.398 After months of experimentation and testing, scientists determined that the drug could, if used properly, prolong the lives of HIV- positive persons.399 AZT was the first effective drug treatment for HIV and represents the earliest halting steps toward achieving the cocktail of drugs that enabled the success of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) a decade later. Gillis’s imaginings of WWIII’s biological warfare and his references to a future cure for AIDS enhance the science-fiction setting of his cyberpunk story, but they also reflected national concerns, conversations, and developments in the progression of the AIDS epidemic.

For comic books, 1986 proved to be another year that inspired commenters to declare, as they had since the early 1980s, that the medium had finally “grown-up.”400 A Chicago Tribune article that year extolled the virtues of Howard Chaykin’s work, in terms of its focus on adult readers, in the same glowing terms that it used to describe Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The article also carried a quote from the editorial director of First Comics who said that every comic book company was “‘looking for a way to crack the adult market.’”401 By tackling the controversial and topical subject of the AIDS epidemic, comic book creators hoped to garner more adult readers by utilizing the heteronormative public’s fear of and interest in HIV/AIDS as part of the storylines of their genre fiction narratives.

Liberated by direct market distribution through brick-and-mortar comic book shops, creators were free to offer their readers stories that did not conform to CCA censorship guidelines. By recognizing and catering to the tastes of adult readers, with stories that invoked

398 Denise Grady, “‘Look, Doctor, I’m Dying. Give Me the Drug,’” Discover, August 1986, 78-86. 399 Matt Clark, “At Last Hope for AIDS Victims,” Newsweek, September 29, 1986, 57-8; Joseph Carey, “An AIDS Pill that Offers Hope,” U.S. News & World Report, September 29, 1986, 69-70; 400 Steve Johnson, “Are Comic Books Growing Up?” The Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1986, pg. D1. 401 Ibid., D1, 3. 132 adult themes and were graphically compelling, creators demonstrated to critics and readers alike that the medium of comic books could express more than the basest of adolescent fantasies. That strategy helped breath life back into the industry and ushered in a fruitful new era for the artistic development of the medium. In the case of AIDS, creators referenced relevant social issues like

AIDS discrimination in public schools, the politicization of AIDS in the rhetoric of religious figures, safe sex, women and AIDS, the themes of sex and death, the concept of an AIDS holocaust, the weaponization of AIDS, and the possibility of a cure to draw the interest of adult readers. Courting socially conscious adult readers worked and TIME observed, that publishers

“boosted sales with special issues that address social causes.”402 With a “combined circulation of roughly 150 million, the comics [were] more popular than at any other time since the early

‘50s.”403

Tellingly, all of the representations of AIDS in the popular American comic books of

1986 revolved around heteronormative characters. Even in Scout, a series that addressed the subject of same-sex attraction, the topic of AIDS was considered only within the context of its impact on heterosexuals and their sex practices. Furthermore, comic book creators approached their subject solely from a white racial perspective. Although Scout and Shatter contained Latinx heroes grappling with the issue of AIDS, their ethnicity is never explicitly mentioned in regard to the disease. In the years that followed, creators remedied their oversights in terms of representing a diversity of sexual preferences and races in their stories, but their absence in the comic books of 1986 speaks volumes about the manner in which the popular press, as a whole, framed the epidemic during its formative years. Whether derived from journalistic or entertainment sources,

402 Gordon M. Henry, “Bang! Pow! Zap! Heroes are Back,” TIME, October 6, 1986, 62. 403 Ibid. 133 the vast majority of popular communications media that considered the AIDS epidemic during the mid-1980s did so from the perspective of white, middle-class, heteronormativity.

As the nation frantically awakened to the dangers of AIDS following the heterosexual panics of 1983 and 1985, it did so within a heteronormative paradigm that marginalized the gay men who comprised the vast majority of persons with AIDS and the people of color who were swiftly becoming HIV-positive in numbers disproportionate with their representation in the U.S. population. As the 1980s progressed comic book creators adapted their work to better reflect shifting demographics, public perceptions, and sociocultural concerns regarding HIV/AIDS.

What is more, as the epidemic progressed, new developments emerged, the death toll grew, and national unease mounted, so too did popular press coverage. Comic books were no exception, and from 1987-1990 creators addressed the AIDS epidemic with growing frequency and in expanding detail.

134

CHAPTER III. THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC IN TRANSITION: FROM HETEROSEXUAL

PANIC TO TRAGIC, NATIONAL CRISIS, 1987-1988

Since the recognition of AIDS as a distinct illness in 1981, heteronormative Americans’ understandings of and opinions about HIV/AIDS, and persons with AIDS, have been in continual flux. Between 1981 and 1986, concepts about AIDS entered the U.S. national consciousness as journalistic reports, covering the spread of what was then a mysterious, new ailment primarily isolated within urban, gay communities, established and disseminated the notion of “the gay plague” through society writ large. During the early 1980s, Americans introduced to the subject of AIDS through the popular press received, for the most part, narratives that propagated gay-plague stereotypes by way of messaging that linked AIDS and male homosexuality inextricably.

Coupled with emergent cases of AIDS in pediatric patients, increasing numbers of heterosexuals diagnosed with AIDS, and the realization that cases of AIDS linked to tainted blood products and transfusions were rising, homophobia and fear of casual transmission induced the first wave of heterosexual panic in 1983. After a cataclysmic spike in heterosexual cases failed to materialize as predicted, hysteria subsided only to return with renewed intensity in

1985 during the media frenzy that surrounded Rock Hudson’s AIDS disclosure and death. While its passion ebbed over time, a substantial current of heterosexual fear remained.

Legacies of the fear and bigotry that typified discourses of the AIDS epidemic from 1981 to 1986 linger to the present day, but, in 1987 a transformation began that, over the span of several years, altered mainstream, heteronormative understandings of HIV/AIDS. From 1987 to

1988, stereotypes attendant to conceptualizations of the gay plague and the level of hysteria that checkered popular, heteronormative perceptions of the AIDS epidemic diminished appreciably 135 and gave way to increasingly empathetic views that continued through the end of the decade and served to normalize HIV/AIDS through recontextualizing it as one of the modern world’s many crises instead of an othering signifier of aberrant identity. Sparked less by a single inciting incident than the accumulation of a critical mass of information, HIV/AIDS scholar Paula A.

Treichler put it best when she stated that “[c]ertainly by 1990 many Americans could rather reliably recite the ‘AIDS 101’ litany (caused by a virus; transmitted via unprotected sexual intercourse with an infected partner, contaminated blood products or syringes, from infected mother to fetus; preventable but not presently curable; may be fatal) and the most egregious moral panics of the 1980s appeared to have subsided.”404

The years 1987 through 1988 represent a historical moment when U.S. political, social, cultural, and intellectual understandings of HIV/AIDS were in considerable flux. The feelings of indifference, contempt, and hysteria bred by the circulation of gay-plague narratives during the epidemic’s first five years slowly faded as they were countered, yet not wholly replaced, by narratives destigmatizing HIV/AIDS through removing its conceptualization as a “gay disease” from the national consciousness and replacing it with a more democratic viewpoint. As a result of official government policies, educational initiatives, acts of public commemoration, and more sensitive portrayals within journalistic and entertainment media, the preponderance and power of

AIDS-based prejudices in American culture decreased. When authoritative voices of U.S. public discourse, specifically those of mainstream journalistic and entertainment media, began offering with regularity counternarratives recognizing HIV/AIDS’s disproportionate impact on gay and other marginalized communities, in a manner which eschewed the bigotry of earlier discourses

404 Paula A. Treichler, “Medicine, Popular Culture, and the Power of Narrative: The HIV/AIDS Storyline on General Hospital,” in Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television, eds. Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, and Paula A. Treichler (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 94. 136 that framed the epidemic as a matter of marginal concern until it was perceived as a threat to heteronormative Americans, popular, public perceptions of HIV/AIDS began changing.

In the history of America’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, 1987 stands out because U.S. newspaper and broadcast media coverage of HIV/AIDS peaked that year.405 According to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it is “difficult to measure a cause-effect relationship between public opinion and media coverage. Yet, the old adage that the media doesn’t tell the public what to think, but does tell them what to think about, suggests that declining coverage of

HIV/AIDS by mainstream news media serves as one important gauge of how prominent the issue is on the policy and cultural agenda of the nation.”406 Since 1981, the volume of print and broadcast media coverage of HIV/AIDS had risen meteorically until 1987 when, following a year fraught with intense political and sociocultural debate over the future of HIV/AIDS in

America, it underwent a long, steady decline.

Both reflecting and compelling a shift in public perception, the messages emanating from journalistic and entertainment media in the late 1980s encouraged an understanding of

HIV/AIDS that interpreted the epidemic as a tragic, national crisis, one among the twentieth century’s many, and one that held ramifications for all Americans regardless of their identity.

Contesting suppositions of the early and mid-1980s that promoted a conceptualization of AIDS as “the gay plague,” counternarratives of the late 1980s gradually altered the homophobic cultural milieu that surrounded the disease since its emergence by presenting heteronormative

Americans with alternative understandings of the epidemic.

405 Mollyann Brodie and others, “AIDS at 21: Media Coverage of the HIV Epidemic 1981-2002,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2004, Supplement, 2. 406 Ibid., 1. 137

After 1987, the fear of a “gay plague” leeching into the heteronormative population could no longer propel media coverage as it had during the epidemic’s formative years because the process of recontextualizing the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a tragic, national crisis had begun and was being embraced by an increasing number of heteronormative Americans. Aided by the edicts of heterosexism that at first prevented heterosexual Americans from considering themselves susceptible to a “gay” disease, from 1987 onward, the notion of a “gay plague” fell out of favor in polite society in part because heteronormative people recognized the risks of becoming HIV- positive themselves and worked to divest the virus from its queer connotations. Forming the bedrock of AIDS-based discrimination in the United States, prejudices spawned during the seminal years of the epidemic eroded when subjected to a steady stream of alternative voices calling for increased awareness, tolerance, and support for persons with AIDS.

As a result of such counternarratives, mainstream, heteronormative thought on the subject of HIV/AIDS gradually transformed. That evolution is evidenced throughout American culture but is, perhaps, most vividly demarcated within popular American comic books. Because the narratives presented in popular comic books were directed toward a readership overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, comprised of young, heterosexual males, a survey of comic book narratives that addressed the AIDS epidemic can disclose alterations in late-1980’s heteronormative thought. Surprisingly, just as journalistic coverage of the AIDS epidemic began to decline, references to the disease in comic books skyrocketed. As comics scholar Sean A.

Guynes has observed, from “its height in the late 1980s and until it was understood as a global epidemic circa 1994, AIDS was met with an unprecedented interest on the part of comics 138 creators, many of whom were young, socially conscious, politically engaged men living and working in New York, one of the social and cultural epicenters of the epidemic.”407

Comic books published from 1987 to 1988 that addressed the AIDS epidemic, like those conceived and published from 1985 to 1986, served what their creators hoped would be the dual role of attracting a larger adult readership, through mature storylines of contemporary relevance, while enhancing the artistic legitimacy of the medium itself amid an atmosphere of growing public interest and critical acclaim for comic books generally and adult-oriented comic books specifically. After nearly collapsing in the late 1970s, the comic book industry of the 1980s underwent a renaissance after targeting an audience of adult readers that had been considered sporadically, as was the case with underground comics and their imitators during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but mostly ignored by the industry since 1954 when the establishment of the

Comics Code Authority (CCA), the industry-implemented, voluntary censorship board, transformed the comic book market overnight after most distributors refused to carry any comic books unapproved by the CCA.408

Judging from media attention, 1987 looked like it would be an even bigger and better year for the business of adult comics than 1986. In December of 1986, the Chicago Tribune reported that the magazine American Forecaster included adult comic books on its list of things that would be “very big” in the upcoming year.409 In 1987, comics were indeed “very big” and received acknowledgement in newspaper columns from book review sections to the financial pages where the benefits and hazards of collecting comic books as an investment were

407 Guynes, “Fatal Attractions,” 182. 408 Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 127. 409 Sheila Taylor, “What’s Haute and What’s Not: An Alternative Guide,” Chicago Tribune, December 16, 1986, D2. 139 weighed.410 The fact that comics were discussed in the business sections of major American newspapers shows that comics of the late 1980s were, as scholar Jean-Paul Gabilliet argues, being elevated to a higher status than they had known for decades.411 In The New York Times, a lifestyle piece made it known that “[v]intage rock ‘n’ roll is back. Comic books are back…[and] the martini is back,” via a column linking the adult comic revival with hip urbanites’ nostalgic attraction to collecting Americana of the 1950s.412 The renaissance experience by adult comic books during the mid-1980s “excited a new enthusiasm for pushing back the horizons of the form” and prompted creators to take the boldest steps possible when producing narratives for an adult audience.413

Scholars have observed that sex and violence are, generally speaking, two key components of popular culture entertainment.414 Comic books and other mediums of popular, narrative art traded on the AIDS epidemic’s linkages with sex, sexuality, and the violence of death to attract consumers in the form of adult readers, as was the case with comic books, or broadcast viewers, the number of which determined the value of a station’s airtime, in the case of network television. Even when it was not the central focus of a particular storyline, any mention of HIV/AIDS, whether in print or on air, beckoned thoughts of sex and violence to swirl within the minds of popular culture consumers. While coexisting with other associations gleaned through each individual’s unique lived experience of America’s sociocultural response to

HIV/AIDS, considerations of sex, sexuality, violence, and death were indissoluble components

410Andrew Leckey, “Collectors Might be Caught off Base.” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1987, B3. 411 Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 85-97. 412 Frank J. Prial, “Reviving the Dry Martini,” The New York Times, October 28, 1987, C1. 413 Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 23. 414 Marcel Danesi, Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 141. 140 of every adult’s understanding of HIV/AIDS due to the preponderance of journalistic coverage that had, since the earliest years of the epidemic, emphasized the illness’s apparent transmission through sexual, namely homosexual, intercourse and its frightening, inescapable lethality.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, comic book creators used the attention-grabbing nature of HIV/AIDS in an effort to expand their adult readership and bolster the artistic standing of their medium at a time when public attention and critical praise fell on comic books geared to adult consumers. While popular comic books initially addressed the AIDS epidemic from an entirely heterosexual and predominantly white racial perspective, during the late-1980s, comic book narratives began to relate more diverse standpoints. As the heterosexual panic of the mid-

1980s ebbed and heteronormative American culture began espousing an understanding of

HIV/AIDS that was informed increasingly by medical and scientific facts rather than prejudice and fear, interpretations of the epidemic as a national crisis, with consequences that touched the lives of all Americans, started to gain traction and proliferate.

Subsequent to that understanding was the growing sociocultural conviction that irrespective of someone’s sexual orientation, drug habits, race, national origin, or preexisting medical condition(s), persons diagnosed HIV-positive should be met with compassion and support not hatred and ire. Studying depictions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular comic books helps highlight the contours of mainstream, heteronormative American thought as sociocultural understandings of the crisis evolved during the late 1980s because doing so offers a window into a forum created for, and principally consumed by, heterosexual, and usually male, readers.

As a result of being drafted for an adult, consumer audience whose heterosexual orientation and masculinity were assumed as givens, depictions of HIV/AIDS in comic books 141 reveal the transformation of heteronormative thought concerning the epidemic in ways that other popular culture products, created for broader audiences, do not. While heteronormative

Americans’ understandings of HIV/AIDS had been forever marred by the concept of “the gay plague,” a foundational understanding that introduced the topic of AIDS to the national consciousness and dominated public discourse on the matter for the first five years of the crisis, comic books of the late 1980s reveal that, at the close of the decade, the homophobia and fear that resulted from that determinative conceptualization began to dampen. As public health and educational initiatives improved in tandem with increased government action, the bigotry provoked through framing AIDS as the gay plague lessened as that narrative gradually acceded its dominance to counternarratives promoting tolerance and the collective tragedy of HIV/AIDS.

As the epidemic matured and the dominant heterosexual understanding of HIV/AIDS transitioned from its fundamental perception of the disease as a dangerous medical anomaly emanating from the queer fringes of society to a view that interpreted HIV/AIDS as a national, and progressively international, tragedy whose depredations were a factor of modern life and held potential consequences for all persons regardless of their identity, a sociocultural environment of greater empathy for persons with AIDS began to geminate.

1987: A Pivotal Year

The preponderance of media coverage that followed Rock Hudson’s medical disclosure and death during the second wave of heterosexual panic in 1985 brought HIV/AIDS to the forefront of national news and marked a turning point in heterosexual Americans’ general understanding of the illness. Although prefaced by a brief heterosexual panic in 1983, it was not until the extended and more pervasive panic of 1985 that the influence of suppositions about

HIV/AIDS as a “gay plague” specifically, and as a disease of othered, high-risk groups more 142 generally, started to weaken incrementally. Voices calling for less homophobic and more reasoned interpretations of the AIDS epidemic existed within the journalistic and popular press prior to 1987, but they were routinely drowned out by the volume of cries that stoked panic by promoting the idea that HIV/AIDS had seeped out of homosexual communities to afflict heterosexual citizens and that, despite the scientific consensus against it, casual transmission might be possible.

News reports routinely divided persons with AIDS into the binary categories of

“innocent” and “guilty,” absolving pediatric patients, persons infected through tainted blood products, and heterosexuals, who contracted HIV through avenues other than intravenous drug use. A significant portion of formative journalistic coverage cast aspersions on gay men, drug users, and Haitian immigrants for supposedly bringing the illness upon themselves and into the

American body politic. Conveying tales of an innocent, heteronormative majority besieged by an infected mass of minorities culpable for the epidemic’s onset, popular reporting perpetuated the idea of the gay plague in the public discourse and helped to codify it in the national consciousness from 1981 to 1987. Beginning in 1987, the peak year for media coverage of

HIV/AIDS, competing narratives emerged in forceful enough quantities and from powerful enough sources that the process of altering Americans’ stolidly homophobic conceptualization of the epidemic began.

After the mid-1980’s heterosexual panic, an understanding of HIV/AIDS as the gay plague could no longer be squared as easily within the nation’s cultural paradigm of heterosexism. Heterosexuals had been diagnosed with AIDS since 1981, but most cases were glossed over or addressed primarily to buttress homophobic concepts about the “gay plague’s” encroachment into heterosexual communities and its ravages on “innocent” heterosexual victims. 143

In 1987, after dominating the narrative of national news coverage since 1981, conceptualizations of AIDS as the “gay plague” were becoming increasingly difficult to justify at a time when heterosexual Americans had, since the summer of 1985, become inured to a future where considerations of HIV/AIDS, and precautions against infection, would be de rigueur for all citizens regardless of their sexual orientation or other identities. In the wake of the heterosexual panic, and in light of heterosexuals’ omnipresent and occasionally irrational fears of infection, the conceptualization of AIDS as “the gay plague” became reconsidered when the heteronormative majority sought to distance itself from an interpretation that it chiefly invented, promulgated, and previously supported.

During the late 1980s, developments in the global spread of HIV assisted heteronormative projects of reconceptualizing the AIDS epidemic in the United States. As queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observed, “in its worldwide epidemiology…AIDS has no distinctive association with gay men. The acknowledgement/management of this fact was the preoccupation of a strikingly sudden media-wide discursive shift in the winter and early spring of

1987.”415 Excluding some Western European countries, the transcontinental spread of HIV across Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America was driven almost entirely by transmission during heterosexual intercourse between opposite sex partners or in utero from infected mothers to their children.416 Since the first reports of AIDS in Central and East African countries like

Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Uganda, the Central African Republic,

Kenya, and Rwanda, journalists noted that “[u]nlike America, where male homosexuals are at highest risk, the malady afflicts men and women about equally in Africa.”417

415 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 5. 416 Rod Nordland, “Africa in the Plague Years,” Newsweek, November 24, 1986, 44-45. 417 U.S. News & World Report, “Africa’s Latest Torment: AIDS,” December 23, 1985, 8. 144

Reporting on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic tended to emphasize transnational unity in the face of “a disease that by its sweep and scope has transcended epidemic standards” to become a pandemic promulgated as much through heterosexual Swiss citizens, for example, who “like to travel to Africa and other areas that offer what they call ‘sex tourism,’” as by the uninhibited sexual subcultures of some urban, U.S. gay populations that became simultaneously a scapegoat for the appearance of AIDS and the subject of heterosexual fascination during the formative years of AIDS in America.418 Remnants of retrograde, gay-plague reporting, that pictured gay populations as dangerous conduits for facilitating the spread of HIV, persisted within some coverage of the global AIDS pandemic.

Evident in a Newsweek article describing HIV/AIDS in Brazil, then “second only to the

United States in diagnosed AIDS cases,” that style of reportage can be witnessed in a description of Brazil’s annual Carnival celebration, where “homosexuals attracted to the festival’s licentious reputation” flooded the country as tourists and spread HIV.419 Such coverage proved far more the exception than the rule as the AIDS pandemic, especially on the African continent, assumed a distinctly heterosexual character. By July of 1986, the prevalence of HIV transmission through heterosexual contact made Africa the continent hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS pandemic with over twice as many confirmed cases of AIDS as North America and an estimated six percent of the its population HIV-positive.420

Congruent with the appearance of news reports remarking on the volume of heterosexual persons diagnosed with HIV/AIDS internationally, journalistic coverage of America’s epidemic began portraying the disease’s domestic expression as similarly heteronormative. Stories of

418 Avery Comarow, “The Bind That Ties All Nations,” U.S. News & World Report, January 12, 1987, 64. 419 Sam Seibert, “‘An Epidemic like Africa’s,’” Newsweek, July 27, 1987, 38. 420 Richard Z. Chesnoff, “Fighting a World Epidemic,” U.S. News & World Report, July 7, 1987, 72. 145 heterosexual persons living in far flung countries and coping with HIV/AIDS, like the portrait of a Ugandan woman whose late husband infected her during sexual intercourse before dying of what was then known on the Continent as “‘slim disease,’” were replicated time and again throughout 1987 and their ubiquity coincided with the rise of similar stories about heterosexual

Americans coping with the epidemic.421 One especially lengthy example came from Ladies

Home Journal and related the story of a woman in Texas coming to grips with her husband’s

AIDS diagnosis, and her possible infection, years after he contracted HIV during a one-night stand prior to their marriage.422 Frequently, stories about the future of HIV/AIDS promoted the belief that through an increasing number of heterosexuals becoming HIV-positive, the epidemic in the United States would begin to bear a closer demographic resemblance to the global pandemic in terms of the sexual orientation of those afflicted.423 Because heterosexuals were being diagnosed in greater numbers, the idea that HIV/AIDS was becoming something other than the gay plague was communicated in a U.S. News & World Report cover story that unambiguously stated “the disease of them is suddenly the disease of us” and declared AIDS

“now a plague of the mainstream, finding fertile growth among heterosexuals.”424

Years of monopolizing journalistic coverage of the AIDS epidemic had ingrained the homophobic prejudices attendant to conceptualizations of the gay plague into the American national consciousness and they would not be extracted easily. Scholar Lynda J. Ames, writing in the mid-1990s, observed that “the words gay and AIDS are seen as synonymous.”425 That confederation remains largely intact. Because of gay-plague narratives’ enduring authority, a

421 Michael S. Serrill, “AIDS: In the Grip of the Scourge,” TIME, February 16, 1987, 58. 422 Kathryn Casey, “For Better for Worse,” Ladies Home Journal, May 1987, 151. 423 Jefferey E. Harris, “The AIDS Epidemic: Looking into the 1990s,” Technology Review, July 1987, 58-64. 424 Kathleen McAuliffe, “AIDS: At the Dawn of Fear,” U.S. News & World Report, January 12, 1987, 60. 425 Lynda J. Ames, “Homo-Phobia, Homo-Ignorance, Homo-Hate: Heterosexism and AIDS,” in Preventing Heterosexism and Homophobia, eds. Esther D. Rothblum and Lynne A. Bond (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 242. 146 power derived from their service as templates for journalistic coverage of the epidemic in publications of record during the early and mid-1980s, associations of HIV/AIDS with homosexuality stand fused in the U.S. national consciousness. Enabling the longevity of that conflation is the fact that in the United States, unlike in many other nations affected by the global pandemic, and contrary to some futurist’s predictions about a meteoric rise in HIV-positive heterosexuals pushing demographics based on sexual orientation to near-parity in the 1990s, gay and bisexual men remain disproportionally affected by HIV/AIDS, accounting, in 2018, for sixty-nine percent of all new HIV diagnoses.426

During the late 1980s, in the aftermath of the heterosexual panic, the conceits of heterosexism would not allow heterosexual Americans to entertain the thought of contracting a

“gay disease.” Therefore, understanding HIV/AIDS chiefly in terms of a “gay plague” was no longer viable. Unable to fully depose the homophobic linkages between HIV/AIDS and gay sexuality, erstwhile homophobic narratives became overlaid with another, competing interpretation that took its cues from the heterosexual character of the global AIDS pandemic to universalize, and in the process heterosexualize, understandings of who was at risk of infection and what sociocultural meanings an HIV/AIDS diagnoses carried with it in the United States.

The second wave of heterosexual panic, and the national interest that the panic generated, cemented the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an abiding feature of the U.S. sociocultural and political landscape for the next decade. During that time, voices ranging from the government, to grassroots organizations, to journalistic and entertainment media cultivated an understanding of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that redefined it as an event akin to a tragic, national crisis and a watershed moment that held consequences for heterosexual and homosexual citizens alike. In

426 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV in the United States and Dependent Areas, https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html. 147

1987, that evaluation began to appear with regularity throughout the U.S. popular press, including popular comic books.

A demonstration of that new, universalizing interpretation of HIV/AIDS came in a comic book called Carnage written and illustrated by Richard Kane Ferguson and published by Eternity

Comics.427 The HIV/AIDS epidemic does not factor into Carnage’s plotline, an actioner set against the backdrop of World War III, but it is incorporated as part of the cover illustration.

Depicting a flurry of activity surrounding his muscle-bound, titular hero, whose hard-body physique itself can be interpreted, according to film scholar Tony Shaw as “convey[ing] the macho, violent qualities of a great deal of eighties American Cold War iconography,” Ferguson renders a cover festooned with billowing U.S. and Soviet flags, menacing intercontinental ballistic missiles, a city aflame, and newspaper clippings that recount fictional developments in world affairs inspired by current events.428 Among the copy that fills Ferguson’s illustrations of newspaper frontpages is a partially obscured, but clearly legible, headline referring to the AIDS epidemic.429

Imagining a tragic future for America, one so riven by international and domestic strife that the White House gets “blown to pieces during a suicidal terrorist attack…[and] everyone from the PLO to the American Nazi Party claimed they did it,” Ferguson’s consideration of the

AIDS epidemic enhanced the apocalyptic setting of his comic book by exploiting its association with death to enrich the tragic milieu of his fictional world.430 The cover of Carnage has only a small portion of its layout allocated to the subject of AIDS, but Ferguson included it among his drawings of other newspaper headlines that referred to America’s War on Drugs, conflicts in the

427 Richard Kane Ferguson, Carnage, no. 1 (Brooklyn, NY: Eternity Comics, May 1987). 428 Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amhurst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 274. 429 Ferguson, Carnage no. 1, cover. 430 Ibid., 2. 148

Middle East, and civil unrest in South Africa.431 By including the AIDS epidemic along with well-publicized and widely recognized matters of national and international significance,

Ferguson indicated that HIV/AIDS held the same importance and the same potential for catastrophe if not handled wisely. By 1987, Ferguson’s insinuation that governmental management of the HIV/AIDS crisis held as much importance in terms of the sociocultural future of the United States as the War on Drugs, and that the epidemic should be considered a national emergency of similar proportions, was beginning to dawn on Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration.

Ferguson’s allusion to HIV/AIDS might appear insignificant from the vantagepoint of the early twenty-first century, but in the context of the late 1980s when many influential voices in

American culture, including President Reagan’s, were loath to speak publicly on the topic of

AIDS, any consideration of the disease, especially those found in popular press sources, held the potential to exert an influence on Americans’ understanding of the subject. On the other hand, overriding homophobic conceptualizations and shifting heteronormative Americans’ paradigm of

HIV/AIDS away from interpretations of the disease as a gay plague, and toward an understanding of the epidemic as a tragic, national crisis, would require more than an artist’s insinuations on the cover of a comic book. Making that transition required Reagan to employ the sociocultural authority of the presidency to redefine AIDS in the eyes of heteronormative

Americans.

Scholars have criticized Reagan’s reticence to speak publicly on the AIDS epidemic because he did not do so habitually until 1987.432 In fact, Reagan spoke in public about

431 Ibid., cover. 432 Larry Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101. 149

HIV/AIDS so infrequently that following his first speech focused solely on the subject, made before the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) at an awards dinner on May 31,

1987, that pundits like journalist Michael Kramer were under the impression that “[s]even years after AIDS was diagnosed as the century’s greatest killer, the leader of the free world finally spoke.”433 While misinformed, it is indicative of the Reagan administration’s tepid response to the AIDS epidemic that commentators of the late 1980s and even those decades later, like journalist and AIDS activist Sean Strub, considered 1987 as the year Reagan “finally spoke the word ‘AIDS’ in public.”434

In actuality, Reagan’s first public utterance of the word “AIDS” appeared concurrent with heteronormative America’s all-pervasive interest in the subject following 1985’s heterosexual panic and Rock Hudson’s health disclosure that same year. Reagan’s first term found him avoiding discussions of AIDS, opposing increased federal funding for research, and generally abdicating his position of leadership, but, at the start of his second term, Hudson’s disclosure and eventual death humanized AIDS for Reagan, as it did for much of heteronormative America, and motivated him to speak to the crisis.435 Reagan won the presidency in 1980, and again in 1984, in part by promising to return the United States to a glorious bygone era, “a place in the world it occupied in the heady years between the end of

World War II and the New Frontier,” according to historian Peter H. Buckingham.436 Merely acknowledging the existence of AIDS spoiled the tranquility of that imagined world, but, after the events of 1985, the epidemic was impossible for Reagan to ignore.

433 Michael Kramer, “Facing Life in the AIDies,” U.S. News & World Report, June 15, 1987, 13. 434 Sean Strub, Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival (New York: Scribner, 2014), 198. 435 Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 94. 436 Peter H. Buckingham, America Sees Red: Anti-Communism in America, 1870s-1980s, Guides to Historical Issues (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1988), 158. 150

A personal friend of Hudson’s from their time working in Hollywood during the 1950s,

Reagan began addressing the AIDS epidemic publicly soon after Hudson’s disclosure in July of

1985. On the evening of September 17, 1985, Reagan held the thirty-second installment in a series of presidential news conferences. During a live broadcast from the East Room of the

White House, renowned political correspondent Helen Thomas asked “[w]ould you support a massive government research program against AIDS like the one that President Nixon launched against cancer?”437 Carried on radio and television networks nationwide, Reagan responded defensively saying that “I have been supporting it for more than 4 years now. It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing.”438 Later, another reporter asked

Reagan, “if you had younger children, would you send them to a school with a child who had

AIDS?”439 Reagan replied that he was glad to not be faced with that decision, then elaborated on his relief by questioning the scientific consensus regarding the impossibility of casual transmission.

After expressing sympathy for children with AIDS, Reagan reasoned that “some medical sources had said that this [HIV] cannot be communicated in any way other than the ones we already know and which would not involve a child being in the school. And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, ‘This we know for a fact, that it is safe.’ And until they do, I think we just have to do the best we can with this problem. I can understand both sides of it.” 440

437 Ronald Reagan, “The President's News Conference,” September 17, 1985, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/260280. 438 Ibid. 439 Ibid. 440 Ibid. 151

Ducking the question while stoking unfounded fears of contagion, Reagan’s reply, like much of his administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic before 1987 appeared rudderless. Reagan missed an opportunity in the fall of 1985 to tamp down the nation’s fear of casual transmission, and instead amplified it by lending presidential credence to such speculations. With an inauspicious and tardy entrance into the national conversation on HIV/AIDS, it is no wonder that

Reagan’s first public utterance of the word “AIDS” has been forgotten or incorrectly attributed to

1987.

Throughout 1986 Reagan assumed a greater leadership role by speaking on the subject of

AIDS more often and directing government resources toward the issue. In February, Reagan visited employees of the Department of Health and Human Services where he proclaimed that

“[o]ne of our highest public health priorities is going to continue to be finding a cure for AIDS.

We're going to continue to try to develop and test vaccines, and we're going to focus also on prevention.”441 The next day, in a written message to Congress, Reagan called AIDS a “major epidemic public health threat” and announced his tasking of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a special report for the American people on AIDS.442 Released on October 22, 1986,

Koop’s report divided Reagan’s constituency, but refuted beliefs in casual transmission, called for improved sex education in schools, and discussed in explicit detail preventive measures such as condoms, other safe sex practices, and clean needles443 In doing so, Koop became a voice of medical authority, the kind which only a year before Reagan had hoped would make a definitive ruling on modes of transmission and other topics relevant to public health.

441 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services,” February 5, 1986, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/258092 442 Ronald Reagan, “Message to the Congress on America's Agenda for the Future,” February 6, 1986, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/258274. 443 Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, 2nd ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 732. 152

Reagan addressed HIV/AIDS with growing regularity during 1986, and it became a matter of routine for him to speak on the subject from 1987 until the end of his tenure as president, but it was Koop who became “the administration’s most credible spokesman on

AIDS.”444 Koop’s report stands as a milestone in the history of HIV/AIDS education in the

United States and it can be argued that Reagan positioned Koop to take the political fallout from spearheading an educational initiative whose explicit references to sexual acts and drug use conflicted with boilerplate conservative messaging on family values. Republican political infighting ensued for months after the report’s release. Koop’s recommendation that “schools teach children about the use of condoms as part of an AIDS-prevention program was lambasted by former allies on the right who had long supported his anti-abortion stance” and other conservative positions.445 Conservative activist and author Phyllis Schlafly “denounced him for appearing to advocate ‘the teaching of safe sodomy in public schools’” and not more thoroughly promoting chastity.446 “[O]nce the Dr. Welby of the right,” the honeymoon had ended between

Koop and many of his conservative backers, but in breaking with the party line Koop forged meaningful alliances with organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, whose work on HIV/AIDS education and safe sex outstripped federal undertakings, and transformed

Koop into a complex and bipartisan political figure than he had appeared when nominated in

1981 for his position.447

There were signs, however, that Americans on the whole were embracing the newfound candor that Koop’s report brought to the national discourse. For example, although “met with considerable resistance,” advertisements for condoms began filling magazines and cable

444 Colleen O’Conner, “Koop Makes Waves in His War on AIDS,” Newsweek, March 2, 1987, 31. 445 Julia Reed, “The Hot New Politics of AIDS,” U.S. News & World Report, March 30, 1987, 30. 446 Alessandra Stanley, “AIDS Becomes a Political Issue,” TIME, March 23, 1987, 24. 447 David Whitman, “A Fall from Grace on the Right,” U.S. News & World Report, May 25, 1987, 28. 153 television stations.448 Soon after, broadcast network television began airing condom commercials, first at local stations like NBC affiliate KRON-TV in San Francisco, and then as part of nationwide broadcasts.449 In New York, Mayor Ed Koch unveiled a public health campaign to encourage heterosexual women to insist that their sexual partners always use condoms.450 An article in Ms. endorsed the universalization of HIV/AIDS as well as Koop’s forthrightness insisting that “AIDS demands explicit talk not only about rubbers, but about anuses, menstrual blood, vaginal juices, spit, cum, pre-cum, and the whole array of sex acts.”451

Because of Koop’s contention that educating children as early as possible about HIV/AIDS led to the best prevention outcomes, articles appeared in magazines like Good Housekeeping advising mothers on how to teach their preschoolers about HIV/AIDS.452

As a voice of medical and governmental authority, Koop’s refusal to obfuscate biological facts by censoring his vocabulary spurred heteronormative understandings of the epidemic to became recontextualized from their previous notions of a gay plague to concepts of a national crisis or, “a modern plague” as opposed to a gay one.453 Rechristening AIDS as a “modern plague,” or simply “the plague,” journalists’ linguistic modifications stripped the epidemic of its erstwhile homosexual connotations and contributed to the sociocultural and intellectual reevaluation of the epidemic in 1987.454

Guiding heteronormative Americans toward understanding HIV/AIDS as a national tragedy and a public health crisis that can be handled through educational and preventive

448 Bernice Kanner, “The Days of the Condom,” New York, January 5, 1987, 10. 449 Anastasia Toufexis, “Ads That Shatter an Old Taboo,” TIME, February 2, 1987, 63. 450 Harold Evans, “A Necessary Offense,” U.S. News & World Report, May 25, 1987, 80. 451 Lindsy Van Gelder, “AIDS,” Ms., April 1987, 71. 452 Dava Sobel, “AIDS: What You Should Know! What You Should Tell Your Children!” Good Housekeeping, June 1987, 73. 453 Ibid. 71. 454 Loudon Wainwright, “The Paranoia of a Modern Plague,” Life, August 1987, 11. 154 measures, “Koop’s outspoken views earned him praise from unexpected allies…including the national PTA, a longtime supporter of early sex education in the public schools, and the Gay

Men’s Health Crisis in New York City.”455 Koop’s prescriptions for sex education that included lessons on safe sex clashed with those of Secretary of Education William Bennett who supported an abstinence-only curriculum with little or no discussion of condoms.456 To Reagan’s credit, he never attempted to constrain or censure Koop’s findings.

President Reagan’s old-fashioned prudishness likely prevented him from using the bully pulpit of his office more effectively despite his compassion for persons with AIDS and his desire for effective medical treatments. Reagan “found it distasteful to make a speech advocating the use of condoms,” but his homespun modesty, whether genuine or not, engendered years of silence that irrevocably tarnished his record on the AIDS epidemic and allowed homophobic interpretations to fill the void.457 By remaining mute on the subject for the majority of his presidency, Reagan allowed gay-plague narratives to flourish within the nation’s public discourse and take root in the national consciousness.

Ultimately, goading from First Lady Nancy Reagan motivated the President to speak more forcefully on the AIDS epidemic and it was at her request that Reagan delivered his speech during the AmFAR awards dinner to reap a whirlwind of national media attention in May of

1987.458 During his speech, Reagan gave what can be considered an official endorsement of then-budding heteronormative reinterpretations of HIV/AIDS when he said “I'm not going to break down the numbers and categories of those we've lost, because I don't want Americans to

455 Barbara Kantrowitz, “The Grim ABC’s of AIDS,” Newsweek, November 3, 1986, 66. 456 Bill Barol, “Koop and Bennett Agree to Disagree,” Newsweek, February 16, 1987, 64. 457 Ibid. 458 Cannon, President Reagan, 733. 155 think AIDS simply affects only certain groups. AIDS affects all of us.”459 Reagan’s summation that “AIDS affects all of us” was not unprecedented and, even in mid-1987, it was on its way to becoming an omnipresent cliché. The precept appeared in a variety of permutations and whether the effects of AIDS were felt by “us,” “Americans,” or the “entire world,” it served as a slogan that expressed the intellectual transformation taking place in regard to how the HIV/AIDS epidemic was perceived within the national consciousness and expressed in the country’s broader sociocultural and legal landscapes.

Just as Reagan’s silence made room for the stigmatizing notions of the gay plague to become entrenched in American culture, his foray into speaking publicly on the subject aided in uprooting those ideas and supplanting them with a universal, democratic understanding of

HIV/AIDS as a tragic, national crisis and a matter of concern for all Americans. His belated response could not erase years of willful neglect, but, when “Reagan had at long last begun to deploy the power of the presidency in a war that many experts consider[ed] to be the gravest public-health threat of [the] century,” his carefully curated, all-American image aided him in promoting universalizing reinterpretations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.460

Reinforcing that reconsideration in the popular imagination, and serving as a rebuke to

“senators and representatives who considered AIDS an affliction far removed from their lives on

Capitol Hill,” Stewart B. McKinney, a Connecticut Republican and eight-term member of the

House of Representatives became the first member of Congress to die from AIDS.461 In a striking, real-life example of the heterosexual veneer being applied over the country’s bedrock

459 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the American Foundation for AIDS Research Awards Dinner,” May 31, 1987, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/252342. 460 Tom Morganthau, “Facing the AIDS Crisis,” Newsweek, June 8, 1987, 16. 461 Newsweek, “AIDS Strikes Down a Congressman,” May 18, 1987, 47. 156 understanding of HIV/AIDS as a homosexual illness, McKinney, married for thirty-seven years and a father of five, exuded the persona of a heteronormative family man and maintained that he became infected by tainted blood from transfusions during heart bypass surgery in 1979.462

However, speculations about McKinney’s sexual orientation circulated among Washington insiders for years and his Washington Post obituary affirmed that “[k]nowledgeable sources on

Capitol Hill and in the gay community said McKinney had had homosexual relationships.”463

Revelations about McKinney’s alleged, closeted gay lifestyle led the American public, conditioned to yoke homosexuality and AIDS together, to presuppose his infection through homosexual intercourse and made his death an even more tragic incarnation of the universalization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s. Given the heterosexism of

American culture, universalization unvaryingly meant the epidemic’s heterosexualization.

Beyond Reagan’s newfound sense of leadership, Surgeon General Koop’s frank health recommendations, and the death of a sitting congressman, legislative action and legal precedents indicate the degree to which federal responsiveness to the epidemic contributed to reforming the national, heteronormative conceptions of HIV/AIDS and those afflicted by it. Foreshadowing the

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the civil rights protections it guaranteed for HIV- positive persons and persons with AIDS, government action, first at the local and state levels and then nationally, began to accelerate during the mid-1980s and, over the course of the late 1980s, became recognized as a necessary adjunct to ensuring the promises of American civil society in the era of AIDS. Similar to America’s drug war that had grown since the 1940s to become an all-

462 People Weekly, “AIDS Makes Another Chilling Advance, Claiming the Life of a Congressman,” May 25, 1987, 53. 463 Michael Specter and Richard Pearson, “Rep. Stewart B. McKinney Dies of AIDS Complications,” Washington Post, May 8, 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/05/08/rep-stewart-b-mckinney-dies-of- aids-complications/19f9f106-7bde-49e7-b987-b3011d7d7915/. 157 pervading national concern and a perennial topic of sociocultural and political debate, government efforts to curtail the spread of HIV and safeguard the constitutional liberties of persons with AIDS expanded in the late 1980s and developed into a fixture of the political landscape of the 1990s.464

On the cover of the first issue of Carnage, Ferguson drew a parallel between the AIDS epidemic and the War on Drugs by invoking the two together in his illustration of newspaper pages with headlines noting events of national and international significance.465 Setting his comic book in the near-future year of 1992, Ferguson imagined that, given the epidemic’s progression, as much governmental consideration would be given to the fight against AIDS in the early 1990s as was then, in the late 1980s, given to the War on Drugs. In every respect, the

Reagan administration allocated more effort to prosecuting the War on Drugs than it did to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. In contrast with his unwillingness to speak publicly about the

AIDS epidemic, Reagan eagerly employed the power of the presidential bully pulpit to galvanize national support for the drug war using speeches and special events broadcast nationally on radio and television.466 More importantly, the passage of federal legislation supported by the Reagan administration influenced the drug war’s trajectory for decades to come. The Drug Abuse Act of

1986, signed with unbridled fanfare and bipartisan support on October 28, 1986, “was only the first of many federal laws that massively upped the federal government’s war on drugs” during the late 1980s.467 Federal commitment to waging the War on Drugs was assured through

464 For a discussion on the genesis of the War on Drugs and its evolution, see Kathleen J. Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 465 Ferguson, Carnage no. 1, cover 466 Eva Bertram and others, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 113. 467 David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 144-145. 158 legislative action, but in 1987 federal legislation created to halt AIDS-based discrimination had yet to appear.

Across the country, the first legislative steps towards protecting the rights of homosexual citizens, HIV-positive individuals, and persons with AIDS occurred at the local and state level.

Those efforts often took the form of banning discriminating based on a person’s sexual orientation. Designed to safeguard the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens, opponents claimed such legislation was really meant to safeguard the rights of persons with HIV/AIDS. Efforts in the early and mid-1980s regularly met with failure because of that association. One measure, proposed in New Orleans during the spring of 1984, attempted to establish a city-wide ordinance banning discrimination in public accommodations, hiring, and housing, but the city council voted it down.468 In New York City, steps were taken to circumvent putting such measures to a vote. In a victory for rights advocates, Mayor Koch issued an executive order banning discriminatory hiring practices by city social service agencies based on a prospective employee’s “sexual orientation or affectional preference.”469 However, in the summer of 1985, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that Koch had exceeded his mayoral powers when he issued that new directive.470

Attempts by municipal or state governments to combat homophobic discrimination often took two steps forward and one step back when public support receded during the second wave of heterosexual panic in 1985. The City Council of Houston, Texas adopted measures in June of

1984 prohibiting discrimination based on a person’s sexual preference when hiring applicants for city jobs. Hailed as a milestone, the victory proved short lived. On January 19, 1985, Houston’s

468 New York Times, “New Orleans Rejects Homosexual Rights Bill,” April 15, 1984, pg. 21. 469 Richard Haitch, “Mayoral Order 50,” New York Times, April 22, 1984, pg. 25. 470 Joyce Purnick, “Court Overturns Order by Koch On Sexual Bias,” New York Times, June 29, 1985, pg. 1. 159 citizens rejected extending the jobs protection measure in a landslide vote of nearly eighty-two percent against.471 In Massachusetts, the state House of Representatives rejected a bill that would have expanded the powers of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to protect gays and lesbians from unfair housing, hiring, and lending practices. Nearly identical legislation had passed the Massachusetts House two years earlier and supporters attributed the reversal to growing public anxiety over AIDS and its association with homosexuality.472

When anxiety started declining over the course of 1986, support for legislative protections resurfaced. Continued reporting on Ryan White moderated public fears by connecting the struggle to secure civil rights protections for persons with AIDS to an individual who heteronormative Americans could readily fell empathy for.473 A New York Times article from February of 1986, titled “Physical Suffering Is Not the Only Pain That AIDS Can Inflict,” argued that HIV/AIDS was a human rights matter and called for governmental vigilance to protect citizens from AIDS-based discrimination.474 Weeks later, New York’s City Council approved what was called at the time a “homosexual rights bill,” banning discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations.475 A year later, proponents of the bill believed its passage was “particularly fortuitous in light of the AIDS crisis which…created a backlash against homosexuals.476 Emboldened by the bill’s passage, Koch issued Executive

Order 94, “to carry out provisions of the city’s new homosexual rights law and related human-

471 Wayne King, “Houston Overturns Rights for Homosexuals,” New York Times, January 20, 1985, pg. 21. 472 New York Times, “Massachusetts Rejects Homosexual Rights Bill,” September 24, 1985, pg. A18. 473 United Press International, “AIDS Victim ‘Nervous’ About Return to School,” New York Times, February 18, 1986, pg. A10; Rogers Worthington, “Amid the Din, Ryan White finds Normalcy,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1986, pg. 5; New York Times, “14-Year-Old Boy with Aids Attends School After 2 Years,” August 26, 1986, pg. B3. 474 E. R. Shipp, “Physical Suffering Is Not the Only Pain That AIDS Can Inflict,” New York Times, February 17, 1986, pg. A8. 475 Suzanne Daley, “Council Panel Approves Homosexual Rights Bill,” New York Times, March 12, 1986, pg. B3. 476 Dennis Hevesi, “A Year After the Homosexual Rights Law, 2 Sides Still Debate Its Result,” New York Times, March 20, 1987, pg. B3. 160 rights legislation” by granting the city government authority to cancel contracts with any business or organization that used discriminatory hiring practices.477

Prior to 1987, legal protections safeguarding the civil rights of HIV-positive individuals and persons with AIDS did not extend beyond specific municipal or state governments to the federal level. Moreover, it appeared that organs of the federal government were taking measures to stifle the liberties of persons with AIDS especially in regard to their rights in the workplace. In what queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called an “ostentatious declaration…of an organized open season on gay men,” the U.S. Justice Department pronounced in June of 1986 that an employer may fire an employee with AIDS “so long as the employer can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact…that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease.” 478

Although the Justice Department’s ruling was binding at the federal level, it did not prevent states from “granting broader protection to people with AIDS and relevant ailments under the states’ laws.”479 Rebuking the Justice Department’s pronouncement, Illinois, New Hampshire,

New York and other states adopted resolutions holding that “fear of contagion is not a bona fide defense for an employer’s action against an employee.”480 At the close of 1986, Newsweek reported that “21 states now include AIDS victims under laws protecting the handicapped, and others are moving in that direction.”481

Before the spring of 1987, HIV-positive individuals and persons with AIDS had few rights and almost no legal recourse if they were terminated from their employment and living in

477 New York Times, “Koch Issues Order to Help Enforce New Law on Homosexual Rights,” June 21, 1986, pg. 32. 478 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 5. 479 Robert Pear, “States’ AIDS Discrimination Laws Reject Justice Department’s Stand,” New York Times, September 17, 1986, pg. A20. 480 Ibid. 481 Tom Morganthau, “Future Shock,” Newsweek, November 24, 1986, 32. 161 an area that lacked local or state government protections.482 That changed in March when the

U.S. Supreme Court, in Schoolboard of Nassau County, Florida v. Arline, ruled that the same laws protecting handicapped workers from on-the-job-bias also covered persons suffering from contagious diseases.483 The Arline case considered the termination of a public school teacher with chronic tuberculosis, and, while not a direct element of the hearing, the specter of

HIV/AIDS loomed over the proceedings so significantly that the Supreme Court understood its judgement would set a legal precedent that persons with AIDS or those who were HIV-positive would use to defend their constitutional rights. Their foresight was borne out repeatedly during the late 1980s as lower federal courts reiterated the high court’s ruling and upheld the belief that

HIV infection was a handicapping condition whenever the notion was contested in their jurisdiction.484 Before the ruling was even put through the rigors of being challenged and upheld,

“legal advocates for homosexual rights felt the Court was speaking loudly and clearly to anyone who discriminate[d] against AIDS victims.”485 Coinciding with the Justices’ decision, workaday lawyers with a sense of activism or practices related to civil and human rights law started considering what role they might play in molding the formation of public policies responding to

HIV/AIDS.486

Public policy, public discourse, and public attention was focused on HIV/AIDS throughout the late 1980s and printing the word “AIDS” on the cover of Carnage, no. 1, demonstrated that upstart publishers, like Eternity Comics, believed that its use could drive sales.

482 Al Gini and Michael Davis, “AIDS in the Workplace: Options and Responsibilities,” in AIDS: Crisis in Professional Ethics, eds. Elliot D. Cohen and Michael Davis (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 118-119. 483 Aric Press, “A Victory for AIDS Victims,” Newsweek, March 16, 1987, 33. 484 Arthur S. Leonard, “Discrimination,” in AIDS Law Today: A New Guide for the Public, eds. Scott Burris and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 301. 485 Ted Gest, “AIDS: A Job-Rights Victory,” U.S. News & World Report, March 16, 1987, 10. 486 Abby R. Rubenfeld, “Today’s Plague, Tomorrow’s Laws,” Human Rights vol. 14, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 17-18. 162

A creation of Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, the owner of Sunrise Distribution, a comic book distribution company that supplied specialty shops, Eternity Comics was one of several small publishing ventures that Rosenberg financed during the direct-market boom of the 1980s including Malibu Comics, Imperial Comics, Wonder Color Comics, and Amazing Comics.487

Although Rosenberg was well known as the publisher of Malibu Comics, his first and most successful foray into comic book publication, the revelation that he was also the hidden, driving force behind a host of other direct market publishers creating titles available via his distribution company created a minor scandal in the world of comic book sales and fandom.488

Because relying on hucksterism and gimmickry to “artificially manufacture hype” remains a part of Rosenberg’s publishing ventures in the twenty-first century, it is possible that he believed having the word “AIDS” on the cover of a comic book during the late 1980s might help his fledgling company sell more copies of it because of the word’s capacity to draw the attention of adult readers browsing a comic shop’s offerings.489 Yet, Ferguson chose to diminish the word’s potential impact by making it one of his newspaper illustrations’ smaller headlines and, therefore, an even more minute portion of the cover art in its entirety. 490 Doing so constrained the word’s ability to entice buyers browsing the racks of a comic book specialty shop, but it also diminished the potential of incurring a negative response that might, during an era when heteronormative perceptions of HIV/AIDS were in flux, just as easily have a deleterious impact on sales.

487 The Comics Journal, no. 115, “Distributor Finances Five Publishers,” April 1987, 12-13. 488 Ibid. 489 Ben Ehrenreich, “Comic Genius?” New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/magazine/11wwln-cowboys-t.html. 490 Ferguson, Carnage no. 1, cover. 163

Direct market sales allowed for smaller comic books publishers, who had been boxed out of the mainstream marketplace by newsstand distribution, to reach an audience at comic book shops. Competing in a market dominated by Marvel and DC, small press publishers of the 1980s also battled against each other and Rosenberg’s Eternity Comics was not the only upstart company using the topic of AIDS to generate interest in its offerings. Megaton Comics, a small press publisher that specialized in the superhero genre and whose titles took inspiration from

Marvel Comic’s massively successful line of mutant superheroes, created the first superhero comic book addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in issue number eight of its flagship title

Megaton.491 Unlike the horror stories from Tales of Terror, the post-apocalyptic adventures of

Scout, or the cyberpunk science-fiction of Shatter, the world of Megaton exists entirely within the genre parameters of superhero fiction. Megaton also differs from the pulp heroics found in

The Shadow.492 Since the superhero genre dominates the comic book medium, noting the first use of the HIV/AIDS epidemic within that fictional paradigm proves useful when comparing and contrasting future genre offerings from 1987 onward. Beyond its superhero affectations,

Megaton warrants consideration because it represents the first time that comic books addressed

HIV/AIDS and from the perspective of an African-American character.

Created by author and Megaton Comics’ publisher Gary S. Carlson, Megaton debuted in

1983 and related the adventures of Matthew Scott, aka Megaton, a black man born with two hearts who, after acting in film and television as a child star, became a teen idol and later, as a result of undergoing experimental surgery conducted by the U.S. military to relieve life-

491 Gary Carlson, “The Cure,” in Megaton, no. 8 (Elgin, IL: Megaton Comics, August 1987). 492 Dual identity vigilantes of early-1930s pulp magazines directly influenced the creation of superheroes, who proliferated after Superman’s 1938 debut, but they do not exhibit all of the trappings that together define the superhero genre, see Reynolds, Super Heroes, 7-16; see also Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 28. 164 threatening cardiac abnormalities, gained superpowers.493 A mixture of superheroic action, melodrama, and social commentary, Megaton contained stories about Matthew Scott/Megaton juggling his personal life, his celebrity status, and the dangers of being a full-time superhero following his retirement from showbusiness. Featuring two short stories, Megaton, no. 8 incorporated the topics of celebrity and African-American identity in ways that other comics that addressed the AIDS epidemic had not. In doing so, Carlson’s storyline reflected then-current events pertaining to public figures and HIV/AIDS as well as alluding to alterations in the racial demographics of persons with AIDS then taking place in the United States.

The media frenzy that surrounded Rock Hudson’s disclosure and death demonstrated that conjunctions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and celebrity identity exuded a force capable of attracting the attention of the entire nation. As the epidemic progressed and claimed a greater number of lives from a wider array of demographic groups, intersections of HIV/AIDS and celebrity identity became more common as individuals with varying degrees of fame either died from AIDS-related illnesses, became diagnosed HIV-positive, or backed philanthropic endeavors in support of HIV/AIDS research, treatment, and prevention. Carlson observed that trend and in

Megaton, no. 8 he used Matthew Scott/Megaton, his fictional celebrity/superhero, to comment on another manifestation of the nation’s fixation with AIDS and celebrity, specifically, rumors about HIV-positive celebrities.

In Megaton, no. 8 Carlson placed Scott/Megaton in the glare of the media spotlight when, after months of public speculation that “Scott was, in fact, suffering from AIDS,” reporters, fans, and persons with AIDS surrounded his mansion in Bel Air when a story appeared “in a national tabloid claiming that secret treatments in a New Jersey clinic” cured him of the disease. 494

493 Gary Carlson, “The Pulsar Project,” in Megaton, no. 1 (Elgin, IL: Megaton Comics, November 1983). 494 Carlson, “The Cure,” 6. 165

Confronted by an overzealous reporter on his front lawn and questioned about his “miraculous recovery from AIDS,” Scott/Megaton replies “I wasn’t cured of AIDS!” to which the journalist, trying to corner him, follows up by asking “Then you admit you still have AIDS?”495 Shocked into a stuttering response, Scott/Megaton retreats into his mansion before the crowd surges forward demanding to learn what he knows about a cure.496 Moments later, after his faithful butler shows him the tabloid’s rumormongering headline, Scott/Megaton flies off to “put an end to these lies!”497

Rumors about HIV-positive celebrities ran rampant throughout American culture well before Hudson’s death, but by 1987 they were de rigueur along with denials, affirmations, and obituary obfuscations.498 When a coroner-ordered autopsy revealed that pianist and entertainment icon Liberace did not die of heart failure in February of 1987 as his personal doctor claimed on his death certificate, but of an AIDS-related opportunistic infection, questions of privacy, personal reputation, and the need for accurate records for public health purposes were brought into focus.499 The deaths of various celebrities, such as designer Perry Ellis’s in 1986, were attributed to AIDS in the court of public opinion if not by any medical authority and

Newsweek reported that “[a]cross the country, AIDS cases are still underreported out of respect for family privacy” even in instances when the departed held no celebrity status.500

As with Hudson, heteronormative Americans seemed fascinated whenever closeted public figures, such as conservative political organizer Terry Dolan, became outed, in effect, due

495 Ibid. 496 Ibid., 7. 497 Ibid., 8. 498 Kathy Merlock Jackson, Lisa Lyon Payne, and Kathy Sheperd Stolley, The Intersection of Star Culture in America and International Medical Tourism: Celebrity Treatment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 38. 499 Terence Monmaney, “Counting the AIDS Victims,” Newsweek, February 23, 1987, 65. 500 Jennet Conant, “A Designer’s Death,” Newsweek, June 9, 1986, 25. 166 to an AIDS-related death and the illness’s enduring association with gay sexuality.501 Some doctors questioned what utility knowing that a celebrity died from AIDS had beyond making absorbing fodder for a newspaper frontpage. Others argued that once Americans recognized that even famous, wealthy, and well-connected citizens were becoming stricken by HIV/AIDS they would accept that, as Donald Henderson, a public-health dean at Johns Hopkins University stated, “‘it’s not just a disease of the poor and homeless…it can hit any level of society.’” 502 The press itself believed that “by insisting on the hard truth at least some of the time” exposés of

AIDS-based celebrity deaths could “make headway against that stigma and lack of full public awareness.”503 Similar logic undergirded celebrity altruism related to HIV/AIDS.

According to David Román, celebrity-endorsed fundraising efforts began as early as

August 28, 1982 when fine artist Larry Rivers hosted a $40-per-ticket cocktail party in his

Southampton home that raised $18,000 and was attended by distinguished playwrights such as

Edward Albee, James Kirkwood, and Terrence McNally.504 By 1987, however, celebrity advocacy for HIV/AIDS had leapt from the niche, high-art world of New York’s literary cognoscenti into the broader arena of popular culture. In 1985 Elizabeth Taylor, costar and close friend of Hudson’s, lent her support to AIDS Project Los Angeles, an LA-based nonprofit, and helped found AmFAR, an organization that ultimately became the largest U.S. national nonprofit dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention and research after Hudson’ .505 Furthermore, due to their former associations in the film industry, Taylor had access to President Reagan and she

501 Jonathan Alter, “Death of a Conservative,” Newsweek, January 12, 1987, 23. 502 U.S. News & World Report, “AIDS: How Wide the Cover-Up,” February 23, 1987, 8. 503 Jonathan Alter, “AIDS and the Right to Know,” Newsweek, August 18, 1986, 47. 504 David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 12. 505 M. G. Lord, The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (New York: Walker & Company, 2012), 161-162. 167 encouraged him to make the AIDS epidemic a higher priority of his administration during his final years in office.506

As an enthusiastic spokeswoman for HIV/AIDS causes, Taylor’s trailblazing activism lead America’s biggest celebrities, who, prior to Taylor’s efforts, almost universally kept their distance from the subject of AIDS lest they find themselves the focal point of AIDS rumors, to begin backing HIV/AIDS research, treatment, and prevention programs. By the summer of 1987,

Red Cross public service announcements about HIV/AIDS were airing across America featuring some of the most prominent names in the film and television industry including Robert De Niro,

Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Johnny Carson.507

At the year’s end, AIDS fundraising had “earned a glitzy reputation” and acquired a certain cultural cache despite facing criticism from detractors who believed that certain segments of the scientific community, gay activists, and celebrity-sponsored initiatives “exaggerated the heterosexual risk in order to reduce the stigma of the ‘gay plague’ and raise more money for research.”508 Those specific accusations comingled with what Jane Stadler observed, in her study of AIDS activism by Western celebrities in South Africa, as the ever-present possibility that celebrity involvement might, rather than augment an issue, trivialize it in the estimation of a cynical public who may view the celebrity’s participation as little more than a calculated, image- burnishing venture.509 At a moment when Taylor’s flagging film career could have exposed her to such accusations, her lifelong friendship with Hudson authenticated her altruistic intentions

506 Allison Lynn, “Elizabeth Taylor: AIDS Activist,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 24, 2011, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/03/elizabeth-taylor-aids-activist/. 507 Eric Sherman, “The Fight Against AIDS,” Ladies Home Journal, September 1987, 90. 508 Jennet Conant, “The Fashionable Charity,” Newsweek, December 28, 1987, 54-55. 509 Jane Stadler, “Stigma and Stardom: Nelson Mandela, Celebrity Identification, and Social Activism,” in Celebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power and Representation in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Robert Clarke (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 314. 168 and insulated her from charges of using the AIDS epidemic as a vehicle for her own aggrandizement.

Carlson’s “The Cure” explores the idea of profiteering from the AIDS epidemic when

Scott/Megaton discovers that his agent, Oscar Sherman, concocted the whole story about him being inexplicably cured of AIDS and fed it to the press. Fearing that Scott/Megaton had been killed by a supervillain during a recent battle, Sherman believed his meal ticket had expired and because the superhero’s estate was in financial distress, he decided to portray his patron’s passing as AIDS-related in an attempt to revitalize public interest in the teen-idol-turned- superhero. Confronted by Scott/Megaton, Sherman explained to him that “Rock Hudson had just died of AIDS and he was hotter than ever! I figured it just might be the way to rekindle interest in you—I had an entire campaign planned out.”510

When it turned out that Scott/Megaton had not been killed, Sherman changed his death to a miracle cure. Hurt by his agent’s lies, Scott/Megaton ordered Sherman to schedule a press conference and inform the public of his underhanded attempt to exploit public interest in celebrity AIDS deaths and hope for a cure. Flying back to his mansion to confront the crowd of journalists, persons with AIDS, and onlookers besieging it, Scott/Megaton arrives and delivers a speech explaining that “[a] cruel hoax has been played on all of us—both you and me! I wasn’t miraculously cured of AIDS because I never even had AIDS!”511 Tearfully saying “I’m sorry— but there is no cure,” Scott/Megaton watches as the dejected crowd dissipates and he ponders the lethality of AIDS responding “I’ll live…but what about them?” when asked how he was handling the situation.512

510 Carlson, “The Cure,” 17. 511 Ibid., 21. 512 Ibid., 21-22. 169

Noteworthy for incorporating junctures between celebrity and the HIV/AIDS epidemic,

Megaton, no. 8 also speaks to Americans’ desire to find a cure. Perennial reports of wonderous treatments and lifesaving vaccines appeared recurrently since the discovery of HIV in 1984, yet their promises lay interminably unfulfilled. Government permissiveness, such as the Food and

Drug Administration (FDA) allowing persons with AIDS to undergo experimental drug therapy responded to a demand of AIDS activists since the early 1980s, and had the added benefit of fast- tracking pharmaceutical development, but smacked of desperation .513 Pessimistic researchers, like those who met in 1987 at the third International AIDS Conference, concluded that the likelihood of developing either vaccines or an exceptionally effective alleviative treatment in the near future was almost nil.514 Even the most optimistic projections doubted that a viable vaccine would be in general use before the mid-1990s.515

In spite of those gloomy prognostications, 1987 saw substantial and unexpectedly strong progress made through the introduction of a new pharmaceutical drug. At the start of the year, azidothymidine, or AZT, as it was commonly known, stood poised for approval by the FDA.516

When greenlit months later, AZT became the first in a series of antiviral drugs capable of meaningfully extending the lives of persons with AIDS.517 After modifying the drug’s unnecessarily high initial dosages, treatment with AZT helped patients live, on average, a year longer and, by the late 1990s, it was recognized as an indisputable medical success that prefaced the innovative pharmaceutical regimen called highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) that

513 TIME, “Changing the Rules,” June 1, 1987, 59. 514 David Brand, “No Progress, No Panic,” TIME, June 15, 1987, 58. 515 Joanne Silberner, “AIDS Vaccine? Now, Tests on Humans,” U.S. News & World Report, August 31, 1987, 10. 516 Joanne Silberner, “AIDS Drug Approval Recommended,” Science News, January 24, 1987, 56. 517 FDA Consumer, “First AIDS Drug Approved,” June 1987, 4-5. 170 produced a sea change in the treatment of HIV/AIDS through the prescription of multiple antiviral drugs who in combination delivered superior health outcomes.518

Curing HIV/AIDS figures into the storylines of many comic books that broached the subject of the epidemic. Fictional universes populated by fantastical heroes made an ideal setting for stories exploring an idea that seemed equally farfetched. Popular comic books of the late

1980s and early 1990s that addressed HIV/AIDS featured characters seeking a cure so routinely that it became something of a cliché. Comic-book cures predicated on science-fiction technology, like the one featured in Shatter, no. 6, were joined over the years by other fanciful remedies stemming from mutant abilities, vampirism, magic, and other imaginary origins.519

Commenting on the possibility of exploiting the news media’s preoccupation with celebrities who died from or were rumored to have AIDS, as well as the country’s dashed hopes for a cure, Megaton, no. 8 presented readers with a world that more closely resembled lived reality. While replete with the conventions of the superhero genre, Megaton was set in the United

States during the time it was written and Carlson took advantage of that orientation to give readers a story that more closely mimicked what they were witnessing in journalistic reports of the developing epidemic. The most true-to-life element of Carlson’s story, however, was his depiction of a person of color struggling with the issue of AIDS.

Although Scott/Megaton only faced rumors of being HIV-positive, during the late 1980s,

HIV/AIDS diagnoses in African-Americans and Latinos grew at an alarming rate and real-life black celebrities, such as Richard Pryor, faced accusations of having AIDS because of their history of drug abuse or, more often, because of base, heterosexist suspicions about their possible

518 Dylan Matthews, “What ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ Got Wrong About the AIDS Crisis,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/10/what-dallas-buyers-club-got- wrong-about-the-aids-crisis/. 519 Gillis, Shatter, no. 6. 171 homosexuality.520 Generally excluded from journalistic coverage of HIV/AIDS, due to stereotypes that rendered the disease as an illness of gay, white men, the disproportionate health challenges faced by people of color and their communities began receiving overdue attention from national news outlets around the same time that Carlson published Megaton, no. 8.

“Finally,” U.S. News & World Report stated, “the U.S. seems to be coming to grips with the dimensions of that [health] catastrophe” in communities of color.521

Apart from the identification of Haitians as a high-risk group, ideas about race seldom factored into the public discourse on AIDS during the epidemic’s earliest years. Instead of their race, Haitians’ nationality, and their perceived sociocultural practices, were the principle areas of formative epidemiological interest. During the early 1980s, researchers fixated on xenophobic and homophobic hypotheses that blamed blood-letting voodoo rituals or amorous, homosexual priests for the spread of AIDS on the island.522 Historian Paul Farmer has noted that, saddled by the Western colonial gaze, “Haiti has long been depicted as a strange and hopelessly diseased country remarkable chiefly for its extreme isolation from the rest of the civilized world.” 523

African-Americans, sharing neither nationality nor sociocultural background with Haitians, did not believe that they subsequently shared a similar risk of infection by dint of their skin color alone.524 Medical and journalistic considerations of AIDS during the first years of the crisis mostly skirted the issue of race, or alluded to it only in passing when referencing the high-risk status of Haitians, and fostered a perception of HIV/AIDS as an entirely white concern..

520 Jet, “Richard Pryor Says, ‘I Want to Dispel the Rumors that I Have AIDS,’” December 8, 1986, 54-55. 521 Art Levine, “The Uneven Odds,” U.S. News & World Report, August 17, 1987, 31. 522 Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 2-3. 523 Ibid., 4. 524 Eric Copage, “What (and Why) You Should Know about…AIDS,” Essence, July 1983, 51. 172

Whatever qualities of racial “blackness” African-Americans may have believed they shared with Haitians; it did not override the prevailing understanding of AIDS as a “gay plague.”

Inculcated through journalistic reports and other forms of mass media, the perceived dangers of

AIDS transmission during the early 1980s were predicated on sexual orientation, and, to a much lesser extent, drug use or tainted blood, but not race. While assumptions of whiteness were implicit within the stereotype of the “gay plague,” heteronormative African-Americans, like their white counterparts, only began paying attention to the epidemic as waves of heterosexual panic gripped the nation; first in 1983 and then again in 1985.525 As in the white community,

“uncompromising intolerance toward homosexuality within the Black community and the stigma placed on AIDS as a ‘gay white disease’” caused African-Americans to turn a blind eye to the

HIV/AIDS epidemic and its effects on people of color until it became a matter of widespread national interest during the heterosexual panic of 1985.526 Regrettably, gay rights organizations, not immune to displays of anti-black racism, contributed to the invisibility of black, brown, and beige persons with AIDS in the earliest years of the crisis.

Author and intellectual James Baldwin reflected that gay men’s organizations were no more ready to accept black people than any other segment of white-dominated society and their function as the progenitors of AIDS activism during the early 1980s obscured the mounting effects of HIV/AIDS on people of color because of their insular, white racial character. 527

Historian Kevin J. Mumford wrote that “neglect and misunderstanding among white gays and the unique circumstances of black people with AIDS necessitated a multidimensional or intersectional approach” that transpired as the decade progressed, but was noticeably absent at its

525 Jet, “Doctors Explode Myths About AIDS,” August 19, 1985, 24-27. 526 Thad Martin, “AIDS: Is it a Major Threat to Blacks?” Ebony, October 1985, 92. 527 Joseph Vogel, James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 71. 173 start.528 Until the CDC sounded the alarm on an exponential rise of HIV/AIDS diagnoses in communities of color, mainstream journalists ignored the epidemic’s manifestation within them.

In October of 1986, the CDC reported that between June 1, 1981 and September 8, 1986 black and Hispanic citizens were being diagnosed with AIDS at numbers disproportionate to their national demographic representation.529 What is more, the CDC’s findings revealed that

“homosexual or bisexual men who had AIDS and patients who acquired AIDS from blood or blood products were predominately white, whereas patients with a history of IV drug abuse or heterosexual contact with persons at increased risk for acquiring AIDS, and persons with no identified mode of transmission were predominately black or Hispanic.”530 Contracted, more often than not, via unsterilized needles or unprotected heterosexual intercourse, the predominant modes of HIV transmission in black and Hispanic communities differed from those found in white ones in another crucial respect; women of color were far more likely to be diagnosed HIV- positive than white women.531

After the CDC’s report, media commentators noted that the profile of a prototypical heterosexual U.S. citizen with HIV was that of an economically disadvantaged black woman who was the regular sexual partner of an intravenous drug user.532 Women of color comprised nearly seventy-five percent of the total number of U.S. women with AIDS in 1987 and faced both homophobic and androcentric understandings of HIV/AIDS compounded by racism.533

528 Kevin J. Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Gay Black Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis, The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 171. 529 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among Blacks and Hispanics—United States,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 35, no. 42 (October 24, 1986): 655-8,663-6, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000810.htm. 530 Ibid. 531 Richard Stengel, “The Changing Face of AIDS,” TIME, August 17, 1987, 12-14. 532 Michael A. Fumento, “AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?” Commentary, November 1987, 21-27. 533 Rosemary L. Bray, “Facing the Fear: Help for Women with AIDS,” Ms. May 1987, 31. 174

Accounting for the disproportionate effects of HIV/AIDS on black women, Julia S. Jordan-

Zachery cites the intersections of “racial discrimination, poverty, racial segregation, higher incarceration rates, low-sex ratios, fractured gender-identity, gender roles, stigma, and high levels of illicit drug use” as the mixture of elements that together result in their greater likelihood of exposure to HIV and later AIDS.534 Comic book storylines dealing with AIDS reproduced heterosexist concerns and an androcentric understanding of HIV/AIDS, but Megaton, no. 8, like

Scout, no. 7, which presented a Latina character’s views on AIDS, challenged the belief that only white people suffered from or were susceptible to the disease.

As the 1980s neared conclusion, depictions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular

American comic books increasingly contained racially and ethnically diverse characters coping with the health consequences of the disease as well as the social stigmatization that accompanied it. Megaton warrants discussion as the first example of African-American racial identity depicted in a comic book addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the first comic book from the superhero genre to broach the subject. Comics scholar Jeffery Brown, has stated that, like other examples of American mass media in the twentieth century, “comic books have more or less managed to erase all cultural diversity.”535 However, during the late 1980s, the comic book medium in general, and comic books addressing HIV/AIDS specifically, began to incorporate characters whose sexual orientations and racial or ethnic backgrounds ran counter to the prevailing depictions of heterosexual, white identity that permeated U.S. popular culture.

534 Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers university Press, 2017), 77. 535 Jeffery A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 3. 175

1988: HIV/AIDS Becomes a Fixture in Popular Comic Books

The events of 1987 opened the floodgates on a torrent of comic books that addressed

HIV/AIDS. Between 1988 and 1989, popular comic books that confronted the subject from a variety of standpoints saw publication and countered the dominance of narratives rooted in expressions of heterosexual panic and notions of “the gay plague.” Triggering the concerns of heterosexuals and drawing the undivided attention of the popular press, America’s heterosexual panic, in a sense, heterosexualized HIV/AIDS, a process that had the unintended effect of diminishing but never fully displacing homophobic conceptualizations of the disease. A byproduct of heterosexism, once heterosexuals started to believe that the “gay plague” could infect them, its queer connotations began eroding in favor of a wholistic interpretation that could accommodate heterosexuality without necessarily impugning it. Comic books from 1988 and

1989 showcase the ongoing and widespread rejection of myopic gay-plague stereotypes in favor of an understanding that contextualized the illness as a national tragedy whose terrors could befall all Americans regardless of their sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity.

Beyond the benefits of Reagan’s belated leadership, improved educational efforts spearheaded by Surgeon General Koop, and the passage of legislative protections safeguarding the civil rights of persons with AIDS, instances of public commemoration reframed HIV/AIDS as a national concern instead of a shameful illness debilitating only to society’s outliers. One of the most powerful examples of public commemoration came in the August 10, 1987 issue of

Newsweek and its cover story, “The Face of AIDS: One Year in the Epidemic.” Featuring a graphic layout similar to a yearbook, the article contained the photograph, name, occupation, and a short biographical blurb about every person who died as a result of AIDS from August of 1986 176 through July of 1987.536 In his introduction, journalist Peter Goldman wrote that “[e]ach face in the album stands for a life cut short too soon; each represents a death in the American family....Seeing them gathered here reminds us that they are ours—our kin, our colleagues, our neighbors and friends.”537 Flipping through the article presented readers with a panoply of faces representing individuals from all walks of life. To be sure, the majority of the departed were young men in their twenties or thirties, but they were joined by women, infants, and the elderly from a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds.

Clearly designed to humanize persons with AIDS and convey the idea that Americans struggling with the death sentence that was HIV/AIDS in the 1980s could not be written off as belonging to any one, single identity group, the Newsweek article took its cues from an influential piece of journalism published in LIFE nearly two decades earlier. The LIFE cover story “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll” contained photos of

American servicemen killed over the course of a single week of the Vietnam War. Written by

Ben Cosgrove, the article featured a yearbook-style layout and a humanizing editorial sentiment that Newsweek replicated in its article about AIDS deaths years later.538 Cosgrove wrote in 1969 that, with their publication, “[t]he faces of one week’s dead, unknown but to families and friends, are suddenly recognized by all in this gallery of young American eyes.”539 Hoping to present the costs of the Vietnam War in a manner that avoided the callous quality of body counts and purely quantitative data, the humanizing effect of the photographs in Cosgrove’s article marked it as one of the most moving and well-remembered pieces of reporting on the Vietnam War.540

536 Peter Goldman, “The Face of AIDS,” Newsweek, August 10, 1987, 22-37. 537 Ibid., 23. 538 Ben Cosgrove, “Vietnam: One Week’s Dead,” LIFE, June 27, 1969, 20-30. 539 Ibid., 20. 540 Ben Cosgrove, “Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll, June 1969,” TIME, May 15, 2014, https://time.com/3485726/faces-of-the-american-dead-in-vietnam-one-weeks-toll-june-1969/. 177

Goldman’s Newsweek article not only contained a similarly humanizing sentiment, but through its mimicry of the LIFE article’s graphic design, it evoked parallels between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Vietnam War in the minds of readers and encouraged an understanding that considered both events as equally tragic chapters of the American history.

Like Newsweek’s cover story, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the most widely recognized and successful commemorative endeavor to arise from the epidemic, generated its cultural capital through humanizing individuals who had died from AIDS.

Conceived of by San Francisco gay community activist Cleve Jones after the death of his best friend, the AIDS Memorial Quilt made its national debut in front of the U.S. Capital on October

11, 1987 as part of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.541 An enormous, portable mixture installation and folk art, the Quilt is comprised of thousands of individual panels, each one dedicated to a person whose death came as a result of AIDS, and “is a reminder to the world of the immense and diverse scope of HIV infection.”542 Typically crafted by the friends, family, or other loved ones of a deceased individual, each person’s three-foot-by- six-foot rectangular panel, a shape that simulates the dimensions of a grave, was decorated with their name along with other words/images intended to memorialize them.543 Contesting the perception that people who died of AIDS were nameless and faceless, the Quilt became a model of community-generated public remembrance that humanized each person’s death through their personalized panels.544 When unfurled and displayed, viewers of the Quilt have been “awed,

541 Cindy Ruskin, “Taking Up Needles and Thread to Honor the Dead Helps AIDS Survivors Patch Up Their Lives,” People Weekly, October 12, 1987, 42. 542 Mary Elizabeth O’Brien, The AIDS Challenge: Breaking Through the Boundaries (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1995), 75. 543 The New Yorker, “Notes and Comment,” October 5, 1987, 31. 544 Stephen O. Murray, American Gay (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 198. 178 moved, and inspired by the power of the total vision” that simultaneously encapsulates the mammoth scope of the tragedy while expressing the singular identities of those honored.545

The AIDS Memorial Quilt traces its origins to the gay community activism of mid-

1980’s San Francisco, but its commemorative power rested in its highlighting the many AIDS- related deaths that befell Americans whose identities did not conform to the stereotype of young, gay men living in urban, coastal cities. Communications scholar Erin J. Rand argues that far from being a provincial endeavor, the Quilt must be considered a national, public memorial and site of ritualized mourning because it participated in shaping national sentiment while “working out the nation’s relationship to the AIDS crisis” at a time when national perceptions of the illness were in flux.546 Popular comic books of the late 1980s exemplify the sociocultural negotiations being “worked out” at that time. Through their increasingly complex depictions of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic and their conscientious, if not always successful, attempts to avoid propagating gay-plague stereotypes, comic books of the era exemplified heteronormative

America’s sociocultural transition away from homophobia-induced panic to a state of acceptance that understood the HIV/AIDS epidemic in terms of a national, and increasingly international, tragedy.

Exemplifying that transition is issue number one of Sable published by First Comics.547

Written by Marv Wolfman, with pencils by Bill Jaaska, Sable is a continuation of author and illustrator Mike Grell’s successful Jon Sable Freelance series that First published from 1983 to

1988 and which featured globetrotting adventures inspired by current, geopolitical events. After

545 E. G. Crichton, “Is the NAMES Quilt Art?” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, eds. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 291-292. 546 Erin J. Rand, “Repeated Remembrance: Commemorating the AIDS Quilt and Resuscitating the Mourned Subject,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 656. 547 Marv Wolfman, Sable, no. 1 (Chicago, IL: First Comics, March 1988). 179

Grell left to work on Green Arrow for DC, First reintroduced the comic’s titular soldier of fortune using a new creative team. On the cover of Sable, no. 1, the series’ ripped-from-the- headlines approach to storytelling is touted with the blurb “Realism in Comics: From Iran to

AIDS!”548 Printed vertically along the left-hand edge of the cover, the announcement was strategically placed to avoid being obscured when the issue was displayed on the shelves of comic book specialty shops. The bold and blatant inclusion of the word “AIDS” on the cover of

Sable, no. 1 in March of 1988 differs considerably from the subtle and obscured use of it on the cover of Carnage, no. 1 less than a year earlier in May of 1987.

The word’s overt use on the cover of Sable demonstrates First Comics’ faith in its ability to draw consumer attention and stimulate sales while risking little in terms of public backlash.

Since considerations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic had become an inexorable factor of modern,

American life, the mere use of the word no longer had the capacity to inspire indignation from any but the most pedantic individuals. Inundated by ceaseless reporting and years of both low and high art explorations of the subject, Americans did not agree unanimously on what to do about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 1988, but nearly the entire body politic accepted that it was an emergency that warranted considerable discussion and concern. First Comics’ exploitation of the word “AIDS” to attract adult readers to the debut issue of its relaunched series shows that

Americans were becoming acclimated to the reality of HIV/AIDS as a fact of modern life and that its presence in a work of popular fiction might be a selling point for some. First Comics was the country’s third largest comic book publisher and, looking to expand its share of the market, took chances in terms of content that DC and Marvel were unwilling to match at that point.549

548 Ibid., cover. 549 Robert Wolf, “Fight for Readers Rages in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1987, F3. 180

Aside from the marketing gimmick utilized on its cover, Sable, no. 1 is worth noting because it was the first comic book to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic using homosexual as well as heterosexual characters. Chronicling a growing friendship between Sable and Ahmed Benu, a gay Iranian man dying of AIDS that Sable agreed to protect from hitmen hired by Ayatollah

Khomeini, Wolfman wove a sympathetic portrait of a person with AIDS contemplating their mortality and a hero’s enlightenment in regard to misconceptions about casual transmission. The cousin of the deposed Shah, Benu is marked for death if he ever returns to Iran, but wanting to be buried there he takes the risk with Sable’s help.550 During their treacherous journey across the

Iranian desert Benu informs an uncomfortable looking Sable, while they ride next to one another in a Jeep, that “I promise you, AIDS is not catching…not by sitting next to me, certainly. Nor even by touching me.”551 That evening they make a cold camp to avoid detection and Sable embraces Benu to warm him through fits of the chills so violent they seem like seizures.552

The next morning, Benu and Sable have a discussion about fear and how being afraid does not detract from a man’s masculine identity. Benu steers the conversation onto the subject of his sexual orientation and tells Sable, “I know you think I am somehow less [of a man].” 553

Explaining that Iranian sexual mores and the performance of masculinity differs from that of the

Western world so much so that “it is not uncommon for men to take small boys or girls for sex when a woman is not available,” Benu alludes to his sexual awakening and Sable questions him about safe sex asking if he ever “protected” himself.554 Benu replies, “Eight years ago? Who thought to? And I had been faithful to my lovers.”555 Subverting the stereotype that promiscuity,

550 Wolfman, Sable, no. 1, 3. 551 Ibid., 8. 552 Ibid., 10. 553 Ibid., 11. 554 Ibid. 555 Ibid. 181 specifically gay promiscuity, bore responsibility for every instance of AIDS, and challenging the notion that monogamy offered sufficient protection from infection, Wolfman depicted Benu in a multidimensional manner that elevated his character beyond what might have become a blundering caricature of a person with AIDS.

In the early-1980s, rampant gay promiscuity became scapegoated to shoulder much the blame for the onset and spread of AIDS. When heterosexuals’ fear of contracting HIV during sexual intercourse emerged in full force during the mid-1980s, incriminations against gay promiscuity collapsed under the weight of the heterosexual panic. The shift toward abandoning gay-plague conceptualization of the AIDS epidemic in favor of views defining it as a national tragedy dovetailed with the reinterpretation of all sex, to a degree, but especially unprotected sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, as dangerous. By 1987, health practitioners advising heteronormative audiences counseled that, even within monogamous relationships, safe sex should be practiced if the relationship was less than five years old.556 Other articles, such as one from Mademoiselle that declared “All across the country, bodies lie in ruins. The temple of the flesh has fallen, and desire has tucked away its head like a turtle besieged,” had more hyperbolic pronouncements.557 Warned of the failure rates of condoms and encouraged by official government edicts that sexual “restraint” remained the best way to protect oneself, a new puritanism surrounding sex emerged.558 An understandable reticence to engage in sex began to dominate the sociocultural dynamics of American sexuality

Enhancing the realism of Wolfman’s fictional person with AIDS, penciler Bill Jaaska’s illustrations portrayed the first visibly ill person with AIDS in the panels of a popular American

556 Ann Giudici Fettner, “The AIDS Scare: Answers to frightening Questions,” Redbook, April 1987, 32. 557 Ian Shoales, “In Case You Hadn’t Noticed…Sex is Over,” Mademoiselle, August 1987, 186. 558 Joseph Carey, “Condoms May Not Stop AIDS,” U.S. News & World Report, October 19, 1987, 83. 182 comic book. Other comic books, specifically Chaykin’s The Shadow, no. 4, contained characters with AIDS, but none bore any of the physical debilitations that were the hallmark of AIDS in its advanced stages. Kaposi Sarcoma blotches, extreme weight loss, fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, seizures, blindness, cognitive failure, and a host of other maladies marked persons with AIDS for stigmatization and significantly contributed to their sense of isolation during the final phases of their lives.559 When introduced to Benu, readers were met with a character whose jaundiced skin and sallow, sunken features indicated the seriousness of his condition.560

Described by Susan Jeffords as “an era of bodies. From the anxieties about Reagan’s age… to the identification of ‘values’ through an emphasis on drug use, sexuality, and childbearing; to the thematized aggression against persons with AIDS,” Jeffords contends that the markers of illness interpreted by observers as the bodily signifiers of HIV/AIDS communicated sociocultural messages about “errant” versus “normative” bodies within a dialectic of reasoning prescribed by the period’s prevailing ethos of conservatism.561 Deemed an errant body within Jefford’s cultural paradigm the 1980s, because of his homosexuality and

AIDS diagnosis, Benu personified an identity that existed at odds with much of mainstream society. What makes Sable, no. 1 remarkable is that Benu’s errant body becomes reframed by a heroic narrative that normalizes it using a humanistic portrayal of the expatriate’s struggle to thwart America’s Iranian enemies, return to his homeland, and die with dignity.

Jaaska’s illustrations of a character physically debilitated by HIV/AIDS was something new for the medium and reflected heteronormative America’s broadening understanding of the

559 Karen Zivi, “Constituting the ‘Clean and Proper’ Body: Convergences between Abjection and AIDS,” in Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS, eds. Nancy L. Roth and Katie Hogan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 41. 560 Wolfman, Sable, no. 1, 2 561 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 24. 183 epidemic’s bodily ravages. More importantly it demonstrates a reconsideration of persons with

AIDS as errant, weak, or otherwise lesser than. Serving the story as one of its protagonists,

Wolfman and Jaaska placed the character Benu in the position to controvert dominant and demeaning perceptions of persons with AIDS. That depiction represented the defiant spirt impelling creative decisions at First Comics which helped the company differentiate itself from its larger and more powerful competitors DC and Marvel Comics. Rick Obadiah, First’s publisher, summarized that philosophy by saying “‘Every comic book character until this point was a young, virile man who leaped tall buildings in a single bound.’”562 Heroes at First Comics rarely fit that mold. Featuring heroes whose identities and abilities ran counter to the medium’s conventions assisted the upstart company in drawing adult readers hungry for stories that avoided the predictable hallmarks of the superhero genre.

Laudable for its efforts to produce a story that considered such complex topics as AIDS, homosexuality, heterosexual paranoia, masculinity, transnational identity, and U.S.-Iranian relations, Sable, no. 1 stumbled near the end of its tale when Wolfman backtracked Benu’s monogamous nature when, shouting at phantoms during a fever dream as he nears death, the character confessed to an absent lover, “Javad,” who he has been conversing with in his delirium, that “Fathi…was a mistake…forgive me.”563 Implying that Benu had an affair through which he became infected and, perhaps, infected his lover, Wolfman’s writing blunders into the pitfall of suggesting that if it were not for gay men’s unchecked promiscuity, the HIV/AIDS epidemic would not have occurred. Despite a growing atmosphere of acceptance for persons with AIDS,

Wolfman’s eleventh-hour return to one of the stereotypes of the “gay plague” demonstrated the

562 Mark Jannot, “Comic Operator,” Chicago, April 1988, 95. 563 Wolfman, Sable, no. 1, 23. 184 cultural durability of such notions. Some comic books, like DC’s maxiseries Sonic Disruptors, looked at those still potent currents of homophobic bigotry through a satirical lens.

Written by Mike Baron and penciled by Barry Crain, Sonic Disruptors takes place in a technologically advanced future where the oppressive governments of the United States and the

People’s Republic of China vie for world domination while rock-n-roll revolutionaries occupy island city-states and a gigantic space station that they have converted into the world’s most powerful radio transmitter and pirate radio station. The covers of Sonic Disruptors carried the label “SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS” that emblazoned many of DC’s direct market titles indicating their intended audience.564 Admonitions which branded certain comic books as

“for mature readers,” were often more to attract adult readers than to dissuade retailers from recommending those titles to children. Jenette Kahn, President and Publisher of DC Comics, argued that the labeling was a form of advertising that helped adult readers easily locate DC titles they might enjoy when browsing the stock of a comic shop.565

Baron’s maxiseries earned its “SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS” epithet primarily through its extremely critical portrayal of rightwing, evangelical Christianity and some of the hateful views ensconced in the rhetoric of some religious leaders. Introduced in the series’ second issue, one of the cronies of the fascistic U.S. president is a simpering caricature of a

Protestant preacher who blesses a state dinner at the White House by praying that “the hippies, the faggots…liberal humanists and lovers of rock music…all drop dead of AIDS which is your secret weapon in the fight against godless homosexuality in the first place, amen.”566 Baron’s work served as a retort to the statements of rightwing religious leaders like Jerry Falwell who

564 Mike Baron, Sonic Disruptors, no. 1-7 (New York: DC Comics, December 1987- July 1988). 565 Comics Buyer’s Guide, no. 684, “DC Comics Releases Comic-Book Editorial Standards,” December 26, 1986, 16. 566 Baron, Sonic Disruptors, no. 2, 21. 185 wholeheartedly endorsed a theological interpretation of HIV/AIDS estimating the disease as

God’s divine retribution against those who engage in homosexual acts.567

Baron’s lampooning of authority figures from the religious right to the American president reproduced the views of the real-life analogues to the iconoclastic rock bands he lionized in Sonic Disruptors. In a 1987 issue of the music industry fan magazine Creem, Mick

Hucknall the lead singer of Simply Red bemoaned the state of the world saying “we can blow up any minute, catch AIDS any minute. This damned shit it’s gonna wipe the world out.”568

Hucknall harangued “the priests, with their hypocritical bullshit” and world leaders who “are too busy playing with their bombs” in a manner that Baron imitated for his iconoclastic protagonists.569 Sonic Disruptors did not devote any pages to fan letters so it is difficult to gage whether or not readers appreciated Baron’s mocking take on late-1980s America, but with the series being cancelled after only seven issues, instead of running the full twelve that were planned, we can assume that the general response was not a good one.

Baron’s comic may have been too extreme, not only in its criticism of the religious right and the U.S. government, but also in its frequent, positive depictions of recreational marijuana smoking and other countercultural behaviors. Baron’s agitations against the societal norms aside, critic Don Thompson’s observation that Sonic Disruptors squandered its “promising start” and developed a “tendency to drag after only three issues” might be closer to the actual reason for the series’ low sales and eventual cancellation.570 However, the homophobia that still permeated segments of American sociocultural life, as Baron’s work highlighted, probably contributed, on some level, to publishers’ reluctance to print more comic books addressing the AIDS crisis.

567 Jerry Falwell, “AIDS: The Judgement of God,” Liberty Report, April 1987, 2, 5. 568 Gregg Khruschev Turner, “Simply Red: Good Class II Xerox,” Creem 18, no. 11, July 1987, 41. 569 Ibid. 570 Don Thompson, “Comics Guide,” Comics Buyer’s Guide no. 739, January 15, 1988, 30. 186

Historian Doug Rossinow described 1987 as a year when “conservative jurists, flamboyant conservative preachers, self-righteous Wall Street ‘masters of the universe’ …, and champions of military confrontation in the Third World” all saw their political and sociocultural influence waning as Reagan’s administration entered its lame duck phase.571 With conservative fortunes fading, popular acceptance of gay-plague stereotypes and homophobia on the part of heteronormative society writ large diminished, but never fully dissipated.

Emblematic of the clout still wielded by some icons of conservatism, North Carolina

Senator Jesse Helms led a successful crusade to demand that all federally financed AIDS- education materials emphasize abstinence and promote neither homosexuality nor drug use after he accused Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) of publishing an AIDS-education comic book to

“‘promote sodomy.’”572 It was true that GMHC received $674,679 for AIDS education research from the CDC and that the safe sex comic books the non-profit organization produced were explicit, but they were printed using funds from a private donor, a point Helms conceded, and were created for an audience of bathhouse patrons and gay bar-hoppers in New York City.573 In spite of those facts, Helms’ demands became part of an amendment tacked onto an omnibus spending bill that included a ban on travel of HIV-positive foreign nationals into the United

States proving that the New Right had not entirely lost its sway in the legislature.574

Helms said he wanted “‘American taxpayer’s dollars to be spent in a moral way’” and the

Senate passed his amendment in a landslide, bipartisan vote of 94 to 2.575 In the House, the amendment passed with almost as sweeping a victory. In a 368-to-44 vote, congresspeople, both

571 Doug Rossinow, The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 222. 572 Associated Press, “Explicit Comic Book on AIDS No Laughing Matter in Senate,” Washington Post, October 15, 1987, pg. A23. 573 William Booth, “Another Muzzle for AIDS Education,” Science, November 20, 1987, 1036. 574 Gina M. Bright, Plague Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114. 575 Associated Press, “Explicit Comic Book on AIDS,” A23. 187

Democrat and Republican, indicated that Helms’ homophobic imposition of moral values on techniques of disseminating public health information stuck a chord with broad swaths of their respective political constituencies.576 A testament to the endurance of the HIV/AIDS-prejudice that motivated the congressional vote, it was not until 2010 when President Barack Obama completed a task begun by President George W. Bush in 2008 by lifting the travel ban on HIV- positive foreign nationals.577 Taking advantage of the homophobia and heterosexism that undergirded heteronormative understandings of HIV/AIDS despite a growing consensus that the epidemic constituted a tragic, national crisis with ramifications for all people regardless of their sexual orientation, Helms’ effective legislative push evidenced that in 1987 the electorate retained considerable feelings of animosity that typified all depictions of gay sex, even safe, gay sex, as a tools of homosexual indoctrination and blanketly viewed HIV-positive persons as a foreign threat to the U.S. population.

Publishers, unsure of how the public would receive comic books dealing with HIV/AIDS or homosexuality reconsidered some of their scheduled publications and were reticent to print material that might be deemed offensive by both liberal and conservative opponents.

Fantagraphics Books, which specialized in publishing underground comic book artists and reprinting edgy or obscure material, hesitated to publish an anthology that contained two short comic stories depicting a love affair between Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors. Both comics were originally created and published before the public learned of Hudson’s condition, but

Fantagraphics feared a backlash from Hudson’s estate or AIDS activists if they reprinted the

576 Joel Bleifuss, “Gay Sex Stops Here,” In These Times, November 18-24, 1987, 4. 577 Bright, Plague Making and the AIDS Epidemic, 115. 188 stories.578 Ultimately, Gary Groth, Fantagraphics’s publisher, resolved to abide by whatever

Drew Friedman, the comic’s creator, decided. Friedman opted to reprint the comics.579

Further demonstrating some publishers’ hesitancy to involve themselves in the sociocultural debate surrounding the AIDS epidemic, The Comics Journal published an article containing allegations from editor and author Mindy Newell that Dick Giordano, the Vice-

President and Executive Editor of DC Comics, deliberately stymied the publication of a comic book she was creating about AIDS.580 Newell claimed that Giordano originally suggested she use a well-known DC character for her story and recommended The Elongated Man, knowing that such a character would be rejected at a DC editorial retreat “because of jokes that could be made about associating The Elongated Man with AIDS.”581 Newell alleged that Giordano then refused her the use of any other characters she suggested. Whether Newell’s allegations are true or not, they indicate a reluctance on the part of DC Comics to associate familiar, superhero properties with HIV/AIDS. Thus far, DC Comics only published stories concerning AIDS in comic books featuring long forgotten characters, like those in The Shadow, or entirely original creations, like those in Sonic Disruptors. Facing editorial pressures, it is commendable that creators succeeded in getting at least some of their stories addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic published at all.

Proof that some publishers were more opposed to discussing AIDS than others came from an article in Omni wherein Marvel Comics writer Bill Mantlo talked about the company’s reluctance to let him broach the subject in his revamped version of Alpha Flight by having one of the superhero team’s members, Northstar, come out of the closet and reveal that he has AIDS. 582

578 Comics Buyer’s Guide, no. 636, “Fantagraphics Books Staff Splits Over Printing Cartoons of Rock Hudson,” January 24, 1986, 16. 579 Ibid. 580 The Comics Journal no. 119, “Newswatch,” January 1988, 13. 581 Ibid. 582 Dane Hall, “Comic Reality,” Omni, January 1988, 74. 189

Mantlo claimed that Marvel was too afraid “‘people in the bible belt would stop buying the book,’” and their worries over lost revenue would not have been unfounded because, unlike all of Eclipse and First’s titles, and many of DC’s, Marvel still sold a considerable share of its books via newsstand distribution.583 That meant titles like Alpha Flight required the CCA’s stamp of approval to be stocked at newsstands, something a story discussing AIDS was unlikely to receive. What is more, titles distributed on the newsstands reached a wider, younger, and far more general audience of casual readers than those stocked for and geared toward older, comic book connoisseurs at specialty shops. More apt to become offended, or to have their parents become offended for them, Marvel titles with an intended audience that skewed toward adolescent readers, as many of their books at the time including Alpha Flight did, were not going to be the testing ground for the publisher’s first effort at addressing the epidemic.

To mitigate the possibility of outrage, Mantlo decided to neither have Northstar come out nor unequivocally address HIV/AIDS. Instead, gay comic book fans became incensed when,

Northstar, who was coded as a gay man throughout the series, and whose creator, John Byrne, intended for him to be gay from his inception, would stay closeted and gradually expire from a disorder that replicated the maladies of AIDS-related illnesses but was brought on by the powers of a supervillain and never explicitly called “AIDS.”584 To avoid complete censure by the editorial powers at Marvel, Mantlo chose to take the path of least resistance and refer to an illness that was “‘really AIDS in another disguise’” instead of addressing HIV/AIDS unambiguously.585 Buckling under pressure from his superiors, Mantlo’s decision to censor his

583 Ibid. 584 Kevin McKinney, “So Long, Northstar, We Hardly Knew You,” The Advocate, August 18, 1987, 31-32. 585 Ibid., 33. 190 original vision shows that Marvel Comics, in an era of heightened public interest and rising acceptance, still believed that HIV/AIDS was controversial enough to not risk mentioning it.

Publishers’ unwillingness to court controversy was stimulated, in part, by calls for comic book censorship. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, the booming market in adult comic books triggered a minor backlash. Comics that dealt with sex or sexuality seemed to attract the strongest condemnation.586 Others decried the medium for its sexist portrayals of women that they claimed sent “subconscious messages supporting female stereotypes.”587 Frank Miller, in an editorial for Comics Buyer’s Guide, advised the industry to stand firm in the face of “[p]ublicity- seeking parents and power-hungry evangelists [who] are waving comic books in front of television cameras, claiming that our poor, wide-eyed, impressionable, suggestible, programable children are being turned to sexual perversion, Satan’s way, or both, by comic books.”588

Miller’s rhetoric came after the arrest of the manager at Friendly Frank’s Comic Store in

Lansing, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago, who was charged with displaying obscene materials.589 The arrest resulted in years of lengthy court battles and provided the impetus for

Denis Kitchen, publisher of Kitchen Sink Press, to establish the nonprofit Comic Book Legal

Defense Fund (CBLDF).590 Having published Omaha the Cat Dancer, an adult comic book about the life of an anthropomorphized cat who works as an exotic dancer, that was among the comic books that an Illinois district court found obscene, Kitchen founded the CBLDF to protect

586Jason Sacks, “Watchmen and the Watchers of the Comics Industry,” in American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1980s, ed. Keith Dallas (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2019), 181-182. 587 USA Today (periodical), “Comic Books Foster Female Stereotypes,” December 1986, 15 588 Frank Miller, “Guest Editorial,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, December 12, 1986, 4. 589James Danky and Denis Kitchen, Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009), 131. 590 Casey Gilly, CBLDF’s First Case, 30 Years Later, November 18, 2016, http://cbldf.org/2016/11/cbldfs-first- case-30-years-later/. 191 the First Amendment rights of creators and retailers and to assist in the legal costs of appeals. 591

Alternative publications from companies like Kitchen Sink Press were most endangered by calls for censorship, and behemoth operations Marvel and DC never published anything that wavered too far afield of mainstream content, but with retailers feeling skittish about stocking anything too extreme, publishers adjusted their output accordingly.592

Small publishers like Eclipse Comics and First Comics believed the rewards of addressing HIV/AIDS outweighed the risks of causing offense. Marvel Comics, and its stable of globally-recognized characters, had more to lose from gambling on the inclusion of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic within a comic-book canon stretching back, in the case of their most popular heroes, decades. Reorienting its business model to capitalize on the adult readers of a burgeoning market, DC hedged its bets by initially including the topic only in limited series like

Chaykin’s The Shadow or Baron’s Sonic Disruptors that were distributed through the direct market only, aimed squarely at adults, and contained only inhouse advertisements. In 1987, The

Village Voice remarked that “DC and Marvel still could not go as far as the indies (after all, they had a certain reputation to maintain, and advertisers to answer to),” when depicting issues pertaining to sex or other contentious subjects.593 In 1988, however, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had become an inescapable consideration of American life spurring Marvel Comics to address the epidemic for the first time and DC to utilize the subject in the stories of one of its most recognizable superheroes.

DC published a number of extremely well received and historically significant limited series between 1986 and 1987. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns four-issue miniseries

591 Calvin Reid, “Comics Producers Fight Obscenity Ruling Against Illinois Bookstore,” Publishers Weekly, April 1, 1988, 12. 592 Ibid. 593 Henry Beck, “Sex and Breasts and Comic Books: A Brief History,” The Village Voice, July 14, 1987, 45. 192 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen twelve-issue maxiseries were two of DC titles that critics heralded as transformative works of the medium in the same glowing tones used to describe Spiegelman’s

Maus. The wave of consumer enthusiasm and critical goodwill generated by those titles emboldened DC to take more creative risks. Fawning articles devoted to adult comic books and their celebrity creators like Chaykin, Miller, and Moore proliferated. “Literary honors, respectful reviews, museum exhibits—even academic attention” were bestowed on the medium’s new vanguard of authors and artists.594

Rolling Stone posited that the comic book medium’s “new generation of storytellers…are among the more intriguing literary and graphic craftsmen of our day.”595 TIME, in an article praising Miller, Spiegelman, and Moore, argued for adopting the term “graphic novel” as a substitute for “comic books” because that identifier came burdened with “suggestions of arrested adolescent development” that could not accommodate the breadth and scope of the new creators’ ambitions.596 The Chicago Tribune newspaper, in its review of Watchmen, described the comic book as having “the gripping narrative power that has been crucial to popular culture since the days of Charles Dickens.”597

Screenwriter and novelist Harlan Ellison, remarking on the comic book medium’s escape from its pigeonhole on the lowest rung of American popular culture, proclaimed in Playboy that

“It was The Watchmen [sic], following the Dark Knight opus, that kicked the Gulag’s door off its hinges. As exciting as Hammett, as intricate as Proust, as socially insightful as Auchincloss, if comics have approached literature, it is here.”598 A decade later, scholar Roger Sabin insisted

594 Art Levine, “Comic Books are Winning New Respect,” U.S. News &World Report, September 21, 1987, 69. 595 Gilmore, “Comic Genius,” 56-58. 596 John Elson, “The Passing of Pow! And Blam!” TIME, January 25, 1988, 65. 597 Chicago Tribune, “A Comic Book as Gripping as Dickens,” December 2, 1987, D3. 598 Harlan Ellison, “It Ain’t Toontown,” Playboy, December 1988, 226. 193 that the greatest lasting impact of creators like Spiegelman, Chaykin, Miller, and Moore was “not to revolutionize comics, as has often been supposed, but to introduce a new readership” to the world of adult comics.599 Unbridled praise came from many quarters and surveys of the comic book medium in the popular press reported with some amazement, as Newsweek did, that

“[c]omic books, say those who make them now, can be about anything. Far from being escapist entertainment, much of what’s being done in the genre embraces the discontents of everyday living.”600 That assessment was undoubtedly true in terms of comic-book representations of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic. Emboldened by success and no longer opposed to the prospect of superheroes being used in a storyline that included the HIV/AIDS epidemic, DC Comics published many titles between 1988 and 1990 that used characters that had been established over decades and were recognizable to a goodly portion of the public, but were not as iconic as top tier, globally recognizable heroes such as Superman and Batman. Mike Grell’s Green Arrow series serves as the foremost example of that trend.

A lesser-known hero whose inception in the early 1940s coincided with a surge of superheroic characters debuting in the wake of Superman and Batman’s successes in 1938 and

1939 respectively, Green Arrow had been revamped several times over the course of the ensuing decades. During the early 1970s, writer Denny O’Neil transformed the Emerald Archer into a countercultural figure who embodied a critical left-wing view of Nixon’s America.601 Green

Arrow’s liberal sentiment has endured since then. When DC Comics tapped Mike Grell to write an ongoing series featuring Green Arrow, a character that he had recently revived in a successful

599 Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996), 165. 600 Peter S. Prescott, “The Comic Book (Gulp!) Grows Up,” Newsweek, January 18, 1988, 70. 601 Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 75. 194

1987 miniseries called Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, Grell used the opportunity to consider the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Containing a “SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS” label, Grell’s two-issue story revolved around the topic of “gay bashing” and Green Arrow’s search for a murderer who targeted gay men.602 Grell revealed that the killer, a mid-level gang leader named Kebo, required his teenage recruits to attack gay couples strolling through the park as part of their initiation.603

Figuring “hey, who’s going to miss a few faggots,” the homophobic Kebo used his young charges to enact revenge against gay men because he contacted “AIDS” after being raped in prison and believed gay men were to blame reasoning “they killed me so why shouldn’t I kill them back?”604 Grell depicts the villainous Kebo endorsing gay-plague stereotypes wholeheartedly and referred to AIDS as “their damn disease!605 Kebo meets a violent end at the hands of his boss who shoots him to prevent the police from tracing the series of gay-bashing murders back to his gang and its illegal business in drugs and prostitution.606 The issue concludes with Green Arrow vowing to eliminate the gang and its stranglehold on the impoverished neighborhood that it operates in.

Fan letters commenting on the story filled Green Arrow’s letters page over the course of the next few months and comics fans from all over America voiced their near-universal approval of the two-part story.607 One gay man wrote that he was “very impressed with the thought and

602 Mike Grell, Green Arrow, nos. 5-6 (New York: DC Comics, June-July 1988). 603 Grell, Green Arrow, no. 6, 16. 604 Ibid.16, 22. 605 Ibid., 22. 606 Ibid., 23. 607 Grell, Green Arrow, nos. 8-10 (New York: DC Comics, September-November 1988). Mike Gold, who edited Green Arrow, also selected fan letters for publication and it is possible that he only included the most positive examples. 195 sensitivity depicted” by Grell.608 Another gay fan said he “wept” while reading the story.609

Heterosexual readers responded as well, appreciating the story for Grell’s refusal to portray gay men as “perverts, weirdos, or anything resembling one” according to an earnest, if not articulate, reader from California.610 One especially observant fan noted that “the age of the average comic book reader has risen drastically (and with the mature readers label), DC can approach subjects such as gay bashing.”611 The same reader discussed visiting an installation of the NAMES

Project AIDS Memorial Quilt during its nationwide tour that year and how his experience demonstrated to him that, irrespective of identity, “only by pulling together as a community can we defeat this damned virus.”612 The opinions of Green Arrow’s readership, and their receptivity to the comic’s portrayal of homosexuality, homophobic violence, and HIV/AIDS reflected newspaper reports of trends toward more “openness and understanding” between homosexual and heterosexual Americans.613 With the epidemic entering its seventh year, citizens of all stripes were becoming better informed about HIV/AIDS, its etiology, and the sociocultural consequences of homophobia and heterosexism.

One fan that criticized the story did so from a perspective that, even in its reproach, revealed how better understandings of the sociocultural challenges faced by gay men and persons with AIDS were becoming more widespread in the late 1980s. Noting that the “story’s only gay characters were victims or an (unseen) rapist,” the fan critiqued Grell’s decision to have his villain blame gay men for raping him when “prison rapists are (otherwise) heterosexual.” 614

608 Michael Garner, “Sherwood Forum,” in Green Arrow, no. 8, 25. 609 Grant Thornly, ibid. 610 Jeff “LW” Lacasse, ibid., 25-26. 611 Paul Pentifallo, “Sherwood Forum,” in Green Arrow, no. 10, 25-26. 612 Ibid., 26. 613 Jane Gross, “Homosexuals Detect New Signs of Friendliness Amid Bias,” New York Times, February 4, 1988, pg. B1. 614 Martha Thomases, “Sherwood Forum,” in Green Arrow, no. 9, 25. 196

Disclosing that they had some familiarity with gender and sexuality studies, the fan referred to

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, by feminist author Susan Brownmiller, as the foundation for her criticisms.615 Lamenting the persistence of gay-plague scapegoating and heterosexist stereotypes, she believed that Grell’s fictional representations might contribute to that harmful atmosphere during a “tough time, with lots of scared people calling for gay men to be quarantined, or tattooed, or left to die because they ‘deserve’ their illness.”616

Such hardline views disappeared from the mainstream over the remainder of the decade, but the idea of the dangerous, homosexual carrier remained part of the public imagination and a tempting figure for writers concocting both fiction and nonfiction narratives about AIDS. In the realm of fiction, an episode from the first season of Midnight Caller, an NBC television series about a crime solving former-cop-turned-radio-DJ, centered on a bisexual man knowingly infecting heterosexual young women.617 Unfortunately, one of the most well-regarded, widely- cited, and comprehensive works of nonfiction about the epidemic, journalist Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, imparted upon the American consciousness the quintessential HIV-positive boogeyman in his creation of Patient Zero.618 Grell’s HIV-positive Kebo many not have been knowingly endangering people through unprotected sexual intercourse, but the violence he inflicted upon his gay victims invites comparisons between his character and that of a Patient

Zero-like villain.

At the time of its publication in the fall of 1987, Shilts was already the nation’s foremost

AIDS journalist and “the only reporter in the country assigned full-time to cover AIDS.”619

615 Ibid. 616 Ibid. 617 Midnight Caller, season 1, episode 3, “After it Happened,” directed by Mimi Leder, aired December 13, 1988, on NBC. 618 Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 619 Ibid, dustjacket. 197

Expanding on his coverage from the San Francisco Chronicle, Shilts recounted the medical mystery of AIDS in the early 1980s using the stylistic conventions of an investigative thriller.

Cast in the role of medical detectives, epidemiologists tracing the epidemic’s origin occupied a substantial portion of Shilts’s book as did the figure of Gaetan Dugas who became nationally recognized as “Patient Zero” and nationally vilified by Shilts for “the unique role the handsome young steward performed in the coming epidemic.”620 Derived from “Patient 0,” the anonymous identifier that researchers used to designate Dugas in a 1984 study of forty persons with AIDS who shared common sexual partners, Shilts depicted his Patient Zero as a vain sociopath who blithely spread the disease well after his AIDS diagnosis. Shilts’s describes Dugas life of sexual debauchery in detail until the day that he became so wracked by AIDS-related illnesses that he died while waiting for his latest sexual conquest to arrive for a visit.621

Mainstream and right-wing journalists alike gravitated to Shilts’s provocative tale. The

New York Times promoted Shilts’s supposition that “Mr. Dugas brought the AIDS virus to this country after having contracted it in Europe through sexual contact with Africans.”622 A National

Review headline christened Dugas “The Columbus of AIDS.”623 A book review in TIME emphasized how the sinister Patient Zero “[u]sing airline passes…traveled extensively and picked up men wherever he went…adding countless direct and indirect victims.”624 Similar to articles from the gay-plague era of the early 1980s, Newsweek’s review made hay out of Shilts’s lurid look into the homosexual world of bathhouses and bars where Dugas cruised, like a serial

620 Ibid., 23. 621 Ibid., 438-439; for the first use of “Patient 0” see, David M. Auerbach and others, “Cluster of Cases of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: Patients Linked by Sexual Contact,” The American Journal of Medicine vol. 76, no. 3 (March 1984): 489. 622 Associated Press, “Canadian Said to Have Had key Role in Spread of AIDS,” The New York Times, October 7, 1987, pg. B7. 623 National Review, “The Columbus of AIDS,” November 6, 1987, 19. 624 William A. Henry, “The Appalling Saga of Patient Zero,” TIME, October 19, 1987, 40. 198 killer, for sexual partners.625 Sounding more like the review of a Ten Little Indians-style murder mystery than a work of history, Newsweek maintained “[r]eading Shilts, you wonder who will die next.”626 People Weekly’s write-up contained accounts of Patient Zero’s “2,500 homosexual contacts in gay bars and bathhouses, mainly in New York and California” accompanied by a large photo of a gaunt and threatening looking Dugas glaring at the camera.627 There were other aspects of Shilts’s story, but it was Gaetan Dugas, in the role of the murderous Patient Zero, that captured the nation’s attention.

Scholars have detailed how Shilts’s discovery that Dugas was the infamous “Patient 0” involved an impressive amount of investigative reporting and deductive reasoning, but they have also noted that the book’s reliance on the Patient Zero narrative to secure reader and media interest backfired resulting in the creation of another stigmatizing icon of gay sexuality’s inherent dangers.628 Media critic James Kinsella wrote that Shilts’s book “was a best-seller, but the story itself was sensational—and wrong.”629 While an astonishing chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in other respects, such as its history of GMHC’s grassroots activism,

Shilts’s lasting contribution to American culture is, unfortunately, the idea of Patient Zero as the progenitor of HIV/AIDS. The legacy of Shilts’s Frankenstein creation and its linkages with gay- plague stereotypes materialized during the late 1980s in every article that discussed “a possible

AIDS Typhoid Mary, spreading the plague in the town’s straight population.”630

625 Jim Miller, “The Making of an Epidemic,” Newsweek, October 19, 1987, 91-93. 626 Ibid., 91. 627 People Weekly, “Patient Zero,” December 28, 1987-January 4, 1988, 47. 628 Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 169-174, 216. 629 James Kinsella, Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 159. 630 Civia Tamarkin, “Love and Death in Key West: A Promiscuous Carrier of AIDS Creates a Panic in Paradise,” People Weekly, June 27, 1988, 38. 199

To the credit of comic-book creators and publishers, of the multitudinous references made to AIDS in 1988, the vast majority shied away from placing persons with AIDS in roles as antagonist. Most comic books, like itchy PLANET expressed comic creators’ attempts to court readers by publishing stories that focused on current events and adult themes. The new itchy

PLANET series billed itself as “a forum for cartoonists to examine the ongoing multifaceted world crisis” and, alongside comics lampooning the possibility of World War III and President

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, it contained an article about the range of political and educational comic books that addressed HIV/AIDS.631 Of the comics highlighted, standout titles included AIDS is Looking for You, an “intentionally terrifying cartoon booklet” that promoted false ideas about casual transmission through swimming pools and hot tubs, and Safe Sex Comix, nos. 1-6, the GMHC publication “designed to show that safe sex can be exciting” that incurred the wrath of Senator Jesse Helms the year prior.632 In an article from Utne Reader discussing how “adult comic books are finally gaining acceptance from genteel relations,” Leonard Rifas, the series’ editor, was asked why he chose the word “itchy” as a descriptor for his anthology series’ title and responded that “‘[b]ecause, while our planet may be more than a little uncomfortable, there’s still hope we can all live here.’”633

Rifas’s outlook summed up the zeitgeist of HIV/AIDS in 1988 equally well.

Heterosexual panic was subsiding and although heteronormative citizens still harbored homophobic conceptions about HIV/AIDS, the dominance of those ideas was diminishing as were irrational fears of infection. In the spring of 1988, a prime opportunity arose for a third wave of heterosexual panic after esteemed sex-researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E.

631 Leonard Rifas, ed., itchy PLANET, no. 1 (Westlake Village, CA: Fantagraphics Books, Spring 1988), 1. 632 “Survey: AIDS Comics,” in itchy PLANET, no. 1, 3; For an AIDS education comic book that Rifas wrote later that year see, Leonard Rifas, AIDS News (Seattle, WA: People of Color Against AIDS Network, July 1988). 633 Joyce Brabner, “Comic Books for Adults,” Utne Reader, May/June 1988, 114-115. 200

Johnson published the claim in their book Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS that

HIV was spreading unbridled through heterosexual Americans who were unaware of their status and had yet to develop symptoms of AIDS-related illnesses.634 Selling 200,000 copies by April,

Crisis fanned the flames of heterosexual paranoia and read, according to a critical essay by

Michael Fumento in The New Republic, like “a classic of the terror genre.”635 Because the conclusions upheld in Crisis ran contrary to what a growing consensus of researchers believed, specifically that the “much feared explosion [of heterosexual persons with AIDS] has not materialized,” nor would it, the popular press pounced on the story.636 “The new book is sure to cause deep concern among many sexually active adults with multiple partners, as well as among some who have just embarked on a new relationship,” stated Newsweek in a cover story on

Masters and Johnson’s incendiary findings.637 Crisis caused a tremor of resurgent fear, but a third wave of panic never occurred because the intellectual, social, cultural, and political significance of HIV/AIDS in the minds of heteronormative Americans had been transfigured considerably.

In his essay, Fumento described Masters and Johnson’s book as the latest example of the print media’s lucrative tactic of portraying HIV/AIDS “as a special scourge to those least vulnerable to the disease: their white, middle-class, heterosexual readership.”638 AIDS and gay rights activists had long decried the mainstream media’s myopic focus on the threat of

HIV/AIDS to heterosexuals, as opposed to concentrating on the gay communities most afflicted by the epidemic, and, after experiencing multiple waves of media-induced hysteria without a

634 William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson, and Robert C. Kolodny, Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (New York: Grove Press, 1988). 635 Michael Fumento, “The AIDS Cookbook,” The New Republic, April 4, 1988, 19. 636 Steven Findlay, “Has the Threat Been Exaggerated?” U.S. News & World Report, February 29, 1988, 58. 637 Terence Monmaney, “The AIDS Threat: Who’s at Risk?” Newsweek, March 14, 1988, 42. 638 Fumento, “The AIDS Cookbook,” 21. 201 catastrophic rise in diagnoses for either heterosexual or homosexual citizens, heteronormative

Americans were becoming cognizant of a pattern. Aware of the possibility of contracting HIV during sexual intercourse, the attitude of heteronormative Americans toward the AIDS epidemic in 1988 can best be described as wary but far less terrified than at the height of heterosexual panic. Because scientists possessed a more informed biological understanding of the virus’s modes of transmission, Americans were becoming less susceptible to believing misconceptions about causal transmission.639 Years of accumulated medical research was proving that “AIDS is very hard to catch [emphasis in original]” and that fact alone comforted many heterosexuals and curtailed the perpetuation of casual-transmission folk lore.640 At the end of 1988, when a massive heterosexual outbreak of the kind that Masters, Johnson, and so many other doomsayers before them had predicted did not materialize, that intellectual shift became cemented in the mind of the average, heterosexual American.641

While much less fearful of becoming infected, heteronormative Americans were more conscious of HIV/AIDS than ever before and several of the adult-oriented titles that DC Comics’ published in September of 1988 prove that. In ,” Swamp Thing, no. 76, another comic

“SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS,” the eponymous character inhabits the body of a human, John Constantine, so that he can impregnate his wife Abigail Arcane.642 Hesitant to engage in sex because she heard that Constantine “was supposed to be quite the ladies’ man,”

Abigail wonders “[i]f he was really that promiscuous what if he was exposed to AIDS?” 643

Swamp Thing/Constantine responds, “[t]hat is a good point, Abby…in this day and age…one

639 Cynthia Hacinli, “AIDS, Straight: A Heterosexual-Risk Update,” Mademoiselle, August 1988, 138. 640 Ellen Switzer, “AIDS: Fear and Loathing,” Vogue, March 1988, 336. 641 John Tierney, “Straight Talk,” Rolling Stone, November 17, 1988, 122-137. 642 Rick Veitch, Swamp Thing, no. 76 (New York: DC Comics, September 1988), cover. 643 Ibid., 17. 202 can’t be too careful.”644 Using his powers to scan Constantine’s blood, Swamp Thing finds him

HIV-negative and they proceed to consummate the planned conception.645 In the spirit of increasing realism in the comic-book medium, author and illustrator Rick Veitch, who took over writing duties from Alan Moore on Swamp Thing, no. 65, decided that even in the context of a mystical sexual union involving an elemental creature inhabiting a human body, safe sex should be considered. Aside from the sex act alone, the two characters were attempting to conceive a child and because it was widely known that the transmission of HIV can occur, in utero, from mother to child, Abby’s caution is doubly warranted. Substituting Swamp Thing’s instant blood scan for an HIV test or a condom, Veitch’s consideration of the virus within the context of the sexual activity the story depicted authenticates the intensity with which heteronormative

Americans pondered the epidemic in 1988.

Another ubiquitous consideration of Americans at the time was a search for HIV/AIDS cures, treatments, and vaccines. Animal Man, a new series by writer Grant Morrison, found

Buddy Baker, aka Animal Man, undertaking his first assignment as a superhero with his investigation of a break-in, and other mysterious goings on, at a research lab working “to develop an AIDS vaccine.”646 Other issues related to the epidemic are discussed briefly such as where the origin of AIDS and conspiracy theories that pertain to it. Conversing with Dr. Myers, one of the researchers, about their use of primates, Animal Man comments that “I’ve heard the theory that AIDS could have started with monkeys.”647 Led to a laboratory door with a massive biohazard warning on it, Animal Man follows up his musings by saying “I’ve also heard that the virus may have escaped from a military research installation” an assertion that Dr. Myers reacts

644 Ibid. 645 Ibid., 17, 24. 646 Grant Morrison, Animal Man, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, September 1988), 22. 647 Ibid., 23. 203 to with surprise.648 Alluding to AIDS research, the origin of AIDS, and timeworn AIDS conspiracy theories, Morrison compressed an ample number of topics connected to the epidemic into a few brief pages of his comic. Importantly, despite multiple uses of the word “AIDS,”

Animal Man did not contain a “SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS LABEL” or any other notification about adult content from the editorial powers at DC. It is possible that because AIDS was not addressed in context with sex or drug not warning was thought necessary, but it also goes to show how conventional the epidemic was becoming in the sense that it was no longer a mysterious, new phenomenon to be discussed in hushed tones, but an ordinary component of life in the late twentieth century.

The same month, Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, included a reference to AIDS in his introduction to V for Vendetta. Published in America for the first time in September 1988,

Moore’s ten issue V for Vendetta series told the story of a mysterious revolutionary fighting to topple the totalitarian government of a near-future Britain. As justification for his tale’s grim prediction of the future, Moore mentioned how the British press is “circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS.”649 Readers surely surmised that Moore’s pessimistic outlook was equally applicable to the United States. In America, prominent public intellectuals, like William F. Buckley, proposed rounding up suspected HIV carriers and forcing them to undergo mandatory HIV testing.650

The slew of comic books addressing AIDS published by DC in September 1988 also included an ongoing series featuring Extraño DC’s first openly gay superhero.651 Extraño, a

648 Ibid. 649 Alan Moore, V for Vendetta, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, September 1988), 1. 650 William F. Buckley Jr., “Identify All Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986, pg. A27. 651 Kara Kvaran, “SuperGay: Depictions of Homosexuality in Mainstream Superhero Comics,” in Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, ed. Annessa Ann Babic (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 147-148. 204 flamboyant Peruvian, debuted a few months earlier, in the limited series Millennium, his inclusion in The New Guardians signified the liberal predilections of author Steve Englehart that informed the series’ various storylines. Englehart’s political leanings are laid bare when he chides conservatives in the opening lines of the series stating “1988 is a tough time in America!

The right wing’s had eight years and Reagan’s non-renewable, and the results are a country that says no to Latin American drugs but can’t quite get there on Latin American wars!”652

Throughout the series’ existence, Englehart used The New Guardians as a forum to endorse an egalitarian understanding of the AIDS epidemic and to promote the intersectionality of persons with HIV/AIDS using an array of characters that embodied different sexual orientations, races, genders, and social classes.

In the double-sized first issue, the heroes faced off against a grotesque, vampire-like villain called Hemogoblin, controlled by a megalomaniacal Afrikaner named Minister Kroef.653

Englehart combined the Apartheid struggle in South Africa with conspiracy theories promoting the idea that HIV/AIDS was fabricated to eradicate racial and sexual minorities in Kroef’s explanation of his evil scheme to remake a world “too blinded by leftist ‘brotherhood’ to realize that once the white race is swept into the multitude, the quality of life for everyone goes down the drain!”654 Kroef unleashes the Hemogoblin as his instrument of destruction and, it is revealed on the comic’s final page after the monster’s defeat, that Hemogoblin “had AIDS--!” 655

Wounded by the Hemogoblin during their battle against him, Jet, a black heterosexual, Jamaican- born British citizen and heroine, Harbinger, a white heterosexual heroine from the United States,

652 Steve Englehart, The New Guardians, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, September 1988), 1. 653 Ibid., 7-10. 654 Ibid., 9. 655 Ibid., 40. 205 and Extraño, discovered that they might have all been exposed to HIV.656 In subsequent issues,

Englehart addresses homophobia, when the heroes witness a protest against persons with AIDS, health care and treatment, when they visit an AIDS-clinic, and the trauma of receiving an

HIV/AIDS diagnosis, when Jet learns she is HIV-positive.657 The next issue Harbinger and

Extraño learn of their positive-status as well.658

Englehart’s use of “HIV,” in issue two, as opposed the blanket use of “AIDS,” was the first time the acronym was articulated in a popular comic book. John Costanza, who lettered The

New Guardians, included an asterisk next to the word that indicated a footnoted description in the corner of the panel explaining that “HIV” stood for “Human Immunodeficiency Virus.” 659

Whether an editorial decision, one made by Englehart, or something Costanza inserted is unknown, but the clarification was in all likelihood unnecessary for most adult readers by that point in time. Given that adults would have been familiar with the acronym’s meaning, the description was most likely included to inform younger readers. The New Guardians, like

Animal Man, was a title that DC Comics considered suitable for children and adults alike. In spite of depicting gay characters, addressing HIV/AIDS, global current events, drug use, and even making jokes about sex, The New Guardians did not bear a “SUGGESTED FOR

MATURE READERS WARNING.”

With the most lengthy and nuanced consideration of HIV/AIDS in a comic book series up to that point, Englehart’s The New Guardians exemplifies heteronormative America’s shifting understanding of HIV/AIDS. Replete with themes that were generally considered adult, it is

656 Ibid., 20-21, 25-26, 35-36; Steve Englehart, The New Guardians, no. 2 (New York: DC Comics, October 1988), 7-8. 657 Steve Englehart, The New Guardians, no. 3 (New York: DC Comics November 1988), 3-5, 9, 12, 15. 658 Steve Englehart, The New Guardians, no. 4 (New York: DC Comics December 1988), 13. 659 Englehart, The New Guardians, no. 2, 7. 206 surprising that DC did not think the title merited a label indicating that. Because The New

Guardians was a spinoff of DC’s previous Millennium mini-series, a title directed at readers of all ages, it is probable that DC simply retained that supposition in order to ensure market continuity. Without that association, The New Guardians would have surely have been branded an adult title based on its continued engagement with the subject of HIV/AIDS and Englehart’s outspoken mission to depict the epidemic realistically. In an interview for Amazing Heroes magazine Englehart described his series as a platform for disseminating information to reduce stigma against homosexuals and persons with AIDS claiming that “[i]f I were writing a story about a homosexual in 1988 and I didn’t do a story on AIDS, [that’s] not really doing 1988.”660

The New Guardians shows the degree to which the AIDS epidemic had been normalized as part of American life and how far counternarratives had come in supplanting “gay-plague” stereotypes through its sale as a comic book for all ages.

Industry-leader DC Comics’ go-ahead to discussions of HIV/AIDS in direct market titles that were intended for all ages, like Animal Man and The New Guardians, marked an important shift in the representation of HIV/AIDS in the comic book medium and constituted the first representations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in comic book titles not expressly written for adults.

Marvel Comics’ decision to publish their first comic book unambiguously addressing HIV/AIDS further signaled a shift in how Americans thought about the epidemic. By including the topic in a title aimed at an adolescent audience, Marvel Comics verified that HIV/AIDS was no longer widely perceived as an obscene subject that needed to be shielded from children like an X-rated movie. Instead, mainstream, heteronormative American thought had, by 1988, embraced a view

660 Andy Mangels, “Out of the Closet and into the Comics: Gays in Comics: The Creations and the Creators, Part II,” Amazing Heroes, July 1988, 51. 207 of HIV/AIDS as a medical condition that warranted awareness, discussion, and reasonable precautions for to protect oneself against infection.

D.P.7., part of Marvel’s New Universe line of comics, was published for slightly over two years beginning in 1986, and author Mark Grunewald, together with illustrator and co- creator Paul Ryan, introduced the topic of HIV/AIDS to their story late in the series’ run when one of its eponymous seven heroes, Stephanie Lindquist, learns her formerly-estranged husband,

Chuck, contracted “AIDS” from “a girl [at] the office.”661 Claiming “it only happened once” and that he does not want to die, Chuck pleads with Stephanie to forgive him, but she realizes that

Chuck had only been trying to repair their broken marriage to take advantage of her healing abilities in a desperate attempt to cure himself.662

Over the remaining issues of the series, Grunewald and Ryan portrayed the chaos that

Chuck’s AIDS diagnosis throws the Lindquist family into.663 Being Marvel’s first comic book to consider the AIDS epidemic makes D.P.7 worth studying, and its approval by the CCA make it even more remarkable. Sold through newsstand distribution, and bearing the mark of CCA approval it can be argued that D.P.7 was the first comic book truly produced with a primarily adolescent audience in mind. While its story of white, middle-class, heteronormative philandering conformed to an obtuse interpretation of the crisis given the demographic groups impacted most by the national epidemic and the global pandemic, Grunewald and Ryan’s characters brough the topic of HIV/AIDS to a youthful audience undoubtedly comprised primarily of white, heteronormative, middle-class kids whose reception to considerations of the epidemic might have been enhanced by that common identity.

661 Mark Gruenwald, D.P.7, no. 24 (New York: Marvel Comics, October 1988), 22. 662 Ibid., 6-7, 11, 22. 663 Gruenwald, D.P.7, no. 25-32. 208

The inclusion of AIDS within a New Universe title lives up to the high expectations set by Jim Shooter, the former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, when he conceived of the New

Universe years earlier. Shooter envisioned a comic book world that more closely resembled our own. In 1986, Shooter wrote an editorial which ran in the first issues of all eight New Universe titles. In it, he announced that there would be “no fantasy or fantastic elements at all except for the few we introduce. Carefully.”664 The New Universe was in many respects a bold attempt to appeal to both kids and adult. Adolescent readers would be drawn to the superhero comics by virtue of the genre itself and adult readers would stick around because they found stories that dealt with events of contemporary relevance. More often than not, New Universe titles failed to live up to Shooter’s, and readers’, expectations. In due course, Shooter’s New Universe failed disastrously and was a deciding factor in his ousting from Marvel in 1987.665

In the years after 1988, more titles targeted to a general readership appeared and diminished adult comics’ monopoly on the topic of HIV/AIDS, nut that was a gradual process.

Comic books conspicuously created for adult readers still dominated the medium’s discourse on the epidemic and would until the early 1990s. Furthermore, comic books for adults were still what captivated the interest of the mainstream media and were facilitating the transformation of the public’s perception of the medium. One adult-comics milestone that year was the debut of the first comic book published by a university press. Shepherded to a U.S. audience by University of

California Press, Japan Inc. adapted a popular manga discussing Japan’s corporate business practices.666 The approval of a prestigious university gave credence to the U.S. public’s growing appreciation for comic books as a legitimate, adult medium. Articles that publicized Japanese

664 Jim Shooter, “Universe News,” in Psi Force, no. 1, ed. Bob Budiansky (New York: Marvel Comics, 1986), 28. 665 Shirrel Rhoades, A Complete History of American Comic Books (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 119. 666 Shotaro Ishinomori, Japan Inc., trans. Betsey Scheiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 209 adults’ zealous consumption of comic books across a wide range of genres, “from pornography to mushy romances to serious instructional topics,” gave the medium a cosmopolitan flair that added to its accruing cultural capital during the late 1980s.667 University of California intend for the comic to be a “fun primer on Japan’s economy,” buts its appearance signified something more momentous.668 Namely, that Americans, from average readers to those in positions of cultural and intellectual authority, were viewing the medium of comics in an entirely different fashion than they had only a few years earlier when stories about the medium’s popularity in

Japan first appeared in the U.S. press.669

The medium of comics was netting gains in its cultural and intellectual capital and one of the creators driving those returns was a young British writer named Neil Gaiman. Before he became a bestselling author of prose fiction, Gaiman worked in the comic book medium and drafted a story that spoke to the subject of sex work and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Gaiman’s

Black Orchid miniseries, published by DC Comics, in its lavish, perfect-bound Prestige Format, a style reserved for only the company’s top tier productions, featured an impressionistic, fully- painted cover illustration by artist Dave McKean signified that the comic was an adult comic book and something distinct from its contemporaries both within and outside of the realm of

DC.670 Although it carried no “SUGESTED FOR MATURE READERS LABEL” Black

667 Daniel Sneider, “In Japan, Comics Aren’t Just for Laughs,” Christian Science Monitor, September 2, 1988, back page. 668 Robert J. Samuelson, “What Makes Japan Tick,” Newsweek, July 25, 1988, 55. 669 Ronald E. Yates, “Tempo: Japanese Readers Get Comic Relief from Hectic Life,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 27, 1986, D1-2. 670 For cover art typical of DC Comics’ Prestige Format books of this era see the earliest example of a Prestige Format publication in, Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, no.1 (New York, DC Comics, February 1986); as well as later offerings such as, Brian Augustyn, Gotham by Gaslight: An Alternative History of the Batman (New York, DC Comics, February 1989); Mike Baron, Deadman: Love after Death, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, December 1989). 210

Orchid’s hefty price of $3.50 an issue put it outside the dollar-or-less price point of most adolescent buyers.671

Similar to Chaykin’s The Shadow, Grell’s Green Arrow, and Morrison’s Animal Man,

Gaiman’s Black Orchid reimagined a character created years earlier that DC wanted to update for a 1980’s audience. Gaiman has said that he wanted Black Orchid to epitomize the kind of comic he wished to see on the market at that time and his decision to discuss HIV/AIDS in it showed the degree of importance he accorded the topic.672 Depicting members of an organized crime talking about how “the AIDS scare” has hurt their prostitution business.673 The mobsters figure that “non-tactile sleaze has got to be the wave of the future” and, agreeing that “nobody ever got a disease from a video screen,” they plot their transition into pornography.674 Gaiman’s use of HIV/AIDS, like Truman’s in Scout, employed a mixture of analyzing current events and making futurist projections about personal behavior to develop the characters and setting. Little prognosticating was needed, however, because Gaiman’s representation mimicked current events closely. According to an article in U.S. News and World Report, “[t]he world’s oldest profession

[was] in a slump” because of “[t]he world’s newest plague—AIDS.”675 Though it only deals with

HIV/AIDS briefly, Gaiman’s work does so in a thoughtful and original manner which is emblematic of many references to HIV/AIDS in mainstream American comic books of the late-

1980s.

671 Pamela Young, “The Comic Book’s Quest for Maturity,” Maclean’s, September 28, 1987, 66 672 Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette, Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993), 190. 673 Neil Gaiman, Black Orchid: Book One (New York: DC Comics, December 1988), 1. 674 Ibid., 2. 675 William L. Chaze, “Fear of AIDS Chills Sex Industry,” U.S. News & World Report, February 16, 1987, 25. 211

Looking Toward the ‘90s

From 1987 to 1988, American comic book authors and illustrators proved, through their references to and inclusion of HIV/AIDS issues, that they could skillfully handle such a controversial topic in the comic book medium. To comic creators’ credit, their representations avoided blatant stereotypes and their work genuinely seemed to reflect a desire to use HIV/AIDS issues for more than adding shock value to their stories. Comic creators incorporated HIV/AIDS issues into their work at a time when adult readers were demanding relevant, “grown-up” storylines and the industry responded by making comics for mature readers that addressed AIDS issues as a means of making their work socially relevant.

At the conclusion of 1988, comic books surely earned their spot on Adweek magazine’s list of products that were “hot” that year.676 Comic books also continued to garner interest for their “new” adult outlook that translated into more new readers and more revenue from them.677

The medium of comic books received attention not only for what they published, but for where those products were being sold. Reporter Lisa Towle considered it a great triumph for the comic book industry when some titles became available in bookstores, specifically Walden Books, “the nation’s largest book seller,” as opposed to only the lowly outlets of convenience stores, gas stations, and comic shops.678 Of course, obligatory news stories expressing shock that adults were reading comic books appeared as well.679

As the 1980s gave way to the ‘90s, mainstream comic book creators began fashioning lengthier and more involved stories related to HIV/AIDS like those in Green Arrow, The New

676 Associated Press, “What’s Hot in ‘88: Pampered Pets, Slashed Jeans,” Chicago Tribune November 7, 1988, pg. 2. 677 Lynda Stephenson, “The Plot Thickens as Comic-Cook Market Matures,” Chicago Tribune August 21, 1988, pg. R7. 678 Lisa H. Towle, “What’s New in the Comic Book Business: Out of the Ghetto, Into the Mainstream,” New York Times January 31, 1988, F21. 679 Edwin McDowell, “America Is Taking Comic Books Seriously,” New York Times July 31, 1988, pg. E7. 212

Guardians, and D.P.7. Comic book creators deserve recognition for contributing an overwhelmingly positive voice to the national discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS and increasing the visibility of the homosexual victims of the virus whose communities the epidemic hit hardest.

Creators like Carlson, Wolfman, Grell, Englehart, and others, who unambiguously addressed

AIDS within a framework that took questions of sexual orientation and race into account at a moment when many Americans, including then-president Ronald Regan, were loath to discuss the subject, deserve credit for blazing a trail that they and other creators would continue through the end of the decade until it became a fully established discursive thoroughfare in the comic book and larger arenas of American mass and popular culture in the early 1990s.

213

CHAPTER IV. AIDS ENTERS THE 1990S: ACT UP’S ACTIVISM, AIDS EDUCATION AT

RIVERDALE H.S., AND AN ATHELETE’S ANNOUNCEMENT, 1989-1991

Foremost among the remarkable cultural and discursive phenomena of the U.S.

HIV/AIDS epidemic stands the fact that journalistic coverage of the crisis, in both print and broadcast media, declined precipitously well before the number of AIDS cases diagnosed annually started to diminish in 1994.680 After reaching its apex in 1987, journalistic interest in

HIV/AIDS ebbed with each passing year, only to experience a marked resurgence from 1990-

1991, upon the death of pediatric AIDS icon and activist Ryan White, the passage of the

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the passage of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS

Resources Emergency Act (Ryan White CARE Act), and Magic Johnson’s disclosure of his

HIV-positive status.681 Tellingly, coverage of the crisis by the news media began to dwindle just as AIDS activism began to flourish and Americans began to reconsider their long-held homophobic understandings of the epidemic.

Reflecting heteronormative Americans’ intellectual reconceptualization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a tragic, national crisis, as opposed to a repulsive “gay plague,” a profusion of popular comic books focused on HIV/AIDS inundated U.S. markets at the dawn of the 1990s.

Signifying a sociocultural transition away from the homophobic bigotry and medical ignorance that induced a national hysteria years earlier, and shaped heteronormative citizens’ formative and enduring understandings of the epidemic, products of art and entertainment that spoke to the topic of HIV/AIDS during the late 1980s and early 1990s did so, almost universally, in a broadminded manner and from a standpoint of overwhelming support for persons with AIDS.

Comic books that considered the epidemic routinely castigated individuals and organizations that

680 Brodie and others, “AIDS at 21,” 2. 681 Ibid., 2-3. 214 advanced “gay plague” narratives or were otherwise antagonistic toward people with AIDS.

Furthermore, comic books that incorporated the issue of HIV/AIDS often did so with an activist- eye toward disseminating public health information about prevention, transmission, and treatment as well as raising funds for HIV/AIDS charities through the creation of benefit comic books. Although homophobic ignorance still dominated Americans’ prevailing outlook on the epidemic, a study of popular comic books at the dawn of the 1990s reveals how AIDS activism,

AIDS education, and the public’s receptivity to counternarratives that challenged prevailing heterosexist understandings of HIV/AIDS were supplanting timeworn prejudices as the epidemic reached the end of its first decade.

1989: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

In “The Double Helix,” a seminal article of third-wave feminism that focused on gender relations during the world wars of the early twentieth century, scholars Margaret R. Higonnet and Patricia L. R. Higonnet, looking to answer the question of why equities in male-female gender relations, achieved during wartime, did not endure during the subsequent postwar periods asked, “[w]hen is change not change?”682 In responding to that query, the authors offered a fresh theoretical perspective that posited a hierarchical model of gender relations best characterized by an androcentric, helical structure that immutably ranked identities and activities linked with masculinity above those associated with femininity.

Employing “the image of a double helix, with its structure of two intertwined strands,”

Higonnet and Higonnet argued that “[t]he female strand on the helix is opposed to the male strand, and position on the female strand is subordinate to position on the male strand.”683 It is in

682 Margaret R. Higonnet and Patricia L. R. Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, eds. Margaret R. Higonnet and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 31. 683 Ibid., 34. 215 that fashion whereby androcentrism retains its intrinsic sociocultural hold regardless of any and all advances in gender equity that arise. Higonnet and Higonnet claimed that “[i]n this social dance, the woman appears to have taken a step forward as the partners change places—but in fact [the man] is still leading her.”684 When assessing sociocultural interpretations of HIV/AIDS at the end of the 1980s, as it relates to Americans’ binary conceptualization of sexuality divided between the poles heterosexual and homosexual, their theoretical construct of the double helix proves similarly useful.

Empowered by America’s innate heterosexism, inroads made toward destigmatizing

HIV/AIDS, and edifying U.S citizens about the biological facts of transmission and prevention through various public health initiatives, often met with an impasse because of the disease’s intractable association with male-male sexual activity. First put forward by second and third- wave lesbian feminist theorists, the concept that all expressions of homophobia, whether directed at men or women, are essentially rooted in androcentric sexism proves useful in understanding how Higonnet and Higonnet’s double-helix theory can help explain the durability of “gay plague” myths in American society and the lethargic pace of advancements in care, treatment, and civil protections for people with HIV/AIDS during the decade that followed its identification.685

In heterosexist societies, sexual attraction to men is intrinsically and immutably linked to feminine gender performances. Therefore, male-male same-sex attraction is inescapably ensconced on the subordinate, female strand of the double helix model proposed by Higonnet and Higonnet. Even in light of the heterosexualization of HIV/AIDS that occurred following

684 Ibid., 35. 685 For an influential investigation of the link between misogyny and homophobia see; Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (Berkeley, CA: Chardon Press, 1988). 216

1985’s heterosexual panic and enabled the sociocultural processes of destigmatizing HIV/AIDS to begin, efforts to counteract the illness’s ignominious and othering connotations with gay sexuality perpetually fell short of subverting the homophobic stigma that surrounded the illness.

For every advancement made, a corresponding stumbling block seemed to follow that hindered the pace of egalitarian progress.

As shown in the previous chapter, gay-plague stereotypes that defined HIV/AIDS in the

American imagination since its observance in 1981 began to wither during the late 1980s under the force of increased medical understanding, decreased fear of casual transmission, improved legal protections, and expanding sociocultural trends that endorsed less-homophobic conceptualizations of HIV/AIDS. Exemplified within products of news and entertainment media that promoted greater compassion toward persons living with HIV/AIDS, the transformation of

Americans’ cultural perception of the epidemic experienced significant, positive shifts.

Nevertheless, epidemiological ignorance and homophobic bigotries inculcated by slapdash scientific studies and fear-mongering journalistic reports during the formative years of the AIDS crisis proved remarkably enduing.

At the beginning of 1989, the durability of such prejudice was on full display in news stories relating tales of “prisoners who were beaten and stabbed by other inmates or thrown into solitary confinement by guards—just for having AIDS.”686 Highly educated and medically erudite citizens, living and working in environments far removed from the violence-plagued settings of America’s penitentiaries, displayed a similar, if less brutal, callousness. In one instance, a dental practice located in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood declined

686 James N. Baker, “Learning to Live with AIDS in Prison,” Newsweek, February 13, 1989, 27. 217 to treat patients after learning of their HIV-positive status.687 And, while the aforementioned incident saw resolution through a monetary judgement, after an investigation by the city’s

Human Rights Commission,688 many HIV-positive individuals, especially the homeless, working poor, or disabled, became victimized as the result of AIDS-based prejudices and found themselves with little ability or resources through which to gain restitution.689

Although the social ostracization engendered by bigoted responses to an individual’s

AIDS diagnosis or HIV-positive status was experienced most profoundly by citizens living on the margins of American society in its prisons, government-subsidized housing, homeless shelters, or on its streets, members if the middle and upper classes were not exempt, by dint of their financial positions, from being rejected within their own, affluent communities. In an article published in Ms. magazine, a suburban mother of an HIV-positive adult son who, shunned by those she once considered close friends, stated that, before learning of her son’s condition, she

“‘had gotten the impression that America was mobilizing around AIDS—marching on

Washington, making quilts, organizing new services, searching its soul. I hadn’t really noticed how few people were doing the mobilizing. So I wasn’t prepared to find the people at the heart of the crisis—those with the virus or the disease and those who love them—so totally alone.’”690

Demonstrating the degree to which AIDS-based ignorance continued to permeate all strata of society, the editorial staffs of glossy magazines marketed to well-heeled, well-educated, and generally well-informed readers still believed it necessary to run lengthy articles debunking false claims about HIV and casual transmission that had been scientifically disproven years

687 Associated Press, “Dental Clinic is Fined $47,000 for Refusing to Treat AIDS Cases,” The New York Times, September 29, 1988, B4. 688 Ibid. 689 Sarah Schulman, “Thousands May Die in the Streets,” The Nation, April 10, 1989, 480-2. 690 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Someone You Know?” Ms., March 1989, 35. 218 earlier. One example, found in Prevention, a health and lifestyle magazine published monthly since 1950, was a multi-page article printed in the early-spring of 1989 that discredited such timeworn HIV/AIDS myths about the dangers of sharing an elevator ride, a swimming pool, a glass of water, or a hug with an HIV-positive person.691

As if shoveling sand against the tide, persons with HIV/AIDS, community activists, and healthcare specialists confronted the frustrated feeling that for every inch of ground they gained in their struggle to access adequate treatment, achieve civil-rights protections, or disseminate accurate public health information, there appeared more terrain yet governed by discriminatory beliefs predicated on fear and medical ignorance that had, since the epidemic’s onset, so thoroughly entrenched themselves in the American national consciousness and, as the epidemic progressed, become augmented by the bigotries of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism.692

Randy Shilts, the San Francisco-based journalist who skyrocketed to international stardom as the foremost chronicler of AIDS in America after the 1987 debut of his best-selling book And the Band Played On, articulated those feelings of exasperation in an article he wrote for Esquire detailing his travails on the U.S. lecture and talk-show circuit following his literary success. Time and again, Shilts recalls fielding questions about HIV infection as the result of mosquito bites or the health risks posed by gay waiters ejaculating into the salad dressing of unsuspecting diners.693 After almost two years in the capacity of a public intellectual, Shilts lamented, “[f]ears that I dismissed as laughable were the genuine concerns of my audience.” 694

Aside from what, by the late 1980s, can only be described as willful ignorance on the part of

691 Andrew Roblin, “15 Ways You Can’t Get AIDS,” Prevention, March 1989, 49-54. 692 Brett C. Stockdill, Activism Against AIDS: At the Intersections of Sexuality, Race, Gender, and Class (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 3-16. 693 Randy Shilts, “Talking AIDS to Death,” Esquire, March 1989, 124. 694 Ibid., 130. 219 many Americans to persist in accepting hackneyed casual-transmission myths, Shilts encountered similarly threadbare views from citizens advocating against government funding, and the use of “[their] tax money,” to treat a disease individuals acquired “through their own misdeeds” and whose sufferers “clearly deserved what they got.”695

Shilts’s experiences serve as one example of how a double-helix-like bind, similar to that which Higonnet and Higonnet advanced as an inbuilt, sociocultural hinderance to the advancement of gender equity, manifested itself within the HIV/AIDS crisis through hampering projects of public-health education and medical research due to the nation’s deep-seated notions of androcentric heterosexism that generated homophobic responses to the epidemic and, to some extent, could not be overcome regardless of how many years’ worth of national dialogue occurred on the subject. Observing the intellectual and sociocultural forces that enable and strengthen that helical dilemma, sociologists Charles Perrow and Mauro F. Guillén noted that

“hostility toward sexual and racial minorities in connection with the epidemic is not confined to the ‘moral majority’ or religious fundamentalists…. It is a common reaction in presumably more sophisticated circles, including academic and professional ones, though it is rarely explicit there.

It emerges from…the sexual and racial stigmas that no citizen born and raised in the United

States can avoid.”696 Perhaps no group of activists more fully recognized the catch-22 presented by the homophobia enculturated within American society, and its power to stymie progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, than members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) a grassroots political organization that, over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, grew to

695 Ibid., 133. 696 Charles Perrow and Mauro F. Guillén, The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 9. 220 incorporate chapters in 147 cities in the United States and around the globe.697

Launched in the weeks after Larry Kramer, playwright and founding, former member of

Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), delivered a rousing call to action before a crowd gathered at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of New York on March 10, 1987, ACT UP was birthed at a moment when the frustration of advocates for people with AIDS reached a boiling point due to a dawning consensus that their entreaties to establishment leaders were largely falling on deaf ears.698 After years of both community-based and nationally-recognized advocacy groups appealing to elected officials serving in government at the local, state, and federal levels, anger at the inaction of political representatives and their appointees had surged to yield a palpable desire for new avenues of redress. According to Peter F. Cohen, an American Studies scholar and former member of ACT UP, the faith of many activists “that existing institutions would come through for them, that getting access to powerful people was the best way to create change” had, by the late 1980s, been shattered as death-tolls mounted and the epidemic showed no sign of abating.699 Kramer’s speech crystalized that sense of fury and he proposed political activism through direct action as the solution.

Drawing inspiration from emerging radical, queer activists, most notably the Lavender

Hill Mob, a close-knit cadre of militant demonstrators then garnering national media attention for staging ostentatious and often raucous displays of civil disobedience that relied on dramaturgical performance enacted at functions held by governmental or religious organizations, a tactic that their founder Marty Robinson called “political zaps,” Kramer envisioned a new era of AIDS

697 United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, DVD, directed by Jim Hubbard (2012; New York, NY: United in Anger, Inc., 2012). 698 Ibid. Although spurred into existence by Kramer’s speech, the origins of ACT UP can be traced to the contributions of multiple progenitors including, but not limited to, the women’s health movement, earlier AIDS protest movements, and a host of socially conscious non-governmental organizations that emerged in New York City and other U.S. localities impacted by the AIDS crisis. 699 Peter F. Cohen, Love and Anger: Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2013) 18. 221 activism that eschewed the staid conventions of the polite and easily dismissible advocacy in favor of a mass protest movement.700 In his speech, Kramer highlighted the Mob’s recent activities disrupting a Center for Disease Control (CDC) conference in February 1987 proclaiming that “[t]hey got more attention than anything else at that meeting. They protested.

They yelled and screamed and demanded and were blissfully rude to all those arrogant epidemiologists who are ruining our lives.”701

The chaotic exploits of the Lavender Hill Mob struck a chord not only with Kramer who, after decades of worked on and off Broadway, recognized the transformative power of theatrical displays, but with other AIDS activists who were fed up with watching friends, loved ones, fellow citizens, and, in some cases, themselves die while foot-dragging on the part of government organizations like the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) stifled HIV/AIDS research, pharmaceutical development, and the creation of public health initiatives disbursement clean needles, condoms, and information on how to halt the transmission of HIV. At the end of the

1980s, ACT UP “resurrected a kind of radical activism that had not been widely seen since the

1970s, imbuing it with their own brand of queer style and sensibility.”702 Facilitated by over-the- top, direct actions that neither the public, the press, nor the political establishment could ignore,

ACT UP became the most visible manifestation of AIDS activism in the United States and their in-your-face style of advocacy influenced successive forms of AIDS activism including expressions of HIV/AIDS awareness in popular comic books.

700 Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 543. 701 Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 135. 702 Liz Highleyman, “Radical Queers or Queer Radicals? Queer Activism and the Global Justice Movement,” in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, eds. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (London: Verso, 2002), 107. 222

Over the course of 1987, the newly formed ACT UP, in partnership with the Lavender

Hill Mob, staged a series of direct actions and political zaps that drew the attention of major news outlets and resulted in the organization becoming, by 1988, the foremost expression of

HIV/AIDS activism in America.703 Indicative of the groups rapid rise to prominence, burgeoning sociocultural influence, and growing interest from sectors of American society geographically or politically removed from ACT UP’s activities in the streets of major U.S. cities or in the corridors of the nation’s federal buildings, DC’s The Spectre #11 featured the superhero Dr. Fate saving participants of a gay rights protest from being crushed by a house collapsing on them after it had been levitated by a supervillain during the course of a climactic battle.704

Author Doug Moench never explicitly states that the activists are members of ACT UP, but he and illustrator Gray Morrow visually coded them as such through the rendering of their placards emblazoned with the slogan “Act now!” and the protestors’ boisterous, public demonstration, which by late 1987, when the comic reached consumers and when ACT UP had already established itself as a well-known entity, would have certainly prompted most readers to make that association themselves.705 Dr. Fate’s rescue of the ersatz ACT UP protest was only a momentary incident in a larger fantasy tale about superheroes fighting the forces of evil, bit it carried meaningful overtones about the righteousness of ACT UP’s cause. In the conventions of the superhero genre, mighty heroes act to protect the lives of the innocent and the righteous. In the process of saving a group of gay rights protestors, Dr. Fate’s actions placed those he saved squarely in the category of innocent at a time when the idea that gay men were guilty of introducing HIV/AIDS into the American body politic still held considerable sway.

703 Arthur D. Kahn, AIDS, The Winter War: A Testing of America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 7-8. 704 Doug Moench, The Spectre, vol. 2, no. 11 (New York: DC Comics, February 1988), 16-23. 705 Ibid., 18-19. 223

The superhero genre dominates the medium of comic books, but they were not the only kind of comic books presenting a message inspired by the activities of ACT UP. According to

ACT UP’s mission statement, posted on the homepage of their original, late-1980’s website, one of the organization’s core principles was to “advise and inform.”706 Of all the comic-book publishers plying their trade during that era, Archie Comic Publications, Inc., at first glance, would seem the least likely to broach the controversial subject of HIV/AIDS given its titles’ fastidiously kid-friendly content and cornball reputation in the world of comic-book fandom.

Nevertheless, in January of 1988, the company took up the mantle of advising and informing the public about the crisis and announced their plans to prepare an educational campaign designed to apprise readers of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis.707 While Archie Comics’ decision might appear at odds with the company’s reputation of catering to an adolescent audience, their choice to incorporate a public service announcement (PSA) about the AIDS epidemic was, in fact, merely the latest iteration of a standard “public service feature that also appeal[ed] to parents” who frequently purchased the comics for their young children.708 Showcased on their titles’ inside front covers, Archie Comics’ public service announcements offered safety tips to kids, anti-drug messaging, or pictures of missing children.

Created in consultation with the CDC and the American Foundation for AIDS Research

(AmFAR), the full-page PSA ran for one year, from the spring of 1988 through the spring of

1989, appeared in numerous comic-book titles featuring the publisher’s stable of Archie

706 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Mission Statement, https://actupny.org/. As stated, in a small blurb on the left-hand side of the homepage, “this website is more of an archive of past her/histories....” Because it functions as a time capsule for preserving the look and content of ACT UP’s internet presence during the era of Web 1.0, it offers researchers a useful window into the beliefs and values of the organization during its most active and influential era. 707 Comics Buyer’s Guide, “Archie Comics Launches a Campaign to Help Fight AIDS,” no. 739, January 15, 1988, 3. 708 Steve Roth, “Archie Comics: Three Generations in the Business,” Publishers Weekly, December 6, 1985, 42. 224 characters, and, based on the annual circulation of Archie comic books, reached approximately thirteen million readers worldwide.709 Illustrated by veteran Archie cartoonist Dan DeCarlo, the

PSA depicted the familiar teenage protagonists Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge,

Chuck Clayton, and Jughead Jones, sitting behind their desks in a Riverdale High School classroom and listening attentively to the school’s principle, Mr. Weatherbee, presenting a lecture on “Health Education.”710 Standing in front of the blackboard, pointer-in-hand, Mr.

Weatherbee indicates its written missive declaring that “AIDS is a serious worldwide problem that affects people of all ages, in all walks of life. Until a cure is found there is only one effective weapon against this problem…. And that weapon is…EDUCATION!!”711 A text box in the lower, right-hand corner of the PSA contained a note to parents encouraging them to call the

CDC’s AIDS hotline or write to AmFAR for more information.712

According to a report on the PSA by the Associated Press, “publishers considered a more graphic message—one that discussed the causes or preventative measures for AIDS—but decided against it” primarily because the average age of Archie Comics’ audience was eleven years old.713 Because of Archie Comics’ unwillingness to draft a more explicit and medically descriptive PSA, relying instead on the follow-up efforts of children’s parents or guardians, with the help of information provided by the CDC and AmFAR, and to educate youngsters on the

709 McAllister, “Comic Books and AIDS,” 4. 710 “Archie Comics’ AIDS PSA,” in Life with Archie no. 268, ed. Victor Gorelick (Mamaroneck, NY: Archie Comic Publications, Inc., July 1988), inside front cover. Other titles, dated from April 1988 to April 1989 that carried the same AIDS PSA include; Archie nos. 358 and 360; Archie Comics Digest nos. 93 and 95; Archie Giant Series Magazine nos. 582, 584, 588, 591, and 593; Archie’s Pals ‘n’ Gals nos. 198-9, 201-3, and 205; Archie’s Story and Game Digest Magazine no. 8; Betty & Me nos. 166-172; Betty’s Diary nos. 17-8, 20, and 23-4; Betty & Veronica nos. 11-17 and 19; Betty and Veronica Double Digest Magazine no. 7; Everything’s Archie nos. 135-7 and 139-140; Jughead nos. 5, 7-8, and 10-1, Jughead Jones Comic Digest no. 51; Katy Keene no. 28; Laugh nos. 6-7 and 11-13; Laugh Comics Digest no. 78; The New Archies no. 5-7 and 12-3. 711 “Archie Comics’ AIDS PSA,” in Life with Archie no. 268, inside front cover. 712 The contact information for the CDC and AmFAR alternated in the text box position on a monthly basis so that one issue contained the CDC’s hotline and the next would have AmFAR’s mailing address. 713 Associated Press, “Archie Comics to Promote AIDS Education,” December 16, 1987, https://apnews.com/31739fc23a0d71b6822edc4d91b7bb8b. 225 topic more fully, critics took aim at the “bland, oblique, carefully worded way” the publisher’s endeavor at public health education was composed.714 Still, the decision to run a PSA on

HIV/AIDS in the first place, especially one targeted to an audience of preteen consumers, represents a major milestone in the history of HIV/AIDS discourse in American popular culture.

Despite criticism from detractors, Archie Comics’ PSA effort was a noble gambit in terms of consciousness raising Because of many Americans propensity to cling to erroneous beliefs about HIV/AIDS, more, and particularly more prominent, educational initiatives were needed. Archie Comics’ PSAs from 1988 and 1989 offered a sterling, if tepidly worded, example of how the topic of HIV/AIDS could be introduced to audiences that were, by and large, too young to have the cognitive ability or life experience to reckon with topics like unprotected, penetrative sex or contaminated injection equipment constructively without the guidance of an informed adult. After all, heath classes in K-12 education are facilitated by teachers and any responsible parent would not expect their child to learn about sexuality solely through what could be gleaned from popular culture alone. The Archie PSAs were never intended to be the supreme expression of HIV/AIDS education, they were meant to initiate substantive considerations of the subject. Moreover, not until DC Comics initiated a series of AIDS PSAs in

1993 and 1994 would a comic-book publisher commit itself to a project of HIV/AIDS education on a comparable scale and, by that juncture, the cultural terrain surrounding the issue had shifted so significantly that the risk of public backlash to their campaign was hardly equivalent to the gamble taken by Archie Comics in 1988 and 1989.

Beyond their social utility as instruments of public-health instruction, corporate- sponsored PSAs should be considered in terms of business and marketing as well. At the most

714 Mary Voboril, “Archie Comic Books Join the Effort to Educate the Young About AIDS,” The Evening Sun, January 13, 1988, pg. D3. 226 basic level, Archie Comics’ PSAs can be interpreted as a calculated business decision on the part of a publisher looking to draw attention to its products. Whether the primary reason for their creation or not, the PSAs were indeed an effective marketing device that attracted notice from mainstream journalistic sources and from publications focused on the comic-book industry as well. Comic books “aimed mainly at adult audiences” may have been “some of the hottest products of 1988,” but for Archie Comics, a company specializing in wholesome, hackneyed hijinks for adolescent consumers, their fare was deemed strictly déclassé by the arbiters of taste and culture in the popular press.715 In the deluge of news reports focused on developing trends in the market for adult-oriented comic books, that lavished praise on American Flagg, The Dark

Knight Returns, Maus, and Watchmen, Archie comic books had been ignored. With the unveiling of their year-long educational initiative, Archie Comics lured media interest their way with a

PSA that was both good for increasing AIDS awareness and good for maintaining the cultural relevancy of their products.

One of the ways that the Archie Comics PSA reached a wider audience beyond the base of youthful consumers that comprised the publisher’s primary readership was through disseminating posters that reproduced the PSA in a large, eye-catching format.716 Created for display on the walls and in the windows of direct-market retailers, the posters were intended to drum up business for Archie titles in an arena where those comics were underrepresented.

Because Archie titles all carried the approval of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), Archie

Comics maintained its longstanding reliance on traditional channels of newsstand distribution that made its publications widely available in drug stores, convenience marts, and grocery stores.

715 Associated Press, “What’s Hot in ’88: Pampered Pets, Slashed Jeans,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1988, pg. 2. 716 Maggie Thompson, “Archies’ AIDS Posters Available to Shops,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, no. 799, March 10, 1988, 20. 227

Such a strategy preserved the company’s impressive annual circulation numbers but lessoned its impact in the burgeoning and adult-oriented world of comic book specialty shops. When displayed in comic book shops the posters’ utility in facilitating AIDS awareness and providing information to support access to educational resources from the CDC and AmFAR also challenged shoppers’ preconceived ideas about what Archie titles might contain and possibly compelled them to purchase one for a closer look or simply as a unique collectable.

Archie Comics’ decision to reproduce its black and white PSA as an eye-catching, full- color poster for pronounced display in direct-market shops mirrored developing trends in AIDS activism exemplified most fully by the “stunning visual art and spectacular street theater” of

ACT UP which generated a sea change in Americans’ perceptions of what HIV/AIDS-based advocacy looked like and how messages of HIV/AIDS awareness became transmitted to the public.717 Paramount to the new style of HIV/AIDS activism that ACT UP brought to the fore was the organization’s robust understanding and skillful deployment of brand-building graphic design and propagandistic art. According to cultural studies scholar T.V. Reed, “ACT UP’s media savvy and aesthetic sophistication combined to form a series of remarkably catchy images and slogans, [activist] texts to catch the media’s and the public’s attention.”718 Facilitated by the multitude of ACT UP members who cultivated their mastery of media literacy working as professionals in the arts, advertising, and entertainment industries, ACT UP developed publicity campaigns in service of HIV/AIDS awareness that could stand toe-to-toe with the most polished marketing initiatives Madison Avenue had to offer.719

717 Tamar W. Carroll, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 133. 718 T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 189. 719 Ibid., 190. 228

The artistic contributions of creatives working within ACT UP were not periphery or supplemental to the movement, but an essential component of their consciousness-raising strategy and its attention-getting success. Douglas Crimp, art historian and former member of

ACT UP, defined the organization’s graphic design aesthetic and projects of artistically imbued protest by stating that “[t]hey codify concrete, specific issues of importance to the movement as a whole or to particular interests within it. They function[ed] as an organizational tool, by conveying, in compressed form, information and political positions to others affected by the epidemic, to onlookers at demonstrations, and to the dominant media.”720 Among the most successful tactics ACT UP deployed from its toolkit of activism was “sniping,” the systematic and repeated postering of specific, public locations.721 Through “sniping” by the organization’s members or unaffiliated allies, posters were wheat pasted on walls, taped onto telephone poles, and tacked to messages boards, first in New York City, then in other cities where chapters of

ACT UP arose. Eventually, ACT UP and ACT UP-inspired posters and graphic designs appeared in locations, both urban and rural, throughout the nation on a wide variety of popular culture ephemera.

Perhaps ACT UP’s greatest and most innovation addition to its heady mixture of activist influences, a combination that included postmodern performance art, Soviet-style agitprop, and mid-century anti-war street theater, was “to get the wheels of mechanical reproduction turning” and generate not just posters carrying their AIDS-awareness messaging, but professionally produced placards, silk screened t-shirts, lithographed prints, buttons, bumper stickers, billboards, subway advertisements, and anything else that could have their iconography and

720 Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990), 20. 721 Karrie Jacobs and Steven Heller, Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992), 9. 229 messaging stamped on it in an effort to raise Americans’ political consciousness.722 Artwork created by graphic designers like Donald Moffett, Richard Deagle, and Ken Woodward, or affinity groups like the artist collective Gran Fury generated a visual vernacular that became ubiquitous components of AIDS-awareness campaigns during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Lorig McAlpin, one of Gran Fury’s founding members, summarized the strategic aims of ACT

UP’s advertising-inspired methods best when he said “‘[w]e are trying to fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”723

The most successful and enduring piece of activist design, and the one whose mass- distribution most closely replicated the cultural saturation of Coca-Cola-level marketing, came from the Silence = Death Project, a small, arts-based affinity group whose work, like that of the

Lavender Hill Mob, predated ACT UP’s formation and proved highly influential to the style and practice of the later organization. The Silence = Death Project, drawing artistic inspiration from the inverted, pink triangle patches worn by homosexual prisoners of Nazi deathcamps during the

Holocaust, created a striking yet simple graphic, consisting of an upward-pointing, pink triangle imposed on a black background above the slogan “silence = death,” that they first printed on posters and plastered across New York City in the final months of 1986.724 Like the Archie PSA years later, the Silence = Death poster contained no actual information about HIV/AIDS prevention and instead functioned as an inducement to those who viewed it learn more about the crisis for themselves, become AIDS autodidacts, and, above, raise their voices to join a growing chorus of people seeking an end to the suffering caused by HIV/AIDS.

In collaboration with ACT UP, the Silence = Death design went from posters, to buttons,

722 Crimp, AIDS Demo Graphics, 22. 723 Jacobs and Heller, Angry Graphics, 12. 724 Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 129. 230 to t-shirts, to stickers, and beyond. Analogous to the iconography of comic book superheroes, like Superman’s “S” or Batman’s bat-silhouette logo, the Silence = Death graphic became nearly as widely recognized and was similarly imbued with sociocultural meanings that could be transmitted at a glance. Assessing the transition of the Silence = Death design from its origin as a symbol of collective, grassroots activism in mid-1980’s New York City to its status as a nationally recognized piece of visual shorthand for all forms of HIV/AIDS activism by the early

1990s, Avram Finkelstein, founding member of the Silence = Death Project, reflected that the graphic’s transformative dispersal can “best be described as a fugue of communal impulses, viral, before [that] sort of gesture became a marketing strategy, one that quickly evolved through its usage….eventually commandeering the city [and beyond] as an activated space.”725

At the same time, however, Finkelstein observed that because of its runaway success, the legacy of Silence = Death became “problematically shaped through popular discourse and collective memory into a dominant narrative more supportive of political and economic power structures than of grassroots organizing.”726 Popular press articles from 1989 reveal the origins of that coopting process as ACT UP’s tactics, inspired by the advertising techniques of big business, began to overshadow the groups messaging and reduced it, in the minds of some critics, to an example of in 1980’s materialism. In an op-ed for The Nation, Darrell Yates Rist, co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), related an anecdote gleaned from his experiences at a Manhattan gym where “a coterie of cultish gay men plastered

ACT UP’s ‘Silence = Death’ logo everywhere in the facility and [were] given to working out in

ACT UP or G.M.H.C. T-shirts—as though sporting such gym wear were a courageous act.”727

725 Avram Finkelstein, After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 67. 726 Ibid., 3. 727 Darrell Yates Rist, “The Deadly Costs of an Obsession,” The Nation, February 13, 1989, 200. 231

Because ACT UP possessed “an ‘80s marketing savvy unlike its Yippie ancestors,” with “posters and billboards that are Madison avenue slick with simple images in bold Day-Glo colors and sardonic pared-down copy lines,” the Silence = Death campaign had, by 1989, migrated westward to appear “all over America.”728 But, that very success opened the door to accusations that the organization’s graphic activism, emblazoned on buttons and t-shirts, was becoming, for some, little more than a consumerist fashion statement.

Through harnessing the power of mechanical reproduction to mass produce items of popular culture ephemera disseminating messages about HIV/AIDS through the graphic arts,

ACT UP did what comic book publishers had, in some respects, been doing since Eclipse

Comics’ Tales of Terror #4 reached the shelves of direct-market distributors in the closing months of 1985.729 By 1989, comic books featured HIV/AIDS as part of their narratives with regularity, so much so that many of that year’s references either parroted or rehashed earlier work. In author and illustrator Jim Starlin’s Gilgamesh II, the quarantining of people with AIDS was again addressed through a satirical critique of proposals by those so fearful of HIV that they sought to curtail its spread via draconian measures that violated civil liberties enshrined in the constitution.730 In Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshal Law, their lampooning of rightwing, evangelical demigods resulted in the creation of a homophobic superhero character who spewed hate-filled speech-bubbles in a parody of Jerry Falwell’s homophobic diatribes.731 In The Maze

Agency, author Mike W. Barr articulated middleclass fears over the heterosexual transmission of

HIV and its attendant homophobia when one character, jealous of his female friend’s new lover,

728 Miriam Horn, “Guerilla Artists,” U.S. News & World Report, March 27, 1989, 70. 729 As noted in chapter 2, although Tales of Terror #4 was cover-dated January 1986, comic books arrived in stores three months prior to their cover date due to holdover practices from the era of newsstand distribution when vendors sought to extend the shelf-life of their magazines. 730 Jim Starlin, Gilgamesh II, no. 1 (New York: Epic Comics, 1989), 33. 731 Pat Mills, Marshal Law, no. 6 (New York: Epic Comics, April 1989), 22. 232 exclaims “I assume you’ve had this guy, this date of yours checked for AIDS, and you’ve made sure he isn’t gay or anything, right?”732 When asked at a recent academic conference, where he gave the keynote address, why he included that reference to HIV/AIDS, Barr simply replied that he thought it would add an interesting sense of realism to the story.733

Anthropologist William Leap describes instances where AIDS-references are “made for shock value, as part of some larger attention-getting strategy, or merely to reflect the extent of one’s own awareness of ‘the current scene,’” as dangerous catalysts for the trivialization of

AIDS.734 While comic book creators like Barr occasionally used the subject as part of an attention-getting strategy and as a means of demonstrating their cultural capital, the majority of references to AIDS did not “take the form of unplanned, off-handed remarks, or . . . associate discussions of AIDS with discussions of nonserious themes.”735 On the contrary, comic book creators of the late 1980s appear to have exercised a substantial degree of care whenever they used their work to address the AIDS crisis.

Most creators avoided referring to AIDS in a flippant or demeaning manner and, with rare exception, included the subject only within stories which revolved around equally serious subjects. Through openly including references to HIV/AIDS within their comic books, creators furnished readers with something more than mere exploitation. Beyond their desire to create products which would appeal to an adult audience and bring critical attention to their industry, comic creators used references to HIV/AIDS as an opportunity to critique American political and sociocultural responses to the epidemic often in the same spirit, and promoting the same

732 Mike W. Barr, The Maze Agency, no. 2 (Norristown, PA: Comico Comics, January 1989), 8. 733 Mike W. Barr, “A Conversation with a Bat-writer,” (Keynote Address, Batman in Popular Culture Conference, Bowling Green State University’s Jerome Library, Bowling Green, OH, April 13, 2019). I posed this question during the audience question and answer session following Barr’s speech. 734 William L. Leap, “Language and AIDS,” in Culture and AIDS, ed. Douglas A. Feldman (New York: Praeger, 1990), 149. 735 Ibid. 233 progressive ideals, as AIDS activist organizations.

Journalist and cultural studies scholar Richard Goldstein surveying representations of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic in high art and popular culture declared that “virtually every form of art or entertainment in America has been touched by AIDS,” and that “[e]very month, it seems, more is added to the oeuvre of art, dance, music, and fiction inspired by the current crisis.”736 Goldstein expounded on his observations by asserting that not since “tuberculosis, that most ‘aesthetic’ of epidemics, produced a comparable outpouring in so short a time,” has a disease preoccupied

American creatives so fully.737 After studying numerous products from both high art and mass entertainment mediums, Goldstein drew the conclusion that, during the late 1980s, “popular culture gave voice to the fear and rage of the majority, while the arts helped dispel stigma by deconstructing it.”738

Within Goldstein’s binary interpretation, popular culture expressed the anxieties of the

“immune,” that is to say, heteronormative citizens and their institutional mouthpieces within government and the media who perpetuated the heterosexist status quo of American society.

According to Goldstein, popular culture “reflects the fears and fantasies of those who regard the world of AIDS as emblematic of the ‘other.’”739 In contrast, Goldstein believed high art expressed the views of the “implicated,” that is, persons with HIV/AIDS, individuals struggling with an ill family member, those who have lost friends or lovers, and anyone whose life had been transformed fundamentally by their personal experience of the epidemic. As a result, high culture performed the yeomen’s task of counteracting AIDS-based prejudices via artwork that told “the

736 Richard Goldstein, “The Implicated and the Immune: Responses to AIDS in the Arts and Popular Culture,” in A Disease of Society: Cultural and Institutional Responses to AIDS, eds. Dorothy Nelkin, David P. Willis, and Scott V. Parris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17. 737 Ibid. 738 Ibid., 39. 739 Ibid., 21. 234

‘story’ of AIDS from the inside out” through focusing on the narratives of the “implicated” instead of relating, as products of popular culture did, the perspectives of the “immune” society that surrounded them.740 Ultimately, Goldstein argued that Americans’ reaction to the AIDS epidemic solicited two distinct cultural responses wherein “[m]ass culture provided a paradigm of social cohesion, while the fine arts offered a model of social struggle.”741

Goldstein’s breakdown of America’s cultural response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic rings true given the binary nature of the debates that the crisis engendered. Much like other deliberations that concomitantly rose to the fore of public discourse with the epidemic’s, i.e. culpable vs. innocent, queer vs. normative, and polluted vs. pure, the conceptualization of implicated vs. immune presents a similar template with which to interpret the nation’s dualistic and dueling considerations of the crisis. On the other hand, his rigidity in insisting that high art spoke exclusively for the implicated and that popular culture spoke exclusively for the immune discounts any possibility that those roles could be reversed and that, in some instances, popular culture might address the epidemic from the perspective of the implicated. Noting that “the fine arts and the mass media worked (though certainly not dialectically) to enable Americans to assimilate the unfathomable,” Goldstein recognized the sociocultural utility of both perspectives, but his absolutist interpretation of high and popular cultures’ respective foci negated any chance that mass, entertainment media might ever voice the concerns of the implicated.742

The contention that products of American popular culture related the beliefs of a heterosexist society inured to AIDS-based othering is accurate to the degree that, as scholar

Simon Watney observed, America’s mass media apparatus tailors its messaging to fit the

740 Ibid., 20. For Goldstein’s conception of “implicated” vs. “immune,” see, ibid., 20-22. 741 Ibid., 39. 742 Ibid. 235 presumed viewpoints of “an imaginary national family unit that is both white and heterosexual.”743 Yet, Goldstein’s presumption that creative decision-making within mass entertainment industries boiled down entirely to matters of political economy dictating a strict adherence to delivering only narratives told exclusively from the perspective of the “immune,” lest a consumer backlash ensue as the consequence of affronting America’s heteronormative,

HIV-negative majority, does not account for the comic-book industry’s willingness to offer its consumers narratives that, with growing regularity, considered the HIV/AIDS epidemic from an

“implicated” perspective.

Although Goldstein assessed numerous depictions of HIV/AIDS in film, television, popular music, and stand-up comedy to formulate his conclusions, he did not consider how the disease was represented in comic books. In passing over comic books as part of his study,

Goldstein overlooked an arena of popular cultural wherein his adamantine division between the narrative foci of high and popular culture broke down to reveal an example of mass entertainment that increasingly offered its consumers stories that related the HIV/AIDS crisis from the perspective of people grappling with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis or individuals who believed themselves to be at greater risk of HIV infection.

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, American comic books addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrated the capacity of popular cultural to underscore the concerns of the implicated as well as the immune. In doing so, the comic-book industry’s output during that period highlighted heteronormative Americans’ shifting conceptualizations of HIV/AIDS.

Presenting less prejudicial, more socially conscious, and increasingly multifaceted conceptions of persons with AIDS specifically, and the broader societal responses to HIV/AIDS more

743 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 43. 236 generally, popular comic books published between 1989 and 1991 epitomize a transitionary period in the cultural history of the epidemic immediately prior to the moment when, during the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS became an all-pervading cause célèbre in the wake of Magic Johnson’s disclosure of his HIV-positive status in November of 1991.

Foremost among popular comic books that considered HIV/AIDS from an implicated perspective was DC’s The New Guardians. Featuring the gay superhero character Extraño, The

New Guardians, created by writer Steve Englehart, ran from 1988-1989 and dedicated a significant portion of its twelve issues to a plotline that saw Extraño coming to terms with an

HIV diagnosis, following his and other members of his superhero team becoming infected via a bloody battle with an HIV-positive supervillain, and pondering its mortal repercussions for him and his HIV-positive friends. In an article about gay characters in comic books from the magazine Amazing Heroes, Englehart talked about his decision to addresses HIV/AIDS using the openly gay character Extraño and explained that to ignore the topic, and its impact on the gay community, would be a myopic decision that had no bearing on the reality faced by gay men living in the late 1980s.744

The New Guardians included a letter column and readers voiced their opinions of the series which ranged from praise to mild criticism. Russ Bedell of Glen Rock, Pennsylvania wrote an encouraging letter telling author Steve Englehart not to “write out AIDS simply because it is controversial.”745 Other readers, while not as encouraging, voiced critiques of the series not for its temerity to include the subject of HIV/AIDS, but for the decision to not speak to the issue even more explicitly than it had. A self-proclaimed member of “The Gay Comics Club,” Jericho

Wilson of Bellbrook, Ohio chastised the creators of The New Guardians for not including

744 Mangels, “Out of the Closet,” 51. 745 Russ Bedell, “Chosen Words,” in The New Guardians no. 10 (New York: DC Comics, July 1989), 26. 237 enough factual information about transmission and prevention in their stories.746 Because of titles like The New Guardians, the general liberalization of American society, and the industry’s shift to focusing on adult readers, the Comic Code Authority (CCA) officially eliminated its restriction on gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in 1989.747

From then on, titles that previously had to forgo the stamp of CCA approval because of their depictions of homosexuality, like The New Guardians, could receive the censorship organization’s blessing that allowed them to be sold through newsstand distribution instead of only through the direct market. However, in an example of the duality inherent to a model of helical progression/regression, The New Guardians was cancelled after its twelfth issue. In the final issue’s letter column, editor Andy Helfer informed fans that the title’s cancellation “was for nothing other than poor sales.”748 Helfer likely included that clarification to prevent speculation that The New Guardians was dropped by DC because of its frank attention to HIV/AIDS, but it can only be assumed that at least a portion of its lackluster circulation numbers were attributable to readers avoiding the title because it integrated the epidemic, and those implicated by it, into its plotlines as fully as the series had.

The cancellation of The New Guardians shows that despite prompting substantive changes in the comic-book industry such as the alteration of CCA guidelines on homosexuality, a significant portion of Americans were not willing to embrace empathetic portrayals of gay men with AIDS in products of popular culture. Such was the case not only in the medium of comic books, but in more popular entertainment mediums like film and television as well. Writing for

746 Jericho Wilson, “Letter Column,” in The New Guardians, no. 6 (New York: DC Comics, Holiday 1988), 25. 747 Maren Williams, “How the Comics Code Erased LGBTQ Characters from Mainstream Comics,” http://cbldf.org/2017/05/how-the-code-erased-lgbtq-characters-from-mainstream-comics/. 748 Andy Helfer and Kevin Dooley, “Chosen Words,” in The New Guardians no. 12 (New York: DC Comics, September 1989), 26. 238

TV Guide, entertainment journalist Mary Murphy stated that “[o]n one hand, Hollywood has institutionalized the fight against AIDS…. And yet. In spite of all the charity events, all the benefits, all the right words, the campaign to create an awareness of AIDS has apparently also created exactly what it didn’t want: an intensification of the already widespread prejudice against homosexuals in Hollywood.”749 Murphy continued by observing that “of all the arts, TV is the least tolerant of gays, presumably because it delivers the largest audiences by far and is most sensitive to backlash, the what-they-will-think-in-Peoria mentality.”750

Even as segments of the film industry began warming to the idea of making and promoting feature-length motion pictures focused on gay men and the history of HIV/AIDS, evidenced by 1989’s Longtime Companion, the first movie about HIV/AIDS to receive a nationwide release and one that eventually earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor Bruce

Davison, television networks still seemed reticent to back productions that dealt with the epidemic and its disproportionate impact on gay communities.751 Prime-time television still felt most comfortable generating productions like 1989’s The Ryan White Story, a made-for-TV movie that dramatized White’s struggles to receive a public education and a heartrending tale that considered the epidemic and AIDS-based prejudices without needing to mention taboo subjects like homosexuality, gay sex, or illicit drug use.752 Instead of recounting the epidemic’s toll on gay men and intravenous drug addicts, who represented the preponderance of AIDS patients in America, television networks found that stories of “[i]nnocent youngsters trapped by circumstances beyond their control provide far easier hooks for uplift exercises,” and much more

749 Mary Murphy, “Denial/Secrecy/Dread: The AIDS Scare—What It’s Done to Hollywood…and the TV You See,” TV Guide, October 22, 1988, 5. 750 Ibid., 9. 751 Longtime Companion, DVD, directed by Norman René (1989; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, Inc., 2002). 752 The Ryan White Story, directed by John Herzfeld, aired January 16, 1989, on ABC. 239 likely to hook commercial advertisers, than stories that valorized groups so marginalized that recounting their stories might prove off-putting to viewers.753

Even if heteronormative Americans were still most comfortable with narratives of

“innocent” hemophiliacs coping with HIV/AIDS, the story of twenty-three-year-old AIDS activist Alison L. Gertz reveals a gradual shift in sociocultural perceptions of the disease by demonstrating that Americans could rally around someone who contracted HIV through casual, albeit heterosexual, sex. Gertz, an attractive, well-educated daughter of a wealthy and prominent

New York family made headlines in 1989 after going public with her HIV-positive status and embarking on a philanthropic crusade to raise money for AIDS research and treatment.754 Named

“Woman of the Year” by Esquire, Gertz’s pedigree as the heterosexual scion of Park Avenue elites added an aura of tragedy to her plight that stirred some Americans, who had been unmoved by the epidemic’s toll on gay, drug addicted, or impoverished sufferers, to take notice of the ongoing epidemic.755 HIV/AIDS attracted an enormous degree of public interest during the heterosexual panics of the mid-1980s, but when the onslaught of heterosexual AIDS deaths never materialized in the quantity predicted by doomsayers, a significant portion of citizens reverted to believing that their sexual orientation alone protected them from HIV. Gertz’s story roused heterosexual Americans who either ignored or had become inured to the suffering generated by the epidemic, but it also exemplified the double-helix dilemma that typified so much of

Americans’ sociocultural considerations of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

On one hand, the public’s embrace of a person who contracted HIV through unprotected casual sex signaled that compassion for people with AIDS was expanding to include more than

753 John J. O’Conner, “AIDS and Hemophilia,” The New York Times, January 16, 1989, pg. C16. 754 Bruce Lambert, “One Victim’s Campaign Changes Image of AIDS,” The New York Times, May 18, 1989, pg. B5. 755 Esquire, “Alison Gertz: Woman of the Year,” August 1989, 102. 240 infants who became HIV-positive in utero or recipients of tainted blood transfusions. On the other hand, Gertz’s story of contracting HIV, during a one-night stand with a bisexual man, cast her in the role of a blameless young woman victimized by her partner’s homosexual deviance.

Articles that related her story tended to emphasize that interpretation and, in doing so, reinforced

“gay plague” stereotypes about the dangerous sexual avarice of bisexual men who lured naive heterosexual women into bed. One article from Good Housekeeping related how Gertz, who was sixteen at the time of her infection and had a school-girlish crush on the much older man she slept with, succumbed to his carnal desires after a romantic evening filled with champagne and roses only to discover, six years later, the horrifying repercussions of that evening.756 Gertz’s rise to national prominence offered a camera-ready face for promoting that notion that even rich, well-bred heterosexuals, who personified none of the identities stereotypically associated with

HIV/AIDS, could contract HIV, but her story also reinforced the belief that HIV-positive people, specifically bisexual and gay men, posed a threat to mainstream, heteronormative society.

Similar examples of that double-helix bind are evident in Marvel Comics’ D.P. 7.

Launched as part of the publisher’s New Universe line of comics, a series of titles inspired by the comic book medium’s turn toward generating more true-to-life narratives during the mid-1980’s adult-comics boom, author Mike Gruenwald tried to write superhero stories while avoiding genre conventions.757 D.P. 7 provided readers with Marvel’s first foray into the real-world crisis of

HIV/AIDS when Chuck, the estranged husband of one of the title’s heroines, revealed that an affair with a female coworker led to his AIDS diagnosis.758 Written as a macho, heterosexual character intimidated by his wife’s superpowers, Chuck, who considered himself “the straightest

756 Marianne Jacobbi, “Alison’s Fight for Life,” Good Housekeeping, September 1989, 246. 757 Barry Dutter, “Mark Gruenwald: Writer Gives His Views on Captain America, D.P. 7,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, no. 682, December 12, 1986, 3. 758 Gruenwald, D.P. 7, no. 24, 22. 241 guy I know,” found it unbearable to be diagnosed with AIDS and attempted suicide.759 In keeping with the title’s real-life tenor, Chuck’s suicide attempt echoed the suicidal ideations of some people who received HIV/AIDS diagnoses during the mid-1980s.760 By focusing on

Chuck’s psychological state, D.P. 7 offered a window into the thoughts of the “implicated” in terms of Goldstein’s binary assessment.

Expanding the circle of implicated identities to encompass heterosexuals who contracted

HIV through heterosexual intercourse was a noble effort during an era when many Americans refused to consider HIV/AIDS as anything more than a health issue faced by gay men. During the late 1980s, that idea was so commonly held that authors like Michael Fumento made careers out of claiming that HIV/AIDS remained firmly anchored in high-risk groups and that only

Americans who had homosexual sex, shared needles, or received blood transfusions from members of those high-risk groups need worry about infection.761 However, any good that might have come from Chuck’s portrayal in D.P. 7 was wiped away issues later when narrative developments placed him squarely in the role of a villain after he kidnapped his children in a misguided attempt to enact a form of revenge on his wife.762 Reinforcing his villainy, Chuck later attempted to kill his wife in a murder-suicide attempt exclaiming “I’ve got nothing but the grave to look forward to! And if I’m gonna go, sweety-pie [sic] —so are you!”763 What might have begun as an earnest effort to incorporate a heterosexual character with HIV/AIDS rapidly devolved into yet another example of demonizing people with AIDS as depraved, volatile, and a threat to the nation. Nevertheless, as the decade of the 1980s came to a close, the propensity for

759 Gruenwald, D.P. 7, no. 28, (New York: Marvel Comics, February 1989), 4-5. 760 David Margolick, “Legal Help Tailored to Victims of AIDS,” The New York Times, January 3, 1986, pg. B5. 761 Michael Fumento, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1990), 15-16. 762 Gruenwald, D.P. 7, no. 27, (New York: Marvel Comics, January 1989), 12. 763 Gruenwald, D.P. 7, no. 28, 4. 242 comic book creators to cast people with AIDS in a villainous light dwindled. Instead, comic books frequently depicted characters that had bigoted attitudes about people with AIDS as their stories’ antagonists.

One of the strongest examples of that trend came in Action Comics Weekly, an anthology series published by DC Comics that featured a revolving cast of heroes in short adventure stories that played out over the course of four or five issues.764 In Action Comics Weekly #636, a story pertaining to AIDS-based stigma and its social consequences began that featured Speedy, Green

Arrow’s former boy-sidekick. Called “Exiles,” the story found Speedy, now an adult striking out on his own and working as a private investigator in Los Angeles, tasked with track down a man named Donald Lossner by his brother Philip.765 What began as a straightforward missing-persons case rapidly escalates when Speedy finds that Donald Lossner is a gay man whose boss forced him into quitting his job and whose landlord harassed him out of his apartment after they learned that he “was diagnosed with AIDS.”766

The plot thickens further when Speedy learns that Philip Lossner, who he never met in person, is actually a famous action-movie star named Sean Bauman who had changed his name from Philip Lossner when he came to Hollywood.767 When Speedy informs Bauman that his brother’s disappearance is likely the result of bigots shunning him after his AIDS diagnosis, the

764 Action Comics had long been a title featuring Superman. However, Action Comics Weekly was published as a stopgap measure while author and illustrator John Byrne worked on revamping DC’s Superman continuity for a highly anticipated, late-1980’s relaunch of that character. Action Comics Weekly retained the numbering of Action Comics, but, as its title suggests, was published in weekly as opposed to monthly instalments. The anthology format of Action Comics Weekly allowed DC to test public reception of stories featuring underutilized or obscure heroes. 765 Mark Verheiden, “Exiles,” in Action Comics Weekly, no. 636, ed. Brian Augustyn (New York: DC Comics, January 24, 1989), 1-7. 766 Mark Verheiden, “Exiles, part II” in Action Comics Weekly, no. 637, ed. Brian Augustyn (New York: DC Comics, January 31, 1989), 7. 767 Mark Verheiden, “Exiles, part III” in Action Comics Weekly, no. 638, ed. Brian Augustyn (New York: DC Comics, February 7, 1989), 4. 243 homophobic and disbelieving Bauman becomes enraged and shouts “that ‘gay’ disease?” 768

After falsely accusing Speedy of attempting to destroy his career by going to the tabloids with his familial connection to a gay man dying from AIDS Bauman and his security guards attack.769

Battling against Bauman’s brawn and his bigotry, Speedy, “getting sick and tired of [Bauman’s] irrational homophobic prejudices,” turns the tables on his attacker and knocks Bauman out with a single punch.770 Still committed to finding Donald Lossner but at a dead end, Speedy sees a report on the evening news about a “controversial AIDS hospice in North Hollywood” besieged by protestors seeking its removal and notices that Donald Lossner is one of the hospice’s patients.771

Ever the professional, Speedy phones Bauman informing him of his brother’s whereabouts then heads to the hospice to confront the angry, brick-throwing mob that has besieged the building.772 Hoisting signs with slogans like “fags get lost” and “fags out” the mob overruns a police barricade on the hospice’s perimeter and Speedy begins fighting them off using his archery skills and trick arrows until he is subdued by the homophobic brutes intent on destroying the hospice.773 But in the nick of time, Sean Bauman appears, leaving the mob star struck and allowing the police time to regain control of the situation before he strides into the hospice.774 At his brother’s bedside, Bauman confronts all the fear and prejudice he harbored toward gay men and people with AIDS and embraces Donald in an emotional scene of

768 Ibid. 769 Ibid., 5-7 770 Mark Verheiden, “Exiles, part IV,” in Action Comics Weekly, no. 639, ed. Brian Augustyn (New York: DC Comics, February 21, 1989), 1-2. 771 Ibid., 5. 772 Ibid., 6-7. 773 Mark Verheiden, “Exiles, part IV,” in Action Comics Weekly, no. 640, ed. Brian Augustyn (New York: DC Comics, February 28, 1989) 1-3. 774 Ibid., 3-4. 244 reconciliation.775 Speedy departs knowing that, in spite of the Lossner brothers’ heartfelt reunion, there would be no easy Hollywood ending for the AIDS epidemic as long as ignorance and prejudice drove people to commit irrational acts driven by hate and fear.776

Author Mark Verheiden’s use of Speedy as an avenging hero protecting people with

AIDS and fighting against homophobic bigotry harkened back to a famous issue of Green

Lantern/Green Arrow from 1971 that tackled the subject of drug addiction when Green Arrow discovered that Speedy had become an intravenous drug user.777 Understanding that his prior drug use during the 1970s put him at risk of testing HIV-positive, Speedy embraced his role as a guardian of individuals socially disenfranchised by their HIV/AIDS-status.778 That component of his identity made him the ideal hero for disseminating the message that the greatest villains in the

AIDS epidemic were citizens who passed moral judgements on people with AIDS, retreated to heterosexist stances cloaked in the rhetoric of personal safety, or resorted to intimidation and violence to ostracize their fellow Americans. While Speedy’s fictional adventures were an extreme example of a citizen taking a stand against lingering homophobic attitudes and AIDS- based prejudice, the actions of the imaginary hero transmitted a clear message to readers that standing up in the defense of people with AIDS is a righteous cause. In the early 1990s, that stance would only become more prevalent.

1990-1991: The Triumph of Heterosexual Recontextualization

As the 1990s began, the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic was on the cusp of reaching a decade in length. The nearly ten years of American scientific inquiry into the etiology, epidemiology, and treatment of HIV/AIDS was matched by an equal amount of time contending with the

775 Ibid., 5. 776 Ibid., 6. 777 Dennis O’Neil, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, vol. 2, no.85, (New York: DC Comics, September 1971). 778 Verheiden, “Exiles, part III,” 2. 245 sociocultural ramifications of an illness that, because of its emergence and subsequent decimation of America’s urban, gay communities, brought expressions of homophobia to the forefront of the country’s national debate over the disease and how to best address it. Because of that, HIV and its, at the time, seemingly inevitable progression to AIDS, constituted something more in the minds of the American body politic than a public health emergency. Scholar

Anthony M. Petro put it best when he stated that “from its start, AIDS was also a moral epidemic, complete with a hierarchy of victimhood that placed innocent children above implicitly guilty homosexuals.”779

The 1990s became the decade when the moral connotations of HIV/AIDS began to diminish, not because Americans eschewed their prevailing commitment to maintaining a homophobic stance regarding the illness, although that gradually occurred and contributed to the sociocultural reconsideration of HIV/AIDS, but because the epidemic had become so devastatingly lengthy and all-pervasive that maintaining a moralizing stance in light of events like the death of Ryan White and Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was HIV-positive became untenable. Those incidents supplied the proverbial straw that broke the back of heterosexist apathy and forced heteronormative Americans to recontextualize the disease as a national tragedy instead of a moral reckoning that befell marginalized groups like gay men and drug users as a consequence of their lifestyle choices.

At the end of the 1980s, newly developed pharmaceuticals and retroviral medications were showing promise in curbing HIV’s deleterious progression into AIDS and it seemed that cultural advancements were being made toward inculcating greater compassion for persons with

779 Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, & American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. 246

AIDS in the hearts and minds of an increasing number of Americans.780 Medical and sociocultural advancements were not mere window-dressing, they yielded meaningful changes in the lives of people with AIDS and psychological studies were showing that suicidal ideation in

HIV-positive individuals was decreasing markedly as both their life expectancy and quality of life increased.781 Although the volume of news reports about HIV/AIDS was dwindling, the topic remained at the forefront of national discourse and articles within the popular press were far more likely to contradict longstanding AIDS stereotypes than reinforce or introduce them as they had during the earliest years of the epidemic. By 1989, HIV/AIDS was widely recognized within academic circles as an issue that needed to be studied carefully, managed ethically, and wholly divorced from stigmatizing discernments that impeded medical and social progress.782

What is more, grassroots activists like GMHC and ACT UP, as well as non-governmental organizations like AmFAR, GLAAD, and a host of other groups were an essential to influencing political decision-makers and effectuating substantive changes in government policy.783

Detractors who argued that government agencies spent too much time and money combating an epidemic that remained a concern of blameworthy groups continued making those claims, but even the evidence they provided to substantiate their criticism, like the fact that the total number of Americans infected with HIV in 1990 was nowhere near the dire estimates predicted in the mid-1980s, demonstrated that efforts made by governmental and philanthropic organizations to curtail the spread of the virus were worthy and successful endeavors.784 After the events of 1990-

780 New York Times, “New Drug Study Heralds a Hopeful Realignment in War Against AIDS,” August 20, 1989, pg. E5. 781 Bruce Bower, “Suicide Thoughts Drop in HIV Positives,” Science News, February 3, 1990, 70. 782 Ronald Bayer, Private Acts, Social Consequences: AIDS and the Politics of Public Health (New York: The Free Press, 1989), v. 783 Jason DeParle, “Rude, Rash, Effective, ACT-UP Shifts AIDS Policy,” New York Times, January 3, 1990, pg. B1, B4. 784 Dick Thompson, “The AIDS Political Machine,” TIME, January 22, 1990, 24. 247

1991, such criticism slackened significantly in mainstream news outlets of the popular press.

Impeded by the albatross of Americans’ deep-seated heterosexism and the homophobia it engendered, progress in the fight against bigotry toward people with AIDS was a slow process but the death of Ryan White on April 8, 1990 served as the first event in a pivotal two-year period that saw the passage of sweeping federal legislation protecting the health and safety of

HIV-positive citizens and people with AIDS, increased fundraising efforts and public philanthropy for HIV/AIDS causes, and finally Magic Johnson’s disclosure of his HIV-status.

White died at the age of eighteen, but over the course of his brief life his struggle to attend school and achieve some semblance of a normal childhood played out before a national audience, first in journalistic reports then in appearances on syndicated talk shows, network after-school specials, and a made-for-TV movie.

Looking back at White’s legacy from the vantagepoint of the early twenty-first century, a

Newsweek retrospective stated that “though given six months to live when he was diagnosed with

HIV, Ryan lived five and a half years, long enough to prod a nation into joining the fight against

AIDS.”785 White, a hemophiliac infected by a tainted blood-clotting agent in the early-1980s, epitomized Americans’ perception of the “innocent” AIDS victim.786 That identity allowed for his life and, perhaps more importantly, his death to reach the hardened hearts of many Americans who were unreceptive to the suffering of the gay men with HIV/AIDS who personified the epidemic’s true face yet were viewed as complicit in their own illness and its global dispersal because of their homosexuality. Because White incarnated the sociocultural concept of an innocent HIV/AIDS sufferer, reporting on his death positioned White as the embodiment of a

785 David J. Jefferson, “How AIDS Changed America,” Newsweek, May 14, 2006, https://www.newsweek.com/how- aids-changed-america-110511. 786 Stephen Pemberton, The Bleeding Disease: Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 263. 248 national tragedy.787 White’s death generated an outpouring of public grief forceful enough to erode the demarcations that separated “innocent” victims of AIDS from those the court of public opinion deemed “guilty.”

In an editorial eulogizing White, former president Ronald Reagan encapsulated that sentiment in asserting that “he [White] told us of a health crisis in our country that has claimed too many victims. There have been too many funerals like his. There are too many patches in the quilt.”788 As a work of commemorative art birthed into being by gay-rights activist Cleve Jones and members of the Names Project Foundation, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, while including heterosexuals, bisexuals, and lesbians who died from AIDS-related complications, was, nevertheless, universally interpreted as a symbol of the lethal toll that HIV/AIDS had taken on

America’s gay communities.789 By Referring to the “the quilt,” Reagan equated White’s death with the thousands of deaths of predominantly gay men that it symbolized thereby promoting an equivalency that rendered all Americans who died from AIDS equally tragic. Reagan further emphasized the need to eliminate moralizing judgements foisted on people with AIDS stating that “[w]e owe it to Ryan to open our hearts and our minds to those with AIDS. We owe it to

Ryan to be compassionate, caring and tolerant toward those with AIDS, their families and friends. It's the disease that's frightening, not the people who have it.”790 In the aftermath of

White’s death, Reagan’s call to honor White’s life through showing compassion for all people with HIV/AIDS, irrespective of their identities or the manner whereby they contracted the virus, spoke volumes to a nation steeped in years of condemnatory interpretations of the illness.

787 David Whitman, “To a Poster Child, Dying Young,” U.S. News & World Report, April 16, 1990, 8-9. 788 Ronald Reagan, “‘We Owe it to Ryan,’” The Washington Post, April 11, 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/04/11/we-owe-it-to-ryan/5d132882-b7e5-48dc-950c- e91003f1a690/. 789 Jen Christensen, “A Rip in the Quilt,” The Advocate, February 28, 2006, 28. 790 Reagan, “‘We Owe it to Ryan,’” https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/04/11/we-owe-it-to- ryan/5d132882-b7e5-48dc-950c-e91003f1a690/. 249

During the months that followed White’s funeral, Congress passed two major pieces of legislation designed to ensure equality in public accommodations, safeguard civil rights, and deliver health care to people with HIV/AIDS. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law by George H. W. Bush on July 26, 1990, people with AIDS, HIV-positive people, and even people who faced discrimination because they were suspected of being HIV- positive, became protected by the full legal authority of the federal government in a manner akin to civil rights protections extended to citizens because of their race, sex, age, or religion.791

Guaranteeing equality of opportunity to disabled people seeking employment, access to public accommodations, travel on public transportation, the use of telecommunications technologies, and the assistance of government services, the ADA became a seminal piece of federal legislation not only because it safeguarded the civil rights of individuals living with

HIV/AIDS in states that did not have sufficient legal protections in place, but because it had a transformative effect on America’s civic landscape. Enhancing the quality of life for individuals with disabilities through guaranteeing their civil liberties and improving the accessibility of public spaces, the ADA allowed disabled Americans to participate more fully in public life and, in the process changed the way Americans thought about physical (dis)ability.792 Broad in its scope, and dependent on the enforcement of regulations through court decisions for its application, the ADA was not a panacea for the ableism that informed many Americans’ views, nor an immediate solution to the inaccessibility problems of many public buildings and services.793 It was, however, a landmark moment that demarcated a transition in America thought

791 United Stated Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Fighting Discrimination Against People with HIV/AIDS, https://www.ada.gov/hiv/index.html. 792 Ibid. 793 Donald T. Dickson, HIV, AIDS, and the Law: Legal Issues for Social Work Practice and Policy, Modern Applications of Social Work (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 2001), 59. 250 and government action regarding HIV/AIDS and one that, when Bush left office in January of

1993, cause Senator Bob Dole to comment that future generations would look back at the ADA as the greatest achievement of Bush’s tenure.794

Following closely on the heels of the ADA’s passage was the Ryan White

Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act (Ryan White CARE Act). Signed into law on

August 18, 1990, the act, named in White’s honor, authorized up to $875 million dollars in federal funding for programs assisting Americans diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.795 The bipartisan bill cosponsored by conservative Republican senator Orrin Hatch and liberal Democratic senator

Ted Kennedy made it easier for the areas hit hardest by the epidemic to receive money to ensuring that Americans living in those locations could receive the care and treatment they desperately needed.796 While there was considerable debate about how money would be dispersed and how citizens would qualify for support, there was near universal agreement, in both houses of Congress, that the bill established much needed legislation.797

Concurrent with White’s death and the landmark victories of federal legislation on

HIV/AIDS, the market for adult comics remained robust. Aided by residual effects from the box- office success of 1989’s Batman, a blockbuster film that cribbed its bleak production design and gloomy depiction of the iconic superhero from Frank Miller’s 1986 DC Comics mini-series The

Dark Night Returns, popular interest in superheroes and the wider world of comic-book culture rose appreciably.798 Hollywood’s take on Batman compelled fans of the movie, many of whom

794 The Washington Post, “George’s Bye-Bye,” January 13, 1993, pg. D3. 795 Nelson Price, The Quiet Hero: A Life of Ryan White (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2015), 125. 796 Patricia D. Siplon, AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 95-96. 797 Ibid., 94. 798 Donald Liebenson, “The Comics Can Make for Serious Movie Success,” Chicago Tribune November 16, 1989, pg. C1. 251 had never set foot in a comic book shop before, to explore the medium for the first time, sustaining adult interest in comic books and comic-book-related memorabilia that had been growing since the late 1970s.799 All of that added to DC and other comic book publishers’ adult audience which had grown over the course of a decade due to considerable changes in the content of its products that included real-world dilemmas like the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By 1991, the average age of the typical DC-reader was twenty-six years old.800 Like their cinema-going counterparts, readers of adult comics were interested in stories that showcased “characters that

[were] more three-dimensional” who “despite superhuman powers, have feelings, quirks, darker sides.”801 One of DC comics’ newest titles, Shade, the Changing Man, attempted to capitalize on such tastes and in doing so delivered a story that reflected the nation’s redefinition of the

HIV/AIDS epidemic from a “gay plague” to a national tragedy.

Written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Shade, the Changing Man #3 carried a “Suggested for Mature Readers” warning on its cover and spoke to reinterpretations of

HIV/AIDS within American society through the narrative of a man named Duane who becomes fixated, to the point of derangement, on “trying to solve the riddle of who killed JFK.”802

Ultimately, Duane’s obsession drives him into madness and sends him careening through

American history in a series of hallucinatory flashbacks, fantasies, and instances of, perhaps, genuine time travel. Grief over John F. Kennedy’s murder fuels Duane’s insanity, but Milligan writes the character in a manner that indicates Duane is haunted far more by the national loss of innocence that Kennedy’s assassination has grown to represent than by the actual killing itself.

799 David McCracken, “Holy oldies! Movie Gives Batman Collectibles a Boost,” Chicago Tribune June 23, 1989, pg. CN5. 800 Susan M. Barbieri, “Planning for a Super Marriage Lois said Yes to Clark, but Questions Remain about the Man of Steel’s Future,” Chicago Tribune, January 31, 1991, sec. Tempo, pg. 1. 801 Ibid. 802 Peter Milligan, Shade, the Changing Man, no. 3 (New York: DC Comics, September 1990), 1. 252

During a long soliloquy, Duane laments that JFK died at a halcyon time “before Vietnam, before Watergate, before crack, before AIDS.”803 Including AIDS within a litany of well-known national tragedies, Milligan portrays the AIDS epidemic as another addition in a growing list of catastrophes that have left an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of individual citizens and on society as a whole. In addition to transformations that the epidemic elicited in the nation’s public discourse, alterations that forced Americans to confront topics that they either preferred to ignore or considered incongruous with the prevailing concerns of Anglocentric, middle-class, heteronormativity, namely, gay sex, drug addiction, and the lives of the urban poor, the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic came to denote something of a Rubicon-moment that, once crossed, established, just as the Kennedy assassination had, two divergent sociocultural phases in the history of late twentieth century American life.

By the 1990s, it had become abundantly clear that, in conceptualizing U.S. history at the turn of the millennium, there existed two distinct eras; one pre and one post AIDS. Scholars writing at the time recognized as much and, in the introduction to their 1991 anthology text, A

Disease of Society, editors Dorothy Nelkin, David P. Willis, and Scott W. Parris described the

AIDS epidemic as “[m]ore than a passing tragedy, it will have long-term, broad-ranging effects on personal relationships, social institutions, and cultural configurations.”804 Time has borne out the acumen of their statement and during the first years of the 1990s the output of American comic book publishers indicated that the tragedy of AIDS would be an enduring and transformative moment.

Street Poet Ray #1, published by Marvel Comics in the spring of 1990, signified

803 Ibid., 4. 804 Dorothy Nelkin, David P. Willis, and Scott W. Parris, eds., A Disease of Society: Cultural and Institutional Responses to AIDS (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 253

America’s post-AIDS sociocultural transition through both its exploration of topical subject matter and its avant-garde visual style. Abjuring nearly every convention of the comic book medium and foregoing entirely the genre-fiction of action and adventure stories that dominate the industry, Street Poet Ray is a collection of poetry that its author, Michael Redmond, described as “rap/haiku.”805 Accompanied by four-panel illustrations by artist Junko Hosizawa, whose rudimentary line drawings resemble the work of Keith Haring, a towering figure in the high-art world and an HIV/AIDS activist who died from AIDS-related complications in February of 1990, Redmond’s rap/haiku poetry scrutinized the human condition with a focus on tragic aspects of contemporary American life such as environmental decay, drug addiction, violent crime, single-parent families, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In one of his poems, Redmond cautioned readers about the health risks associated with casual sex. Intoning “one night [sic] stand quite a thrill, but know this it just may kill,” Redmond advised couples to “try instead a different tack, share some time before the rack.”806 Hosizawa’s accompanying illustrations compliment the poem by featuring an image of the Grim Reaper, cloaked in a robe with the acronym “AIDS” printed on it, lurking near a heterosexual couple copulating under a blanket emblazoned with the gender symbols for male and female.807

Classifying heterosexuals among the “implicated” in Goldstein’s binary, Redmond’s rap/haiku about the dangers of unsafe sex reads like a pithy PSA warning heterosexual Americans who may have become complacent about their possibility of infection to think twice before making rash decisions in the heat of passion.

Concurrent with a frenzy of AIDS philanthropy and fundraising that swept the nation

805 Michael Redmond, Street Poet Ray, no. 1 (New York: Marvel Comics, March 1990), inside front cover. 806 Ibid., 12. 807 Ibid. 254 during the early 1990s, comic books created to raise funds for HIV/AIDS charities and provide public service messaging about HIV/AIDS awareness became the order of the day and were produced in substantial quantities. AIDS-benefit comics trace their origin to 1988 when Strip

AIDS U.S.A. was published by Last Gasp Press as a fundraiser for the Shanti Project a San

Francisco-based non-profit support group that offered counselling to AIDS patients.808 Featuring the work of over one-hundred of the era’s most prominent comic book authors and illustrators, the goal of Strip AIDS U.S.A was “to expel some AIDS-related myths and share some universal emotions about the disease with a wider public.”809 Strip AIDS U.S.A. showcased an astounding display of talent, including Frank Miller, Will Eisner, Moebius, Alison Bechdel, Sergio

Aragonés, Harvey Pekar, in service of communicating messages that denounced homophobia, promoted the use of condoms and clean needles, encouraged HIV testing, or simply offered words of love and comfort to people with AIDS.810 Produced after the success of a similar collection, Strip AIDS, which was published in England to benefit the AIDS hospice organization

London Lighthouse, Strip AIDS U.S.A. ultimately raised over $16,000 for the Shanti Project.811

Fund raising events held for HIV/AIDS-focused causes started in the early 1980s helmed by grassroots organizations like GMHC who hosted the first major AIDS benefit, a performance by the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, in 1983.812 As the decade progressed and the epidemic expanded, increasingly visible forms of philanthropy, such as the first annual AIDS

Walk Los Angeles, held in 1985, began.813 Star-studded fundraisers, hosted by Hollywood

808 Comics Buyer’s Guide, “Cartoonists Contribute to AIDS Benefit Book,” no. 749, March 25, 1988, 42. 809 Comics Buyer’s Guide, “‘Strip AIDS USA,’” no. 765, July 15, 1988, 48. 810 Trina Robbins, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Robert Triptow, eds., Strip AIDS U.S.A: A Collection of Cartoon Art to Benefit People with AIDS (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp Press, 1988). 811 Trina Robbins, “‘Strip AIDS’ Publisher Don Melia Dies of AIDS,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, no. 984, September 28, 1992, 24. 812 Gay Men’s Health Crisis, “GMHC/HIV/AIDS Timeline,” https://www.gmhc.org/about-us/gmhchivaids-timeline. 813 AIDS Walk Los Angeles, “About AIDS Walk Los Angeles,” https://aidswalkla.org/our-story/. 255 celebrities that garnered generous coverage by major news outlets also appeared in 1985 following Rock Hudson’s health disclosures.814 However, the early 1990s was truly the era when fund raising for AIDS came into vogue and emerged as the charitable cause of the moment.

Events of all stripes were hosted by luminaries from the worlds of fashion, popular music, literature, film, and television.815 After White’s death, fundraisers for pediatric AIDS charities proved especially popular.816 Epitomizing the duality of celebrity-driven fundraisers’ fusion of genuine altruism and self-aggrandizing promotion, pop music superstar Madonna donated the proceeds from the final performance of her 1990 “Blonde Ambition” tour to AmFAR in a display of generosity meticulously documented for her 1991 concert film Madonna: Truth or

Dare.817

AIDS awareness in the comic-book industry revealed a similar dichotomy. In an especially exploitive example, 101 Other Uses for a Condom mimicked the style of the Strip

AIDS U.S.A. anthology, due to its assemblage of black and white artwork from industry luminaries including Mike Grell, Rick Geary, William Messner-Loebs, Gray Morrow, and others, but the comic book was purely a for-profit endeavor with none of its proceeds benefiting any HIV/AIDS causes.818 Despite containing a lengthy safe-sex PSA on its final page, including the toll-free numbers of five HIV/AIDS hotlines and a rejoinder that asserted “[b]ut seriously

814 Bill Barol, “A Hollywood Bash to Combat AIDS,” Newsweek, September 30, 1985, 80-81; William R. Doerner, “A Gala with a Grim Side,” Time, September 30, 1985, 30,32. 815 For a representative sampling of celebrity AIDS benefits from 1990 see, Vogue, “7th on Sale,” September 1990, 514; Rob Tannenbaum, “Arista AIDS Benefit Held,” Rolling Stone, May 3, 1990, 26; Jet, “Dionne Warwick’s Dinner Funds AIDS Campaign,” July 23, 1990, 56-57; Publishers Weekly, “PEN to Sponsor Benefit for Writers and Editors with AIDS,” November 2, 1990, 11. John Milward, “They Get a Kick Out of Cole,” TV Guide, December 1- 7, 1990, 28-29. 816 For examples of fundraisers for pediatric AIDS see, People Weekly, “Ronald Reagan, Meet Bart Simpson: No Couples are Odd in a Worthy Cause,” June 25, 1990, 50; Jeffery Ressner, “All-Star AIDS Benefit,” Rolling Stone, June 27, 1991, 15; People Weekly, “All for a Good Cause,” June 24, 1991, 108-109; S. McCoy, “The Ball Boys,” Seventeen, December 1991, 56. 817 Madonna: Truth or Dare, Blu-ray, directed by Alek Keshishian (1991; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Films, 2012). 818 Glenn Haumann, 101 Other Uses for a Condom (Greencastle, PA: Apple Press, December 1991). 256 folks…A condom could save your life,” the book’s juvenile humor trivialized a serious matter in service of a quick, attention-getting cash grab.819 Other examples were not as blatantly profiteering. In Real War Stories # 2, author Kim Yale and illustrator Dean Motter produced a short story in support of Citizen Soldier, a non-profit GI and veterans’ rights group, that, along with its legal assistance programs, offered servicemen and women help with questions related to their sexual orientation, HIV-testing, and HIV/AIDS diagnoses.820 Real War Stories offered factual information about homophobia, HIV/AIDS, and the U.S. military. However, the comic book itself was dedicated not an AIDS charity, but to promoting Citizen Soldier’s pacifist and anti-militarist cause.

Benefit comic books from the early 1990s often addressed HIV/AIDS alongside other topics of contemporary importance. The single-issue anthology comic book Within Our Reach is emblematic of such a trend in that its publication helped both an HIV/AIDS charity, AmFAR, and the Sempervirens Fund, an environmentalist organization committed to the preservation of redwood forests.821 The most notable quality of Within Our Reach is not that some of the profits from its sale went to AmFAR, but that it contained a story featuring the superhero character

Spiderman. Although Spiderman’s story had nothing to do with HIV/AIDS, and instead dealt with the superhero protecting a family of illegal immigrants from the depredations of a greedy slumlord, Marvel Comics’ decision to allow their most universally recognizable character to be represented within a comic book that benefited an HIV/AIDS charity demonstrates the degree to which AIDS-based philanthropic endeavors were being embraced.822

819 Ibid., 26. 820 Kim Yale, “Citizen Soldier,” in Real War Stories, no. 2, ed. Joyce Brabner (Forestville, CA: Eclipse Comics, January 1991), 19. 821 Mike Friedrich and others, eds., Within Our Reach (Hayward, CA: Star Reach Productions, November 1991). 822 Roy Thomas and Dann Thomas, “A Wolf at the Door,” in Within Our Reach, eds. Mike Friedrich and others (Hayward, CA: Star Reach Productions, November 1991), 1-8. 257

At approximately the same time, Marvel Comics made another landmark decision by incorporating HIV/AIDS into one of their flagship-superhero titles for the first time. In The

Incredible Hulk #388, writer Peter David and illustrator Dale Keown revealed that the Hulk’s friend, Jim Wilson, was HIV-positive.823 Readers’ responses to the issue prove that David and

Keown’s incorporation of HIV/AIDS resonated with their audience and, in an era of rapidly changing sociocultural considerations of HIV/AIDS, signified a transition in the national zeitgeist. A fan named Mitch Ross wrote that he was “astounded by the honesty and beauty with which [David and Keown] partially addressed the issue of AIDS in what has traditionally (and erroneously) been considered only a ‘child’s’ medium.”824 Another reader, who signed his letter only with the name Duke, said “Thank you, Peter David, for realizing the AIDS crisis in the world and putting the people dealing with this disease in a positive light-not as some monsters, or undesirables, but people with a disease.”825

The inclusion of an HIV/AIDS-based storyline in a comic book featuring the Hulk, one of Marvel Comics’ most iconic characters, foreshadowed a revolution within the medium and spurred the publishers, writers, and artists of many flagship superhero titles to confront

HIV/AIDS within their narratives beginning in 1992. It was during the period of 1992 to 1995 when the industry’s largest and most influential publishers, Marvel and DC, felt most comfortable including material that addressed the HIV/AIDS epidemic in their most popular, bankable, and widely circulated titles. Realizing that after the death of Ryan White, the passage of key federal AIDS legislation, and the boom in HIV/AIDS philanthropy Americans of the

1990s understood the epidemic in different and much less prejudicial terms than they had in the

823 Peter David, The Incredible Hulk, no. 388 (New York: Marvel Comics, December 1991), 6. 824 Mitch Ross, “Green Mail,” in The Incredible Hulk, no. 392 (New York: Marvel Comics, April 1992), 31. 825 Ibid. 258

1980s, major publishers like Marvel and DC were no longer fearful of including the subject in their major superhero titles. That decision was influenced, in no small part, by the tidal wave of national interest that followed real-life athletic hero Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s revelation on

November 7, 1991 that he was HIV-positive.826

As possibly the most famous athlete in America, and the first African-American celebrity to reveal their HIV seropositivity, Johnson’s disclosure incited a frenzy of media interest that dominated news coverage of HIV/AIDS for the remainder of the year.827 In revealing his HIV- positive status Johnson inspired many citizens to get themselves tested for HIV and, in the weeks that followed his November 7, press conference, HIV testing rose in New York City by an astounding sixty percent.828 The CDC also noted that calls to their toll-free AIDS hotline skyrocketed from 3,000 to 5,000 daily calls before Johnson’s announcement to 25,000 per day after it.829

Johnson’s celebrity piqued the publics’ interest and compelled people to seek more information about AIDS or get tested for HIV, yet he was far from the first famous man in

America to contract the virus. Rock Hudson, Liberace, and Broadway choreographer Michael

Bennett had all made headlines after revealing their seropositivity or dying from AIDS-related causes, but their stories did not instigate a stampede to HIV-testing facilities or compel

Americans to swamp AIDS hotlines in the way that Johnson’s did. Ultimately, the difference between Johnson and those men was that he was straight and they were gay or bisexual. As a

826 Richard W. Stevenson, “Basketball Star Retires on Advice from His Doctors,” The New York Times, November 7, 1991, pg. A1. 827 Everett M. Rogers, “Intermedia Processes and Powerful Media Effects,” in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, 2nd ed., eds. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillman, (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 205. 828 Calvin Sims, “H.I.V. Tests Up 60% Since the Disclosure from Magic Johnson,” The New York Times, December 7, 1991, pg. 1. 829 Ibid., 28. 259 heterosexual athlete whose physical prowess on the basketball court made him a star, Johnson’s fame was derived from entirely different sources than the effete artistry of Liberace and Bennett or the ersatz heroics of a Hollywood hunk like Hudson. Even Johnson’s identity as a black person did not meaningfully contribute to the public’s absorption with his plight since it is hardly mentioned, or done so only in passing, in popular press coverage at the time. No, it was

Johnson’s heterosexuality and his infection with HIV as the result of unprotected heterosexual intercourse that made all the difference. Despite years of medical data proving that HIV could be transmitted during heterosexual intercourse and in spite of the mid-1980’s waves of heterosexual panic, innumerable media reports, condom advertisements, and public health announcements focused on communicating that biological fact, heterosexual Americans still considered themselves immune to infection by dint of their sexual orientation. Johnson’s disclosure irrevocably shattered that false sense of security.

Americans did not want to believe that Johnson could have contracted HIV through heterosexual sex and rumors abounded the he was either a closeted gay man, bisexual, or had experimented with homosexual sex in the past.830 But, as Johnson himself explained, “a lot of people—and especially athletes—still want to believe that I got the virus through a homosexual encounter. Because if I did, that would let them off the hook.”831 Americans, with the help of the popular press, had, since the start of the epidemic, tried to convince themselves, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that AIDS was solely a “gay disease.” Since the heterosexual panics of the mid-1980s, the thought process of mainstream, heteronormative Americans seemed to go something like, “Ok, so heterosexual can get AIDS, but it’s only a few degenerate needle freaks, a prostitute or two (all junkies anyway) and some unlucky hemophiliacs, transfusion recipients,

830 Jet, “Magic’s Plight Gains Support as he Explains When, How he got HIV,” December 2, 1991, 46. 831 Earvin “Magic” Johnson with William Novak, My Life (New York: Fawcett Books, 1992), 247. 260 and a couple o’ innocent kids, but I never will because I’m not like them and I’m damn sure not a faggot!” Johnson was, as the cliché goes, “a man who women wanted and who men wanted to be.” Now, Americans were forced to square the circle of how someone they idolized could become diagnosed HIV-positive. As a result of that process, the helical binds of sexist androcentrism, that had hampered sociocultural progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS since the days of its identification as Gay Related Immune Disease (GRID), became broken. Because of

Johnson, an alternative understanding of the epidemic became truly possible for the first time as

HIV was not solely the mark of a homosexual other, and therefore an indicator of feminine deviance, but a badge of manly, heterosexual prowess.

Some commentators like Sally Jenkins in an op-ed for Sports Illustrated took the opportunity to lambaste the sexist double standard of Johnson being lauded as a hero for what, in her estimation, amounted to nothing more than owning up to the consequences of reckless sexual behavior. Jenkins wrote that “[i]f Jackie Joyner-Kersee announced that she had had sex with more men than she could count and had contracted HIV from one of them, she would not be regarded as a heroine. She would be regarded as a tramp.”832 Jenkin’s identification of the role that androcentric sexism played in the press response to Johnson’s seropositivity coincided with the detrimental influence of heterosexist homophobia that directed the nation’s decade-long reaction, or more precisely inaction, to HIV/AIDS. Yet, even Johnson’s gender could not insulate him from attacks by critics like New York Times sports journalist Dave Anderson who wrote “[h]e’s not St. Magic of Sunset Boulevard; he’s Earvin Johnson of the Fast Lane who finally got caught for speeding.”833 Anderson’s critique revealed the nation’s deep and abiding investment in a homophobic conceptualization of HIV/AIDS when he stated that “Magic’s

832 Sally Jenkins, “Where’s the Magic?” Sports Illustrated, November 25, 1991, 152. 833 Dave Anderson, “Sorry, But Magic Isn’t a Hero,” The New York Times, November 14, 1991, pg. B19. 261 message is, ‘If I can get it, anybody can.’ But anybody with a sense of heterosexual responsibility isn’t likely to get the HIV virus.”834 Why Anderson did not simply say “sexual” responsibility instead of preceding it with the prefix “hetero” demonstrates not only why

Johnson’s admission of his HIV seropositivity so stunned the nation, but also why it was so vitally necessary for something, anything, to wake heterosexual Americans form their homophobic dream of a “gay plague” which their sexual preferences inoculated them from.

In an assessment of Johnson’s popular press coverage by New York magazine, Edwin

Diamond observed that although Johnson’s disclosure was initially hailed as brave, the tenor of reporting swiftly shifted and journalists began interpreting his decision to go public as an example of expedient celebrity-brand management.835 Whether gallant or self-serving, Johnson’s announcement marked a turning point in the cultural history of HIV/AIDS and it became the much-needed catalyst for accelerating Americans’ burgeoning reconceptualization of the epidemic. Buttressing heterosexual citizens’ nascent rejection of obfuscating gay-plague myths and solidifying their burgeoning reclassification of the epidemic as a national tragedy, Johnson’s revelation changed the way the country discussed HIV/AIDS from that point onward.

Initiating the final push to divest the epidemic of its ingrained characterization as a disease of homosexuality, a project that would take years and is, in some respects, still ongoing,

Johnson’s disclosure prompted a deluge of popular cultural products that considered the epidemic. Over the course of the next five years, representations of HIV/AIDS in popular culture contributed to the epidemic’s reevaluation. American comic books exemplify that effort and demonstrate how, during the 1990s, artifacts of popular culture helped facilitate an intellectual transition that removed the epidemic from its original, homophobic conceptualizations and began

834 Ibid. 835 Edwin Diamond, “Magic and the Media,” New York, December 2, 1991, 30, 34. 262 recasting HIV/AIDS as a national tragedy increasingly divorced from the heterosexist views that characterized considerations during its first decade.

263

CHAPTER V. FROM A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE TO YESTERDAY’S NEWS: HIV/AIDS

AWARENESS AND POPULAR COMIC BOOKS, 1992-1996

1991 was a milestone year in the history of America’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Not only was it chronologically significant, as it marked the ten-year anniversary of the malady’s initial detection, it was, more importantly, the year when a confluence of major sociopolitical events begat a turning point in the epidemic’s cultural history due to their role in reframing heteronormative Americans’ conceptualization of the epidemic. While homosexual and heterosexual citizens’ understandings of HIV/AIDS had never been stagnant, as media interest, public alarm, legislative action, and social activism all waxed and waned during the course of the epidemic’s first decade, mainstream, heteronormative Americans’ conceptualization of the crisis underwent its most drastic alteration amid the aftermath of 1991’s landmark events that included the death of Ryan White, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Earvin

“Magic” Johnson’s revelation of his HIV-positive status.

Through the 1980s, the subject of HIV/AIDS had been alternately bathed in the limelight of homophobic fearmongering or shunted to the margins of national discourse. At that time,

America’s heterosexual majority believed itself threatened by an encroaching “gay plague” as journalistic outlets disseminated that belief through stories of the epidemic’s expansion, its terrifying lethality, and its mounting death toll of “guilty” and “innocent” victims. Gay or bisexual men, as well as intravenous drug users, were judged by the press and, consequently, in the court of public opinion, as “guilty” for both spawning the epidemic and spreading it to

“innocent” individuals, namely children, the recipients of blood transfusions, hemophiliacs, and heterosexual sex partners. After a projected, mid-1980’s surge in heterosexuals with HIV/AIDS failed to materialize in the apocalyptic quantity predicted by some doomsayers, media interest 264 dwindled markedly and heterosexual Americans’ mistaken belief in sexual orientation-based immunity became reified while formative understandings of the epidemic as “the gay plague” coalesced in the national consciousness.

As the journalistic spotlight on HIV/AIDS dimmed during the late 1980s, it ameliorated heterosexual panic and opened a discursive space that allowed for grassroots AIDS activism to flourish via educational initiatives, lobbying for increased government funding, endorsements of legislative protections for people with HIV/AIDS, and the staging of public displays of commemoration and protest. However, as ACT UP and other emergent, direct-action organizations of that era emphasized, HIV infection and AIDS-related fatalities continued to rise while much of the nation either ignored the epidemic, remained ignorant of the biological facts of HIV’s transmission, or simply discounted HIV/AIDS as a problem facing America’s gay communities alone. Following the high-profile death of Ryan White, the poster child for

“innocent” AIDS victims, the ratification of the ADA, which codified citizens with, or suspected of having, HIV/AIDS as a protected class, and Magic Johnson’s health disclosure, which, because of his celebrity, athletic prowess, and reputation as a heterosexual playboy, became interpreted in the popular press and by the public writ large as a repudiation of gay-plague stereotypes and a marker of universal vulnerability to the virus, national interest in the epidemic became reinvigorated and HIV/AIDS activism became a cause célèbre of the early 1990s.

From 1992 through 1994 initiatives purporting to raise the public’s awareness of

HIV/AIDS, or garnering charitable contributions in service of halting the epidemic through fundraising for research, treatment, and public-health education, became vaunted humanitarian and philanthropic efforts. Even though the volume of journalistic reporting on HIV/AIDS continued to decline precipitously, maintaining a downward trend that began after coverage 265 peaked in 1987, and was only reversed, temporarily, during the landmark events of 1991, manifestations of AIDS-based altruism were more pronounced during the early 1990s than at any other moment in the epidemic’s history.836 During those years, communal expressions of benevolence toward people with HIV/AIDS, commemorative acts of solidarity, and other forms of HIV/AIDS advocacy were no longer the province of, predominantly, tightknit cadres of urban gay, lesbian, and queer activists who, augmented by a select number of straight allies, “took responsibility for doing something about AIDS in the mid-1980s when the larger society was either panicking or denying the threat.”837 On the contrary, showing support for the fight against

AIDS became, after 1991, in vogue with a substantial portion of America’s heteronormative majority and a prominent feature of the early-1990’s cultural landscape.

When AIDS awareness and activism morphed from a niche concern endorsed by steadfast advocates into an omnipresent element of mainstream American culture, its visibility on the national stage increased. However, its broadened appeal also caused the movement to shed much of its radical zeal in favor of more saleable approaches, typified by trendy and symbolic gestures, as opposed to the kind of engagement that arose from the ardor of committed activists and that prompted legislative action to begin in the late 1980s. Red AIDS-awareness ribbons became a chic, new fashion accessory, the observance of various commemorative occasions, many of which had occurred for years without garnering much fanfare, specifically the World Health Organization’s AIDS Awareness Day and other consciousness-raising events like Day Without Art, Night Without Light, or Moment Without Television, became a perfunctory means of accruing cultural capital, and personal participation in, governmental

836 For a quantitative study of U.S. news stories on HIV/AIDS see Brodie and others, “AIDS at 21.” 837 Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, revised ed., Social Movements Past and Present (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 157. 266 involvement with, or corporate sponsorship of those and similar happenings became sacrosanct methods of signifying an individual’s or an organization’s empathetic bona fides.838

By the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS awareness was so thoroughly commercialized that businesses like Under One Roof, a San Francisco-based gift shop, could sustain themselves by selling “an expensive selection of merchandise on the cutting edge of the epidemic: Keith Haring tote bags, T-shirts with the words ‘We’re cookin’ up love for people with AIDS,’ ‘Awareness

Watches’ and teddy bears sporting red ribbons.”839 Americans, mindful of the epidemic’s scourge and looking to support people with HIV/AIDS, no longer needed to engage in activities as pedestrian as attending a protest against government inaction or volunteering their time at an

AIDS hospice, they simply needed to voice their backing through eye-catching displays of consumption. Over the course of the early 1990s, a phenomenon that journalist Daniel Harris dubbed “the kitschification of AIDS” commodified the epidemic within America’s consumer- driven sociocultural paradigm through the power of marketing ingenuity that effectively wholesaled ersatz concern to the masses, while denuding HIV/AIDS activism of its countercultural authority to induce revolutionary change.840

Coopted between 1991 and 1995 by the economic forces that propel American popular culture, AIDS activism and the promotion of AIDS awareness became transformed into a consumer trend du jour and the era’s habitual manifestation of HIV/AIDS-related subject matter within popular comic books testify to that transformation. While capable of communicating beneficial messages to the public, especially those that challenged gay-plague stereotypes or disseminated lessons regarding safe sex practices that could prevent the transmission of HIV,

838 Glenn Collins, “Making the Shadow of AIDS Visible,” The New York Times, December 2, 1992, pg. C19. 839 Alexander Cockburn, “Gay Culture Is the Ultimate Victim of AIDS,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1997, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-06-19-me-4778-story.html. 840 Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion Books, 1997), 223. 267

AIDS activism had, nevertheless, become estranged from its origins as a deathly serious social movement and transfigured into a commodity that necessitated only symbolic gestures of support and the parroting of toothless calls to action from anyone eager to consider themself part of a haute, mass movement with airs of a social conscious.

Expressed in a style more akin to a fad than an authentic attempt at civic reformation, popular comic books propagated conspicuous displays of AIDS awareness during the years immediately following 1991 by addressing the epidemic using internationally recognized, flagship superheroes whose association with HIV/AIDS had been avoided fastidiously until the confluence of a booming comic book market and the widespread popularity of promoting AIDS awareness causes made doing so both a profitable and fashionable decision in the early 1990s.

However, as the decade progressed, AIDS awareness messaging in flagship superhero comics evaporated as quickly as any consumer craze that had come before. By 1996, New York

Magazine noted that “once-ubiquitous red ribbons and the media headlines [about AIDS] are disappearing,” and Daniel Wolfe, communications director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, stated that HIV/AIDS “‘simply isn’t fashionable anymore. People are ready to throw money at the next disease.’”841 Representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comic books offer a vivid example of the meteoric rise and even hastier demise of HIV/AIDS awareness as a pervasive, national concern during the first half of the 1990s and provide an example of how efforts to produce socially conscious products of popular culture become abandoned swiftly when commercial and sociocultural forces make their prolongation no longer economically viable or publicly admired.

841 Andrew Jacobs, “Can AmFAR Survive AIDS?” New York Magazine, April 8, 1996, 27, 30. 268

1992-1994: A “Scause” Célèbre

In October of 2012, the animated television series South Park featured an episode titled

“A Scause for Applause.”842 A comedic response to one of that year’s biggest news stories, cyclist Lance Armstrong being stripped of his Tour de France victories amid allegations of blood doping, the episode lampooned Americans who bought into the fad of wearing colorful, rubber wristbands to denote their support of various socially-conscious causes as part of a fashion trend that Armstrong’s charitable foundation, in collaboration with athletic apparel manufacturer Nike, began in 2004 when they started selling yellow, “Livestrong” wristbands to raise money for cancer research.843 The episode’s satirical highpoint occurred when Stan, one of the South Park’s main characters, tours a wristband factory where, in a parody of Dr. Seuss’s prose, the plant’s madcap owner intones to his visitor that “[i]n the modern age there are those who believe that a cause is a thing to be worn on one’s sleeve. And so, we sell a cause. It’s called a ‘scause,’ and wearing a scause gets you lots of applause.”844 Although the new millennium’s wristband fad appeared long after the heyday of American’s enthusiasm for HIV/AIDS altruism had passed, identifying AIDS awareness as the preeminent “scause” of the early 1990s, and an antecedent to every “scause” that has followed since, is appropriate given the commercialized manner in which it was expressed and the rapidity with which it faded.

Epitomized by the proliferation of American comic books that considered the epidemic, the prominence with which those considerations were made, and the superficial manner whereby such considerations were often manifested, the nature of commercialized AIDS awareness during

842 South Park, season 16, episode 13, “A Scause for Applause,” directed by Trey Parker, aired October 31, 2012, on Comedy Central. 843 For a synopsis of the Livestrong bracelet and the rubber wristband fad it begat see Rob Walker, Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are (New York: Random House, 2009), 60-62. 844 South Park, season 16, episode 13, “A Scause for Applause.” 269 the early 1990s is best understood not as an earnest attempt to halt the epidemic, but as an opportunity for business interests to profit from it. For one thing, by the time AIDS awareness became mainstreamed in 1992, the vast majority of Americans were already well aware of AIDS and HIV.845 In fact, it was precisely because Americans were aware of HIV/AIDS and, moreover, had resigned themselves to the fact that the disease constituted an enduring aspect of life in the late twentieth century, that American enterprise, especially businesses that trafficked in the arts and entertainment, felt comfortable endorsing AIDS-awareness causes or according topics pertaining to HIV/AIDS a place of distinction in their consumer products.

Examining cultural representations of HIV/AIDS from the early 1990s, Women’s and

Gender Studies scholar Gabriele Griffin observed that “HIV/AIDS was at the height of its visibility at that time, signaled by the proliferation of its cultural (re)presentation. New films, plays, videos, and other visually over-determined cultural productions centering on HIV/AIDS were still regularly appearing then.”846 Although the preponderance of cultural productions considering HIV/AIDS started to shrink by the middle of the decade, during the early 1990s,

American popular culture, including comic books, was inundated by the subject. As the public’s fear of HIV/AIDS diminished from its mid-1980’s zenith, the epidemic ceased being innately controversial. Therefore, the threat of incurring a consumer backlash receded and industry- leading comic book publishers DC and Marvel felt safe utilizing the topic in their flagship superhero properties in order to capitalize on the AID-awareness trend that was sweeping the nation.

Superheroes like DC’s Batman and Superman or Marvel’s Spider-Man are iconic figures

845 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 173. 846 Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1. 270 recognized the world over from their appearances not only in comic books, but in movies, cartoons, and live-action television shows in addition to the use of their likenesses to make toys, decorate clothing, and generate a wide variety of officially licensed merchandise.847 The immense popularity and global recognition of Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man makes them prized above all other properties in their respective publishers’ pantheon of superheroes because it is those sale of those characters through numerous popular culture products that generates the most substantial and most consistent streams of revenue for their owners. Consequently, they are also the characters whose depictions, whether in products produced by the parent companies that own the copyright to them, like comic books, or in licensed products such as lunchboxes, toys, or apparel, are most closely monitored and most tightly controlled. Any misstep in their portrayal holds the potential to infuriate fans and, far worse, possibly kill a publisher’s proverbial golden goose. As a result, introducing a subject like HIV/AIDS into those characters’ fictional universes would never occur until doing so was not only a smart move, but a prudent and likely profitable one, too.

During the mid-1980s, at the height of heterosexual panic, both DC and Marvel were unwilling to allow authors to broach the subject of HIV/AIDS in any of their prized superhero properties. More so than Marvel, whose output, by and large, remained wedded to obeying the guidelines of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), thus enabling them to rely on newsstand distribution for the vast majority of their comics, DC took full advantage of the emerging system of direct-market distribution and sold adult-oriented mini-series, maxi-series, and “For Mature

Readers” titles unapproved by the CCA through comic specialty shops in an attempt to court

847 Jeffery A. Brown, The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture, Routledge Advances in Comic Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017), 90. 271 older and more deep-pocketed readers.848 As part of that process, DC allowed authors like

Howard Chaykin, in his 1986 reimagining the 1930’s pulp hero The Shadow, to consider

HIV/AIDS a part of his mini-series’ storyline.849 However, the brand recognition of a moribund hero like The Shadow stood world’s away from a globally recognizable, powerhouse property like Batman.

Even during the late-1980s, when heterosexual panic began subsiding and the subject of

HIV/AIDS became less controversial due to Americans’ increased understanding of HIV transmission, the beginnings of civil rights protections for people with AIDS, and the cultural impact of “innocent” HIV-positive spokespeople like Ryan White and Alison Gertz, DC remained staunchly committed to only mentioning AIDS in comics that featured lesser-known superheroes. Considerations of HIV/AIDS in assorted “For Mature Readers” titles that overhauled B-list superheroes for a new, adult audience, like Mike Grell’s take on Green Arrow or Grant Morrison’s revamped Animal Man, were as close as DC came during those years to addressing the subject using recognizable characters from the superhero genre.850

Even as the sheer volume of DC titles speaking to the epidemic expanded between 1987 and 1990, the increase was comprised mainly of short-lived or obscure superhero series, The

New Guardians, Black Orchid, and Shade, the Changing Man, for example, or series that featured no superheroes at all, like Sonic Disruptors or Gilgamesh II.851 While utilized by DC within titles geared to attract adult readers through more violent or sexually explicit stories that frequently focused on real-world issues of contemporary relevance, the topic of HIV/AIDS was,

848 For an overview of the 1980’s transition to direct-market distribution see Greg S. McCue with Clive Bloom, Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context (Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993), 60-66, 75. 849 Chaykin, The Shadow, no. 1-4. 850 Grell, Green Arrow, nos. 5-6; Morrison, Animal Man, no. 1. 851 Englehart, The New Guardians, nos. 1-7; Gaiman, Black Orchid, no. 1; Milligan, Shade: The Changing Man, no. 3; Baron, Sonic Disruptors, no. 2; Starlin, Gilgamesh II, no. 1. 272 nevertheless, kept far away from the pages of comics that showcased the adventures of celebrated, A-list superheroes whose massive fanbases included readers of all ages from across the country and around the world. All of that changed between 1992 and 1994, however, when the tenor of the national conversation surrounding HIV/AIDS shifted and DC believed that the subject could be included in comic books featuring some of its most popular superheroes without the risk of incurring a public backlash.

Although Marvel began publishing comics that mentioned HIV/AIDS two years after DC did so, beginning with its short-lived New Universe title D.P. 7 in 1988, it became the first of the comic industry’s Big Two publishers to debut the topic in a series featuring one of their iconic superheroes.852 In the closing months of 1991, Marvel published The Incredible Hulk #388 that reflected on the epidemic via a story revealing that Jim Wilson, one of the Hulk/Bruce Banner’s close friends, had contracted HIV.853 Instead of becoming a polemical issue within the world of

Hulk fandom, the story was unanimously praised and fan mail streamed into Marvel’s office for months after its publication. Characteristic of Hulk fans’ admiration, an emergency room doctor wrote to say that author Peter David’s “handling of this serious issue was both sensitive and uncompromising. It would have been very easy for you to have hid your heads and never allowed AIDS into the Marvel Universe. It’s nice to see that the medium can aspire to be more.”854 Another reader favorably compared The Incredible Hulk #388 to other examples of

American popular culture that earned critical accolades for addressing HIV/AIDS in the early

1990s, like the made-for-television movies Andre’s Mother and Our Sons, writing that the subject “was handled more intelligently than those Emmy award-winning TV shows that are

852 Gruenwald, D.P. 7, no. 24. 853 David, The Incredible Hulk, no. 388. 854 Todd Severin, MD, “Green Mail,” in The Incredible Hulk, no. 393 (New York: Marvel Comics, May 1992), 63. 273 always popping up on the tube.”855 Recognizing Marvel’s success, and realizing that incorporating HIV/AIDS into stories that included their most popular superheroes no longer carried the risk of offending some readers, as it likely would have only a few years prior, DC started to allow creators working with some of their iconic heroes the leeway of speaking to the epidemic.

The four-issue Batman mini-series Gotham Nights, written by John Ostrander, became the first instance where HIV/AIDS factored into a storyline featuring one of DC’s tent-pole superhero properties.856 Aside from being DC’s first title offering one of its major, A-list superheroes in the context of a story that considered HIV/AIDS, Gotham Nights also differed from DC titles that previously considered the epidemic because it carried the stamp of CCA approval. Nearly every DC and Marvel comic book that featured one of their flagship superheroes, including The Incredible Hulk #388, carried CCA approval which meant that not only could the series be sold outside of comic book shops, through newsstand distribution, but that it was created to entertain the widest swath of readers possible.

Whereas considerations of HIV/AIDS in comic books of the mid and late-1980s appeared solely in titles marketed to adults, in an effort to attract older readers through stories that confronted controversial subjects of contemporary relevance, the references to the epidemic that appeared in flagship superhero comics of the early 1990s demonstrate that, although the subject was, in some respects, more relevant than ever before, in light of its burgeoning considerations throughout the entirety of American culture, it had ceased being the innately controversial topic that it once was. No longer an edgy piece of subject matter used by comic book creators to bolster the adult sensibilities of titles “Suggested for Mature Readers,” the inclusion of

855 Jay Fulkerson, “Green Mail,” in The Incredible Hulk, no. 393 (New York: Marvel Comics, May 1992), 63. 856 John Ostrander, Gotham Nights, no. 1-4 (New York: DC Comics, March-June 1992). 274

HIV/AIDS in a Batman comic book approved by the CCA demonstrates the degree to which considerations of the epidemic were not only being mainstreamed, but becoming de rigueur.

In his survey of the AIDS pandemic, historian Jonathan Engel observed that “[a]s the

1990s progressed, expressions of support for AIDS became ubiquitous in certain liberal circles on both coasts. Hollywood and New York fund-raisers, hosted by…celebrities and public figures…raised millions in support of basic research, and small red AIDS commemorative ribbons became common place.”857 Although many of the consciousness-raising and altruistic activities in support of individuals with HIV/AIDS or promoting HIV/AIDS charities emanated at first from the liberal enclaves of Los Angeles and New York, two cities hit hardest by the epidemic and, what is more, served as epicenters of the arts, entertainment, journalism, and commercial business industries, the tectonic shifts in national considerations of the epidemic during the early 1990s were so substantial that they transcended the dogmatism of America’s sociocultural, liberal-versus-conservative binary to pervade both spheres of the nation’s political spectrum.

For example, no less a right-wing gathering than the 1992 Republican National

Convention, held in August of that year in the conservative city of Houston, Texas, featured an

HIV-positive speaker, Mary Fisher, who wore “a sequined version of the red ribbon that…symbolized sympathy for AIDS victims” and “rebuked those in her party who have regarded the sickness as a self-inflicted plague earned by immoral behavior—homosexual sex or intravenous drug abuse.”858 Products of mass, popular culture are designed to appeal to the widest possible audience and, with HIV/AIDS activism being embraced within both camps of

America’s warring sociopolitical factions, comic book publishers felt confident that considering

857 Jonathan Engel, The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 236. 858 Michael Kelly, “AIDS Speech Brings Hush to Crowd,” The New York Times, August 20, 1992, pg. A21. 275 the epidemic using their most popular superheroes would not alienate readers, whatever their political views, and would only enhance the brand identity of their most valuable intellectual properties.

The manner in which HIV/AIDS factored into the storyline of Gotham Nights demonstrates how commonplace considerations of the epidemic had become by 1992.

Eschewing traditional formulas of the superhero genre, Ostrander’s miniseries focused on how

Batman’s crusade against Gotham City’s villains impacted the lives of average citizens. Two of the workaday Gothamites featured, Jennifer and Jimmy, are yuppies in their late twenties who commute into the city together and try their best to deny their deepening romantic attraction to one another. After sharing a train ride and walking through the station to buy coffee, Jennifer and

Jimmy converse about dating in the 1990s where Jimmy mentions that “because of things like

AIDS” he does not date much.859 Later, after Jennifer has a one-night stand with another man, where it is insinuated that they practiced safe sex through illustrator Mary Mitchell’s drawing of a box of Trojan brand condoms in a bathroom drawer and Jennifer’s partner’s statement about

“taking reasonable precautions” and “not wanting to commit suicide,” her and Jimmy’s friendship becomes muddled.860 Jimmy, wounded by Jennifer’s tryst, envious of her more carefree attitudes about sex, and tired of her reliance on him for support after she is jilted by men who treat her affections cavalierly, lashes out and admonishes her that “with AIDS and everything…you know the only safe sex is no sex!”861 Ostrander included those discussions of the epidemic as a literary device to elucidate his fictional characters’ motivations as they negotiated their sex lives in a post-AIDS environment. Doing so in the pages of a Batman comic

859 Ostrander, Gotham Nights, no. 1, 10. 860 Ostrander, Gotham Nights, no. 3, 3-4. 861 Ibid., 17. 276 book demonstrates how deeply imbedded considerations of HIV/AIDS had become within

American culture of the early 1990s.

Only a few years earlier, the idea that AIDS would be discussed in a mainstream superhero comic book seemed ludicrous. In fact, the superhero genre in general, and Batman comics in particular, were viewed as a haven wherein citizens could indulge in a form of consumer escapism to avoid the ominous realities of the nation’s escalating health crisis. A New

York Times article from 1985 testified to such bygone notions in relating the thoughts of a gay businessman who accused some men in his community of “living their lives as if AIDS doesn’t exist…[t]hey say, ‘I got my motorcycle, my Batman comic books, I go to the gym and I go to the baths and that’s all I ever want to do.’”862 By 1992, fleeing from reality to seek refuge in the fantasy world of Gotham City was no longer possible as considerations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic had become a paramount feature of seemingly all facets of popular culture including flagship superhero comic books.

Generally speaking, comic books fans welcomed that transition and the degree of realism that they believed it brought to the superhero genre. Commenting on Ostrander’s Gotham Nights mini-series, an unnamed fan stated that “I am truly pleased with the direction that DC, as a company, has been heading for the last few years. It seems that it has been focusing more and more on getting readers interested in ‘real people,’ as the supporting characters in many of your flagship books have become more prominent.”863 Americans of the early 1990s may not have possessed an exceptionally deep or nuanced understanding of the epidemic, but they were certainly familiar, on some level, with HIV/AIDS, if only to the degree that they appreciated its lethality and understood that the disease could be transmitted through sexual contact. Creators

862 Collins, “Impact of AIDS,” B4. 863 Unknown, “Gotham General Delivery,” in Gotham Nights, no. 4, 23. 277 working on flagship superhero comics in the early 1990s used that familiarity to enhance the believability of both their supporting characters and, increasingly, their titular heroes. In the case of the Flash, writer William Messner-Loebs did both.

During the early 1990s, Messner-Loebs was one of the comic book industry’s rising stars and his innovative work on Flash, one of DC’s flagship superhero titles, helped cement that status. In 1991, Messner-Loebs made the bold choice to have the character Pied Piper, a former adversary of the Flash who renounced his criminal past to become a close friend and ally, come out to as gay.864 At that time, gay characters in mass-market American comic books were almost nonexistent and Messner-Loebs’s decision paved the way for other writers to create new, openly gay characters or have previously established ones come out of the closet in the years that followed. Demonstrative of the sociocultural and political shifts taking place during the early

1990s, at which point, according to political science scholar Jeremiah J. Garretson, “the public’s fear of AIDS waned and a national dialogue on gay rights emerged,” Messner-Loebs’s work reflected both the nation’s nascent acceptance of its homosexual citizens and ascendent trends in

HIV/AIDS awareness then pervading American culture.865

A few issues after the Pied Piper, aka Hartley Rathaway, made his sexual orientation known to the Flash, aka Wally West, Messner-Loebs wrote an exchange where the two friends walk through the city, wearing street cloths instead of their trademark costumes, and ruminate on the topic of AIDS and the gay community, safe sex, and the future of the epidemic. West raises the subject of HIV/AIDS when he tells Rathaway that “I’m worried about you, pal…I don’t know that much about AIDS or about gay lifestyles either…but what I have heard scares me.” 866

864 Bill Messner-Loebs, Flash, vol. 2, no. 53 (New York: DC Comics, August 1991), 3. 865 Jeremiah J. Garretson, The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 3. 866 Bill Messner-Loebs, Flash, vol. 2, no. 60 (New York: DC Comics, March 1992), 6. 278

Rathaway responds by telling West that “[i]t should. But don’t worry…I’ve been careful about

AIDS since they were calling it ‘the gay cancer.’”867 Rathaway continues his response by noting the devastation wrought by AIDS and how that has altered his sexual habits and those of many gay Americans. Rathaway asserts that his “social life hasn’t been exactly heavy duty for quite some time,” then mordantly asserts that “[l]osing half your friends to a plague doesn’t make you feel like partying.”868 After Rathaway acknowledged the disproportionate effects of the epidemic on gay men, Messner-Loebs then had the character turn the tables on West by challenging what appears to be West’s view that HIV/AIDS is solely a homosexual health issue.

When Rathaway notices West admiring an attractive female stranger jogging down the sidewalk in spandex shorts he turns to him and, referring to West’s reputation as something of a

Lothario, says, “[y]ou, on the other hand…” to which West retorts, “[c]’mon. I am a lot more discriminating than people think. A lot more.”869 But, Rathaway does not let West off the hook that easily and follows up his insinuation that West might not be as careful about his sexual health as he should be with the question “and you use protection, right? Every time?”870 West responds with an emphatic “yes,” but quickly tries to change the subject saying “[t]his has got me totally spooked. Let’s talk about something else.”871 Their exchange ends on a morbid note in a panel that has Rathaway, standing in front of a graffiti covered wall with a skull and crossbones spray painted on it, intoning, “[s]ure. After all, we’re only discussing the death of the human race.”872

867 Ibid. 868 Ibid., 7. 869 Ibid. 870 Ibid. 871 Ibid. 872 Ibid. 279

Rathaway’s final statement may seem hyperbolic, but, in 1992, the rate of newly diagnosed HIV infections was climbing and the frequency of AIDS-related deaths was increasing annually. That year a grim signpost was reached when, according to the Centers for Disease

Control (CDC), “HIV infection became the leading cause of death for men aged 25-44 (up from second in 1991) and the fourth leading cause of death for women in [that] age group (up from fifth in 1991).”873 Indicative of the degree to which early-1990s readers of Flash did not consider

Messner-Loebs’s dialogue heavy handed, one fan wrote to say he appreciated the writer’s

“subtle, personal approach.”874 Another reader’s comment, that “Wally automatically worries about the Piper catching AIDS because of his gay lifestyle, without stopping to think that the way he’s been living over the last few years has been much more dangerous,” points to one of the reasons why the persistence of gay-plague stereotypes from the 1980s enabled the escalation of HIV transmission via heterosexual intercourse in the 1990s.875

Comparable to the scenario Messner-Loebs crafted in Flash, men who were asked about their commitment to using safe sex practices during every sexual encounter would, as the character of Wally West/Flash did, consistently respond in the affirmative. However, as West’s uneasiness with his friend’s line of questioning suggested, what was claimed and what was actually practiced often differed. With alarming regularity, sexually-active heterosexual

Americans, both men and women, were claiming that they practiced safe sex while still engaging in unprotected intercourse.876 Striking a tone that wavered between enabling that behavior and advising heterosexuals to act more cautiously, popular press articles on safe sex, like one from

873 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Update: Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection Among Persons Aged 25-44 Years—United States, 1991 and 1992,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 42, no. 45 (November 19, 1993): 869-872, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00022174.htm. 874 Jim Kelly, “Speed Reading,” in Flash, no. 66, by Mark Waid (New York: DC Comics, July 1992), 31. 875 Rol Hirst, “Speed Reading,” in Flash, no. 66, by Mark Waid (New York: DC Comics, July 1992), 31. 876 Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Love, Lies, and Fear in the Plague Years…,” Psychology Today, September/October 1992, 30-35. 280

Time, intoned that “[t]he risk to most American heterosexuals is still small, but it is real and growing.”877 In spite of a marked upsurge in mass-media promotions of safe sex, especially condom use, many heterosexual citizens still considered themselves implicitly shielded from infection.

The U.S. cultural turn toward encouraging AIDS awareness in the early 1990s accelerated the disappearance of homophobic analysis from journalistic coverage of the epidemic. However, the intellectual legacies of formative reporting from the 1980s lingered.

Impeded by then emergent norms from vocalizing their belief in gay-plague stereotypes, some heterosexuals, who did not want to appear uncouth in mixed company, yet still believed in their sexual orientation-based immunity, parroted safe-sex platitudes in public while continuing their risky sexual behaviors in private. Homophobic assessments of HIV/AIDS made during the 1980s engendered health consequences in the 1990s in part because of heterosexuals’ willingness to alter their rhetoric, but their reluctance to relinquish homophobic beliefs and alter their sexual habits.

Despite a continued rise in instances of HIV infections resulting from heterosexual intercourse, researcher Deborah Lupton has stated that, in the early 1990s, “[n]ews about the risk of AIDS to heterosexuals was no longer fresh and exciting.”878 Having experienced the heterosexual panics of the 1980s, when news outlets, time and again, predicted a catastrophic wave of heterosexual deaths that never materialized, Americans appeared deafened to less sensational and more tempered warnings. Sub-Saharan Africa’s growing HIV/AIDS epidemic provided ample evidence to dispel the gay-plague era myth of heterosexual immunity, but

877 Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “How Safe is Sex?” Time, November 25, 1991, 72. 878 Deborah Lupton, Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media, Social Aspects of AIDS (Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994) 90. 281 without a cataclysmic spate of heterosexuals dying from AIDS in developed countries of the

Western world, the homophobic perceptions that caused heterosexuals to misconstrue their health risks as negligible seemed remarkably determinative.879 Another factor that contributed to the incongruence between some heterosexuals’ words and their deeds came from an abiding faith that scientific innovation would undoubtedly deliver a cure for HIV/AIDS in the near future.880

After the discovery that antiretroviral drug azidothymidine (AZT) could help ward off the development of AIDS in patients with HIV, hopes ran high in the late 1980s that HIV would become a chronic, but manageable, condition as opposed to an inexorably fatal one.881 Those hopes remained in the early 1990s, but it was becoming apparent to researchers, doctors, and patients that although AZT could prevent the onset of AIDS for a goodly amount of time, years in some cases, it could not stem HIV’s lethal progression into AIDS indefinitely.882 Other drugs, specifically didanosine (DDI), were showing promise in retarding the onset of AIDS, but the pace of developing new pharmaceutical treatments for HIV remained sluggish and neither AZT nor DDI demonstrated themselves as a cure-all prescription.883 With mortality rising, some HIV- positive citizens turned to underground suppliers to secure drugs, such as dideoxycytidine

(DDC), that were in the process of receiving the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for treating HIV but that had not yet gone to market.884

Regardless of drug treatments capable of extending a person’s time living with HIV, receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis in the early 1990s was still tantamount to being handed a

879 James Chin, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness (Seattle, WA: Radcliffe Publishing Ltd., 2007), 59. 880 Peter Radetsky, “Straight Sex and AIDS Vaccines,” Discover, January 1992, 52-53. 881 Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 237. 882 Science News, “Mixed Results on AZT’s Survival Payoff,” May 2, 1992, 300. 883 Science News, “Which Drug Works Best?” August 29, 1992, 134. 884 FDA Consumer, “Dangerous Variations in ‘Underground’ DDC,” May 1992, 5. 282 death sentence. That prognosis made the prevention of HIV infection the sine qua non for terminating the epidemic’s spread and the only truly life-saving measure then available. The fictional conversations about safe sex featured in Gotham Nights and Flash are indicative of the real-life dialogues that suffused public and private discussions of the topic and were a fixture of the national debate regarding AIDS awareness. Magic Johnson’s revelation that he contracted

HIV through heterosexual intercourse “sparked national concern over how to prevent the spread of the virus which causes AIDS,” but specialists could not reach a consensus on what steps, if any, government organizations should take to promote safe sex initiatives or maintain abstinence-only education.885

The mass distribution of condoms, particularly in public high schools, was an especially contentious topic. Criticism of supplying teenagers with condoms came from predictable quarters, the Catholic church and conservative media outlets, but even some nonreligious and apolitical public intellectuals questioned the appropriateness of such measures and their ability to thoroughly prevent transmission.886 Public intellectual and physician Robert C. Noble, like the fictional character Jimmy in Gotham Nights, was a staunch believer in adopting an abstinence- only approach to sex given the lethality of HIV/AIDS and wrote that “[p]assing out condoms to teenagers is like issuing them squirt guns for a four-alarm blaze. Condoms just don’t hack it.”887

Whether school districts decided to promote abstinence-only education or the distribution of condoms, instances of HIV/AIDS in teenagers and young adults was skyrocketing. From 1989 to

1992, “the cumulative number of 13 to 24-year-olds diagnosed with AIDS increased 77

885 Jet, “Practice Safe Sex or Abstain: Experts Offer Their Advice,” December 9, 1991, 16. 886 For a representative sample of Catholic and conservative criticism of condom distribution in high schools see John R. Quinn, “Distributing Condoms in High Schools,” America, November 2, 1991, 320; National Review, “The Condom Parade,” December 28, 1992, 12-14. 887 Robert C. Noble, “‘There is No Safe Sex,’” Newsweek, April 1, 1991, 8. 283 percent.”888 While there was no consensus on what should be done to counter that trend, there was universal agreement that something must be done to raise teenagers’ and young adults’ awareness of the illness and compel them to take preventative measures. Flagship superhero comics that received CCA approval and were widely available through newsstand distribution played an increasing role in disseminating information to teens and young adults about the biological facts of HIV in the years that followed.

During the mid-1980s, comic book publishers fought mightily to nurture the growth of their adult readership and their efforts in that regard proved tremendously fruitful. By the early

1990s, they had cultivated a robust crop of dedicated adult readers, many of them “boomers

[who] returned to the fold” of comic book collecting.889 Nevertheless, children and teenagers were “still an important part of the market for comic books.”890 Whereas publishers initially utilized the AIDS epidemic within titles targeted exclusively at adult readers, by 1992, discussions of HIV/AIDS had ceased being inherently provocative and instead had become an accepted matter of public health education and an appropriate topic for readers of all ages. At a moment when AIDS awareness campaigns enjoyed their greatest level of public prominence, DC joined the surge of nationwide initiatives to curb the epidemic’s spread, and generate some positive press for itself, by running five “single-page public service ads about AIDS in its superhero comics starting in December” of 1992.891

In a synergistic decision, DC debuted its five-part series of public service announcements

(PSAs) to coincide with the World Health Organization’s World AIDS Day. Held annually on

December 1 since 1988, World AIDS Day was one of the many consciousness-raising and

888 Barbara Kantrowitz, “Teenagers and AIDS,” Newsweek, August 3, 1992, 44. 889 Dan Fost, “Comics Age with the Baby Boom,” American Demographics, May 1991, 16. 890 Ibid. 891 Chicago Tribune, “Comics Zero in on AIDS,” October 27, 1992, sec. KIDNEWS, pg. 1. 284 commemorative endeavors that originated in the late 1980s but whose observance became prevalent within America’s post-1991 environment of widespread cultural concern for

HIV/AIDS causes.892 Like the references made to HIV/AIDS in DC titles from 1992, DC’s PSAs continued utilizing flagship superheroes to consider the epidemic. However, unlike in Gotham

Nights, where ancillary characters discussed HIV/AIDS, or Flash #60, where the comic’s titular hero appeared out of his iconic costume and in the guise of an average citizen, the PSAs featured instantly recognizable superheroes, in costume, and debunking AIDS myths. First printed in DC titles cover-dated February 1993, the PSAs took the form of vignettes that showed superheroes intervening to educate bystanders or, in some cases, become better informed about HIV/AIDS themselves.893

DC’s AIDS PSA series reflected the shifting terrain of U.S. cultural understandings of the epidemic through the company’s willingness to overtly link some of its most recognizable superhero characters with the drive to expand AIDS awareness without fearing that such an association would adversely affect the economic viability of those properties as popular culture commodities. It also revealed that, even in light of a historic moment when empathy for people with AIDS was growing and Americans’ knowledge about the epidemic was improving, the medical misconceptions and homophobic bigotries that surfaced during the earliest years of the crisis were still influencing perceptions of the disease a decade after they first appeared.

Coinciding with national concerns about the spread of HIV in teenagers, DC’s PSAs were created to educate a young-adult audience that may not have been well aware of AIDS during the

1980s. Yet, the delusional beliefs that the PSAs were created to counter came straight from the

892 Michael Merson and Stephen Inrig, The AIDS Pandemic: Searching for a Global Response (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 84. 893 Comic books are postdated two months later than the month when they are distributed. Titles marked February 1993 would have been sold in December of 1992. 285 seminal years of the epidemic and confirmed that a new generation of Americans, while ignorant of many truths regarding HIV/AIDS, had already been well schooled in the falsities and prejudices of their adult predecessors.

Chief among the misconceptions most deeply embedded in the national consciousness was that a person could contract AIDS through casual contact. The majority of DC’s PSAs focused on contradicting that erroneous belief. One featured a basketball-playing preteen who refused to drink from a friend’s can of soda, because he believed “[t]hat’s how you get AIDS,” being informed by the Flash that “[y]ou can’t catch AIDS from drinking after somebody—or from any form of casual contact.”894 Another showed members of the Teen Titans superhero team visiting AIDS patients in a hospital where a worried Beast Boy asks, “[c]an’t we get sick, or maybe die just by being here,” before Wonder Girl tells him that “you don’t get AIDS just by being near someone. It takes more than toughing, or hugging, or even kissing to catch HIV.”895

In another iteration on dispelling fears of casual transmission, Robin, Batman’s sidekick, sits in the Batcave talking to their butler, Alfred Pennyworth, about a student at his school who some of his classmates are avoiding because they have learned that he has HIV.896 Alfred tells

Robin that “there is no danger of contracting the disease through casual contact.”897 Echoing

Ryan White’s struggle to attend public school during the 1985-1986 school year, the Robin PSA drew inspiration from events of the recent past to help dissipate belief in casual transmission, but, in doing so, it also highlighted the disheartening fact that myths about casual transmission,

894 “The Flash AIDS PSA,” in Superman the Man of Steel, no. 20, by Louise Simonson (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), between pgs. 20 & 21. DC’s AIDS PSAs appeared in all of their non-mature reader titles cover dated February 1993, but the examples I cite here are primarily from those featuring the character Superman due to the character’s stature as DC’s most widely recognized superhero. 895 “The Teen Titans AIDS PSA,” in Superman, vol. 2, no. 76, by Dan Jurgens (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), between pgs. 20 & 21. 896 “Robin AIDS PSA,” in Action Comics, no. 686, by Roger Stern (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), between pgs. 20 & 21. 897 Ibid. 286 which were proven false even in the mid-1980s when White’s battle became national news, required PSAs to challenge and dispel them seven years later. In the early 1990s, belief in casual transmission was not the only persistent AIDS myth that needed to be challenged

The two remaining PSAs in DC’s five-part series countered similarly longstanding fallacies. A PSA featuring Green Lantern considered gay-plague stereotyping and showed the hero intervening to prevent an incident of homophobic violence when an angry, club-wielding mob chased down a gay couple shouting “[w]e can’t risk letting people like you live in this town,” and “[e]veryone knows your kind carry AIDS!”898 Flying to the couple’s rescue, Green

Lantern tells the enraged crowd that “[n]ot all gay people have AIDS” and informs them that

“gay communities were hit early and hard by the AIDS epidemic…now AIDS is spreading fastest among people you wouldn’t expect.”899

Like the PSAs refuting myths about casual transmission, PSAs that challenged anti-gay and other AIDS-based prejudices remained sorely needed years after falsehoods about who carries or can contract HIV had been thoroughly debunked. Researcher Kevin T. Berrill argued that increased gay political activism in response to the epidemic, and the media spotlight it garnered, “may have simultaneously increased public acceptance [of homosexuality] and exposed gay men and lesbians to greater risk of violence.”900 During the early 1990s, when incidents of homophobic violence were rising in cities across America, and perpetrators regularly cited HIV/AIDS as a justification for their crimes, the message of DC’s Green Lantern PSA proved a testament to the conflict that resulted from the gradual erosion of America’s venerable

898 “Green Lantern AIDS PSA,” in The Adventures of Superman, no. 499, by Jerry Ordway (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), between pgs. 20 & 21. 899 Ibid. 900 Kevin T. Berrill, “Anti-Gay Violence and Victimization in the United States: An Overview,” in Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men, eds. Gregory M. Herek and Kevin T. Berrill (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1992), 39. 287 cultural paradigm of heterosexism.901

The final PSA, showcasing members of the Justice League superhero team, found

Booster Gold telling Blue Beetle that he does not worry about AIDS, because he only dates “nice women,” before being interrupted by the superheroine Fire who shouts, “[y]ou morons! You think you can only get AIDS from people who aren’t nice? It doesn’t matter who you are. The

HIV virus doesn’t discriminate.”902 The impetus behind the Justice League PSA arose from a need analogous to that of the Green lantern PSA and its efforts to counter prejudices ingrained by formative conceptualizations of the epidemic. The Justice League PSAs countered gay-plague era myths about who was and was not susceptible to infection and, given the propensity of many heterosexuals, especially men, in the early 1990s to continue considering themselves shielded from HIV by virtue of their sexuality alone, it was a message as equally well-timed as the one contained in the Green lantern PSA. Revelatory of that specious belief’s profound longevity, nearly four decades after being instilled in the national consciousness as a result of gay-plague stereotyping in the early 1980s, scholars still produce monographs investigating its ongoing ramifications in the early twenty-first century.903

Commendable for their willingness to reflect on topics such as homophobia and the lax attitude of some heterosexuals toward protecting themselves and their sex partners from HIV transmission, DC’s superhero PSAs, nevertheless, shied away from any discussion of condoms or the dangers encountered by needle-drug users who share injection equipment. Demonstrating that those topics retained a somewhat controversial character, even within the early 1990’s

901 Ibid., 36-38. 902 “Justice League AIDS PSA,” in Justice League America, no. 71, by Dan Jurgens (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), between pg. 26 and the inside back cover. 903 For a thorough study of heterosexual men’s response to HIV/AIDS in the United States and around the globe during the 2010s see Shari l. Dworkin, Men at Risk: Masculinity, Heterosexuality, and HIV Prevention (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 288 atmosphere of increasing frankness, DC withheld considerations of them from the superhero

PSAs printed in its all-ages titles and, instead, discussed them at length in a special eight-page

PSA inserted in the February 1993 issues of its three ongoing, suggested-for-mature-readers titles.904

Written by Neil Gaiman and called “Death Talks about Life,” the PSA featured Death, a character from Gaiman’s Sandman series, explaining what HIV/AIDS is, how HIV is transmitted, and how people can protect themselves from contracting it. Gaiman was one of the most lauded comic book writers of the era and his work on Sandman attracted attention from not only comic book aficionados, but from the wider literary world of prose fiction. A year before his AIDS PSA debuted, Gaiman’s work made Sandman the first comic book to win a World

Fantasy Award for best short fiction.905 A prestigious honor usually granted to short stories or novellas, “Gaiman’s victory caused such a furor among wordsmiths that the judging rules were…rewritten to exclude a comic book from winning in a literature category again.”906

Highlighting the ever-present cultural prejudice against comic books, as well as the inroads made by the medium since the 1980s, Gaiman’s achievement added to his artistic renown and made him an ideal choice to pen a PSA that, unlike its superhero counterparts, was advertised as a selling point of the comic books that carried it using a message on their covers that stated

“Special Insert: Death Talks About AIDS and Safer Sex.”907

Gaiman’s PSA reiterated that “[y]ou can’t get it [AIDS] by shaking hands, or being in the

904 In December 1992, Sandman, Hellblazer, and Shade, the Changing Man, were DC’s ongoing monthly titles that carried a “Suggested for Mature Readers” label. 905 Brenda Herrman, “Enter Sandman,” Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1991, sec. Tempo, pg. 3. 906 Ibid. 907 Neil Gaiman, Sandman, vol. 2, no. 46, (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), cover. The PSA was also included in Hellblazer, no. 62 and Shade, the Changing Man, vol. 2, no. 32, both dated February 1993. In 1994, DC published “Death Talks About Life” as a standalone promotional comic distributed for free at participating comic shops. 289 same place as someone with AIDS,” and that “you can’t tell who’s got AIDS by looking at them,” but, in contrast with DC’s all-ages superhero PSAs, “Death Talks about Life” addressed subjects such as anal, vaginal, and oral sex, as well as how to sterilize injection equipment with bleach.908 Discussing safe sex unflinchingly, Gaiman’s PSA included a lengthy passage where

Death described what a condom is, how it works, and demonstrated how to correctly apply one through drawings of the prophylactic being sheathed over a banana.909 Beyond the mechanics of applying a condom, Gaiman’s PSA considered the “embarrassment connected with possessing, purchasing, and using condoms” that inhibited the frank discussion of them in public forums and contributed to some citizens’ reluctance to use them habitually.910 The PSA concluded with a list of contact information for HIV/AIDS organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, and

Australia and a brief bibliography of publications about living with HIV/AIDS.911

Dedicated to Don Melia, publisher of the 1988 British benefit comic book Strip AIDS, that inspired the subsequent creation of Strip AIDS U.S.A., “Death Talks About Life,” like DC’s superhero PSAs, was motivated by the deepening effects of the epidemic’s rising death toll.912

Melia, who died of AIDS-related complications on August 21, 1992, devoted his life to projects that “mixed comics, culture, and conscience” and inspired others, like Gaiman, who referenced

AIDS previously in his 1988 DC mini-series Black Orchid, to do the same.913 Both the Gaiman

PSA for adult readers, and DC’s superhero PSAs for readers of all ages, were spearheaded by

Neal Pozner, Senior Editor of Creative Affairs at DC who, like Melia, recognized that improving

908 Neil Gaiman, “Death Talks About Life,” in Sandman, vol. 2, no. 46, by Neil Gaiman (New York: DC Comics, February 1993), 2. 909 Ibid., 3-5. 910 Ibid., 3. 911 Ibid., unnumbered final page. 912 Ibid., unnumbered penultimate page. 913 Rose Collis, “Obituary: Don Melia,” The Independent, September 2, 1992, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-don-melia-1548897.html. 290 public health education about HIV/AIDS was the most effective weapon against stopping its spread.914

A gay rights activist who used his talents as a graphic designer to do pro bono work for the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis,

Pozner’s oversight imbued DC’s December 1992 PSA project with a level of activist zeal that ensured the republication the superhero PSAs the following year, in all-ages series cover dated

February 1994, and the reprinting of “Death Talks About Life” in the format of a short, promotional comic distributed for free through direct-market comic book shops.915 Nevertheless, in a demonstration of how DC’s PSAs epitomized genuine advocacy intermingled with the commercial, bandwagon activism of the early 1990s, subsequent to Pozner’s AIDS-related death on June 21, 1994, the company failed to once again reissue the PSAs in observance of World

AIDS Day that December.916 At that juncture, waning national enthusiasm for AIDS activism coincided with a massive downturn in the economic fortunes of the comic book industry and the convergence those events impelled DC to abandon its fleeting foray into HIV/AIDS education.

Regardless of the industry-wide recession that loomed on the horizon, when DC first issued its AIDS PSAs in December of 1992, the company was enjoying a tsunami of public enthusiasm that started during the adult-comics boom of the 1980s, gained greater momentum after the success of 1989’s feature-film blockbuster Batman, and began cresting in the fall of

1992 when the publisher announced that its most iconic superhero, Superman, would be killed off in an upcoming installment of the Superman series while battling a new supervillain named

914 Comics Buyer’s Guide, “DC Spreads Word on AIDS,” no. 988, October 23, 1992, 28. 915 The New York Times, “Obituary: Pozner, Neal,” September 16, 1994, pg. B8. 916 Maggie Murphy, “The Face of AIDS: 1994,” Entertainment Weekly, December 2, 1994, https://ew.com/article/1994/12/02/faces-aids-1994/ 291

Doomsday.917 Avid comic book fans, causal readers, and people who had not bought a single comic book in their entire life took notice “amid a never-before-seen amount of mainstream

[media] attention” that transmogrified the popular culture event into international news.918 On the editorial page of The New York Times, Superman’s impending death was discussed with as much earnestness as the real-life drama then occurring within New York City’s public school system over how to handle sex education, the distribution of condoms, and the promotion of sexual abstinence in light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.919 When the hero’s much ballyhooed downfall occurred in Superman #75, the three million copies of its first printing hit the racks on

November 18, 1992 and went to buyers who “[ran] the gamut from hardcore collectors to the curious.”920 Three more printings soon followed and, by the year’s end, four million copies had been sold.921

DC’s AIDS PSAs debuted in the aftermath of Superman #75’s titanic success when

Superman titles “sold more than a million copies a week month after month, which was better than Superman had done since the 1940s and better than he has done since.”922 All told, DC’s decision to lay its most iconic hero to rest, at least temporarily, produced “a gold mine” for the publisher.923 Putting AIDS PSAs on pages that would otherwise be filled by paid advertisements or inhouse ads made the gesture a financial sacrifice for DC, but one that was negligible

917 The Associated Press, “The Bell Tolls for Superman,” The New York Times, September 5, 1992, pg. 14. 918 Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 192. 919 The New York Times, “When Superman Gets Boring,” October 4, 1992, pg. E16; The New York Times, “Yes, Abstinence. Yes, Condoms.,” October 4, 1992, pg. E16. 920 Larry McShane, “Man of Steel’s Demise is a Super Event for Comic Book Retailers,” Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1992, pg. 2. 921 Mark Voger, The Dark Age: Grim, Great, and Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2006), 89. 922 Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (New York: Random House, 2012), 251. 923 Ibid. 292 compared to the goodwill it engendered during the apex of both comic book sales and AIDS awareness in the early 1990s. When comic sales slumped in 1994, and DC was no longer flush with cash, the PSAs went out the door to make room for the desperately needed revenue brought by paid advertisers. Before that occurred, however, the comic book industry thrived as never before and, like DC, Marvel Comics rode a wave of impressive sales that emboldened them to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic using their own stable of iconic superhero properties.

Since the late 1980s, the U.S. comic book market had grown exponentially. Comics scholar Jean-Paul Gabilliet estimated that between 1988 and 1992 the market doubled in size,

“from 300 million dollars in 1988 to 400 million in 1990, 500 million in 1991, and 600 million in

1992.”924 That growth was enjoyed by publishers across the board, from the smallest independent outlets to industry juggernauts DC and Marvel. In large part, comic book sales were buoyed by the creation of major “event” comics, like the death of Superman, that accelerated developments in the industry that had been brewing since the mid-1980s and were gradually transmuting comic book collecting from a niche hobby into a serious speculative market.925 One newspaper article, printed in the business section of the Chicago Tribune, summed up the goldrush mentality of the era nicely when it claimed that “[s]ince the Batman movie became a mega-hit a couple of years ago, comic book dealers don’t have to worry about being stereotyped as nerds. Now the worry is being labeled tycoons.”926

During the early 1990s, the hobby’s commodification reached its apotheosis in the output of Marvel Comics who relaunched flagship superhero titles, renaming and/or renumbering them,

924 Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 155. 925 Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 13-14. 926 David Altaner, “Superheroes Beat Law of Supply and Demand,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 1991, sec. Bus., pg. 5. 293 to create new, number one issues that sold millions of copies to became all-time best sellers, but hyper-inflated a market already bubbling toward its bursting point. Spider-Man #1, by author and illustrator Todd MacFarlane, sold a record 2.85 million copies in the summer of 1990 and its success became the formula that Marvel tried repeatedly to duplicate in the years that followed.927 In 1991, Marvel published a new X-Men series to great fanfare selling over seven million copies of X-Men #1 to fans and speculators who bought multiple copies under the misguided belief that, twenty-years hence, they could sell the books for a windfall and retire.928

The massive profits generated by such tactics emboldened Marvel to address HIV/AIDS using their flagship superheroes, but, when the comic book market crashed in 1994, Marvel, like DC, promptly abandoned the topic.

One of the most notable “event” comics to emerge from the comic book boom of the early 1990s was Marvel’s Alpha Flight #106 published in 1992.929 A spinoff of Marvel series featuring the X-Men, Alpha Flight related the adventures of a Canadian superhero team who, like the X-Men, battled evildoers as well as societal prejudice against individuals with mutant abilities in plotlines containing thinly veiled allegories against racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Alpha Flight #106 drew from that tradition of social commentary to make progressive statements about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, gay rights, and, in the process, created a groundbreaking story that has become the focus of numerous scholarly studies regarding gender and sexuality in the comic book medium.930 With a blurb on its cover proclaiming “NORTHSTAR™ AS YOU’VE

NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE!,” the issue featured the mutant superhero Northstar both

927 Dan Raviv, Comic Wars: How Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire—And Both Lost (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 35-36. 928 Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 13-14. 929 Scott Lobdell, Alpha Flight, no. 106 (New York: Marvel Comics, March 1992). 930 Matt Bryant Cheney, “US Comics, Moral Capital, and Social Change: 1954-2014,” in The American Comic Book, ed. Joseph Michael Sommers (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2014), 45. 294 adopting an AIDS-stricken infant and, more importantly, coming out of the closet to disclose his homosexuality.931 Through the events of Alpha Flight #106, Northstar became the first openly gay character to appear in a Marvel publication and is widely regarded as the first openly gay superhero in the history of popular American comic books.932 Alpha Flight #106 was hailed for its potential to educate teenage readers, who would “benefit most from [the comic’s] discussions about sexuality and disease prevention,” and for being an important indicator that “gay

Americans are gradually being accepted in mainstream popular culture.”933

Although the issue’s cover blurb maintained that Northstar would appear as readers had

“never seen him before,” Northstar had, in actuality, been coded as gay since his creation, by author and illustrator John Byrne in 1983, and Alpha Flight’s readership was well aware of the character’s implied sexual orientation long before it became stated explicitly.934 As a CCA- approved title, Alpha Flight had long abided by censorship guidelines that expressly forbid openly gay characters. However, a door for the establishment of unambiguously gay characters was opened in 1989 after the CCA revised its homophobic mandates.935 It seems the editorial staff at Marvel chose to forego Northstar’s coming out until doing so would mark that disclosure as another momentous event designed to induce massive sales through repeat, speculative purchases fueled by tacit promises of the issue becoming a valuable collector’s item. What is more, the expanding visibility of the gay rights movement and the popularity of AIDS awareness champaigns reached a critical mass in the early 1990s and it appeared that the time was ripe to

931 Lobdell, Alpha Flight, no. 106, 9-11, 20. 932 A. Scott Henderson, “Just Like US? LGBTQ Characters in Mainstream Comics,” in Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses: Critical Perspectives, ed. Crag Hill (New York: Routledge, 2017), 68. 933 New York Times, “Comics Break New Ground, Again,” January 24, 1992, pg. A28. 934 Bolling, “The U.S. HIV/AIDS Crisis,” 205. 935 Chris Gavaler, Superhero Comics, Bloomsbury Comic Studies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 198. 295 address two subjects that, only a few years earlier, had been considered too offensive for inclusion in one of Marvel’s all-ages superhero titles.

Marvel’s willingness to broach the subject of Northstar’s sexual orientation, a topic that had been skirted for years, showed that discussions of homosexuality in a mainstream superhero comic book were, circa 1992, more likely to elicit praise than public outcry. After the successful incorporation of HIV/AIDS into the Marvel Universe the previous year, in The Incredible Hulk

#388, the publisher knew that fans would support considerations of a heretofore taboo topic in one of their flagship, superhero titles. Nevertheless, because homosexuality and HIV/AIDS remained conjoined in the public consciousness, contemplating the two subjects in tandem made the entire enterprise less of a gamble than if the plot of Alpha Flight #106 had focused entirely on Northstar’s sexual orientation. Shoehorning both Northstar’s coming out and his adoption of an abandoned, AIDS-stricken infant into the same issue could have become a case study in clumsy, socially conscious comic book writing, but Scott Lobdell, the author of Alpha Flight

#106, managed to integrate the two stories in a manner that avoided inelegant stereotypes by challenging the concept of “innocent” vs. “guilty” HIV/AIDS victims, a notion that emerged during the first years of the HIV/AIDS crisis but retained its considerable sway in shaping how many Americans understood the epidemic.

In the narrative of Alpha Flight #106, Northstar’s adoption of the deathly ill child becomes a major news story, members of Alpha Flight deliver speeches about the need for

“public schools to increase AIDS awareness and prevention classes,” and “all

Canada…embrace[s] the plight of [the] AIDS-stricken infant.”936 After witnessing Canada’s outpouring of support, a grizzled former superhero named Major Mapleleaf, embittered by the

936 Lobdell, Alpha Flight, no. 106, 11. 296 media’s neglect of his son’s AIDS-related death a year earlier, comes out of retirement and violently attacks Northstar shouting, “My son, Michael, was a victim of AIDS as well! But he was gay—so people didn’t afford him the luxury of being ‘innocent.’ There were no press conferences, no fund-raisers, no nightly news updates! He was just one of thousands who died of

AIDS last year!”937 As the battle rages, Major Mapleleaf continues to expound on the injustice of a world that treats homosexuals who die from AIDS as complicit in their illness which prompts

Northstar to lash back bellowing, “Do not presume to lecture me on the hardships homosexuals must bear. No one knows them better than I. For while I am not inclined to discuss my sexuality with people for whom it is none of their business—I am gay!”938

Upon subduing Major Mapleleaf with a combination of fisticuffs and oratory, the two heroes reconcile over the death of Northstar’s adopted daughter, whose passing in the comic’s final pages reiterated the lethality of HIV/AIDS in 1992.939 Afterwards, Northstar held a press conference publicly revealing his sexuality to the world by invoking the rhetoric of ACT-UP stating, “It has been said ‘Silence equals Death.’ I no longer wish to be that part of the Death that is the AIDS crisis.…It is my fervent wish that the expression of my homosexuality will open the doors to conversation.”940 Northstar’s wish was realized during the weeks that followed as fans inundated Marvel’s offices with letters relating their thoughts on the story. After sifting through their “overstuffed mailbag,” Marvel staffers calculated that 76.3% of the letter writers approved of Northstar’s coming out while 21.1% disapproved and 2.6% remained neutral.941

Demonstrating the degree to which AIDS awareness had become de rigueur during the early

937 Ibid., 16. 938 Ibid, 17, 20. 939 Ibid., 25, 27. 940 Ibid., 29. 941 “Alpha Waves,” in Alpha Flight, no. 110, by Simon Furman (New York: Marvel Comics, July 1992), 31. 297

1990s, letters discussing Northstar’s sexuality outnumbered those discussing HIV/AIDS five to one.942

Around the time of Alpha Flight #106’s publication, Matthew Gilbert, a film and television critic for The Boston Globe, lamented that filmgoers would find it “difficult to point to a Hollywood gay character who could be called a hero.”943 Three years later, Entertainment

Weekly surveyed the cultural landscape and christened the decade “The Gay ‘90s” in a cover story celebrating the proliferation of gay and lesbian representation throughout all realms of

American popular culture writing that, “[i]n 1995, the gay stream flows freely into the mainstream.”944 It could be argued that Northstar was not only the first gay superhero in a popular American comic book, but among the first, if not the earliest, openly gay and overtly heroic characters in all of mainstream American popular culture. In that respect, Alpha Flight

#106 marked a turning point in the history of gay representation and served as a harbinger of future, heroic depictions of queer characters that bourgeoned in American popular culture during the years and decades that followed.

The most lauded and culturally significant portrayal of homosexual heroism in the early

1990s was the 1993 motion picture Philadelphia. Foremost among “a host of HIV/AIDS films that began to burst forth around this same time frame,” Philadelphia, like Alpha Flight #106, was a morality tale that concerned the topics of AIDS-based prejudice and homophobia.945 Telling the story of a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by a gay, AIDS-stricken man against the law firm that fired him unjustly, Philadelphia starred Tom Hanks in the lead role of the homosexual

942 Ibid. 943 Matthew Gilbert, “Beyond Villains and Buffoons,” The Boston Globe, March 22, 1992, pg. B25. 944 Jess Cagle, “Special Report: The Gay 90’s,” Entertainment Weekly, September 8, 1995, https://ew.com/article/1995/09/08/special-report-gay-90s/. 945 M. Sara Rosenthal, Healthcare Ethics on Film: A Guide for Medical Educators (New York: Springer, 2020), 99. 298 hero, Denzel Washington as the lawyer who represented him, and Jason Robards as the bigoted boss who they challenge in a commercially successful and critically acclaimed courtroom drama that outperformed its prerelease box-office expectations and earned Hanks his first Oscar for best actor.946 As “the first major [film] production to simultaneously take on two Hollywood taboos:

AIDS and homosexuality,” the runaway success of Philadelphia emboldened movie studios and television networks to generate more content that featured either homosexual characters and/or dealt with HIV/AIDS.947

With its positive commercial and critical reception, Philadelphia became the standard bearer for a new era of gay visibility in American popular culture and demonstrated to executives working in entertainment media that products featuring homosexual heroes could indeed prove profitable. For audiences that viewed it, Philadelphia was, in words of film critic David Denby,

“a kind of lecture-demonstration that’s meant to improve us,” through preaching a message of acceptance and denouncing the homophobic judgementalism that characterized so much of the cultural history of HIV/AIDS up to that point.948 In its wake, Philadelphia triggered a deluge of film and television offerings that helped erode the nation’s deep-seated heterosexism and functioned as a catalyst for diminishing citizens’ well-conditioned fear of HIV-positive people by featuring homosexual or HIV-positive protagonists.

Overestimating the cultural impact of Philadelphia would be difficult as it became, according to cultural studies scholar Dion Kagan, “the AIDS melodrama par excellence, which re-wrought the public story of gay men and AIDS as a heroic battle against prejudice and a

946 Philadelphia, Blu-ray, directed by Jonathan Demme (1993; Glendale, CA: Twilight Time, 2013). 947 Mark Miller, “The Selling of ‘Philadelphia,’” Newsweek, December 20, 1993, 99. 948 David Denby, “Emotional Rescue,” New York Magazine, January 3, 1994, 53. 299 lesson in tolerance and liberal pluralism.”949 Other scholars concur with that assessment and journalism professor Roger Streitmatter credits Philadelphia with playing an instrumental role in shifting heteronormative citizens’ perceptions of both gay men and HIV/AIDS noting that

“[a]fter spending two hours with Tom Hanks in the role of Andy Beckett, an untold number of moviegoers became much more comfortable the next time they saw someone who looked like he might be gay or have AIDS.”950 However, Kagan also reminds us that Philadelphia had detractors who panned the film for what they considered its “desexualizing” of gay characters through cutting any scenes of sexual intimacy in a commercial tack Kagan described as “a key strategy of redeeming gayness for popular audiences.”951 Yet, in dissociated gay sex from

HIV/AIDS, Philadelphia contributed to subverting the habitual pairing of the two in the

American consciousness.

The lack of gay sexual expression in a film that featured a homosexual protagonist stemmed from reluctance on the part of TriStar Pictures, the studio that produced Philadelphia, to risk box-office returns by offending viewers with scenes of male-male physical contact.952

However, by omitting such scenes, TriStar executives inadvertently afforded audiences the opportunity to appreciate the character of Andy Beckett, and gay Americans with HIV/AIDS by extension, on new terms; not as “guilty” individuals whose sexual identity manifestly caused their infection, but as a multifaceted human beings wherein queer sexuality and HIV-positivity were not one in the same. Observing film and television products of the early 1990s, American studies scholar Melanie Kohnen noted that “where once the connection between queer identities,

949 Dion Kagan, Positive Images: Gay Men & HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’, Library of Gender and Popular Culture (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 44. 950 Roger Streitmatter, From “Perverts” to “Fab Five:” The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians (New York, Routledge, 2009), 90. 951 Kagan, Positive Images, 46. 952 Streitmatter, From “Perverts” to “Fab Five,” 91. 300 sexualities, and AIDS seemed inseparable, and one could not confront or represent one without the others, discussions surrounding a more ‘responsible’ way of life coupled with a moralizing safe sex discourse allowed a disarticulation of the automatic association of gay sexuality and

AIDS.”953 Homosexual and HIV-positive protagonists were desexualized routinely in the popular culture of the 1990s, but that process of erasure held a silver lining in that it contested

Americans’ decade-long inclination to think of gay sexuality and HIV/AIDS in tandem.

While news reports in the early and mid-1980s inculcated foundational understandings of the epidemic as “the gay plague,” fostering kneejerk associations between homosexuality and

HIV/AIDS that linger to the present day, the conflation of homosexuality and HIV/AIDS became decoupled, in part, through the contributions of films like Philadelphia and other popular cultural products. Kohnen argues that the “disentanglement of the perceived casual intertwinement of

AIDS and queer sexuality” began due to the emergence of desexualized yet “sympathetically rendered gay and lesbian characters in the mainstream media” of the 1990s.954 However, Kohnen neglects precursors to that trend found in comic books of the 1980s that disentangled queer sexuality and HIV/AIDS long before other realms of popular culture followed suit.

In the mid-1980s, comic books presented narratives that dissociated homosexuality from

HIV/AIDS principally through their omission of gay characters. When the medium started addressing HIV/AIDS during the heterosexual panic of 1985, creators broached the subject using heterosexual characters exclusively.955 Appearing in direct market titles that did not need to abide by CCA strictures prohibiting the use of openly gay characters, writers and artists

953 Melanie E. S. Kohnen, Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television: Screening the Closet, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies (New York: Routledge, 2016), 101. 954 Ibid. 955 For representation of HIV/AIDS in comic books of the mid-1980s that did not introduce discussions of homosexuality see Jones, “Last Laugh,” in Tales of Terror, no. 4; Chaykin, The Shadow, no. 4; Truman, Scout, no. 7; Gillis, Shatter, no. 6; Ferguson, Carnage, no. 1. 301 possessed a degree of creative latitude that would have allowed them to link HIV/AIDS with homosexuality had they chosen to do so. Instead, they decided to divorce the two subjects from one another and highlight HIV/AIDS as a heterosexual issue in order to connect the epidemic with their predominantly heterosexual male audience. Comic book creators did so in the hope of attracting adult readers through their fictional ruminations on real-life, contemporary subjects in a creative and profit-making strategy that was employed throughout the industry at that time.

Regardless of the heterocentric commercial motivations behind them, such stories offered a blueprint for future considerations of the epidemic that were detached from homophobic understandings that amalgamated queer sexuality and HIV/AIDS and checkered much of the epidemic’s representation in both news and entertainment media throughout the 1980s.

Beyond functioning as a cultural touchstone that some scholars have credited with firing the opening salvo in an intellectual movement countering the amalgamation of queer sexuality and HIV/AIDS in popular perceptions of the epidemic, Philadelphia also exemplified narratives emerging in entertainment and journalistic media of the 1990s that portrayed people with

HIV/AIDS not as passive victims, but as active heroes. Since the start of the epidemic, public health officials, medical researchers, hospital staff members, physicians, and epidemiologists, had all had been labeled as heroes working to halt a dreaded disease.956 HIV-positive individuals who became public figures and AIDS activists, such as Ryan White or Alison Gertz, were described as facing their condition heroically by taking up the cause of increasing AIDS awareness, but, in general, “hero” was a descriptor deployed more often in the popular press to describe healthcare practitioners and AIDS researchers than people with HIV/AIDS. Not until

Magic Johnson disclosed his HIV-positive status did the word “hero” became commonly applied

956 For examples of such comparisons see Victoria A. Harden, AIDS at 30: A History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012), 33, 71, 125, 170. 302 to people living with HIV/AIDS. The cinematic heroism of Philadelphia’s Andy Beckett epitomized that transition in the cultural representations of HIV-positive Americans. By 1996, the heroism of people living with HIV/AIDS had become so widely trumpeted that HIV-positive celebrity activists, still regarded as an elite class of HIV-positive citizen, became likened to comic-book superheroes. One Newsweek cover employed superhero iconography in a photo of

Magic Johnson ripping open the front of his business suit, à la Clark Kent transforming into

Superman, to reveal a purple and gold Los Angeles Lakers jersey instead of Superman’s costume.957

Comic books, an entertainment medium that thrives on the sale of superhero stories, so much so that the medium and its most popular genre have become synonymous, offered unequivocally heroic portrayals of HIV-positive people during the highwater years of AIDS awareness as emergent publishers utilized time-honored tropes of the superhero genre to create

HIV-positive superheroes that fought against evildoers, AIDS-based prejudice, and their own mortality. Whereas established comic book publishers like DC and Marvel incorporated

HIV/AIDS into titles featuring their flagship superheroes, newly founded publishing companies dreamed up original superheroes whose HIV-positive statuses they believed would mark those characters as a unique commodity amid the booming comic book market and enhance their companies’ prestige within a cultural atmosphere where AIDS awareness was approaching its peak.

Months before Philadelphia’s release, Lightning Comics, an upstart, Michigan-based comic book publisher, caught the attention of local and national news outlets with the debut of a series that featured an HIV-positive superhero called Bloodfire. Infected with HIV via the top-

957 Newsweek, “It’s More Than Magic,” February 12, 1996, front cover. 303 secret experiments that endowed him with superhuman powers, homophobic Marine Brian Reace became Bloodfire, the series’ titular hero, whose supercharged blood exploded into flames upon contact with the air and whose super strength, speed, and agility transformed him into an ideal covet agent of the U.S. government.958 Cribbing from superhero origin stories that featured science experiments gone awry, such as those that created Captain America, Spider-Man, and the

Hulk, author Joseph A. Zyskowski infused established conventions of the superhero genre with a narrative of heroism in the face of HIV/AIDS that he hoped would demonstrate that “‘anyone who gets AIDS can be an incredibly cool person with something to offer all of us.’”959 Referring to AIDS as “‘the tragedy of our generation,’” Zyskowski created Bloodfire to inform people that

“‘AIDS is something that could happen to any of us not just a gay person.’”960

Journalistic coverage of Bloodfire saluted the comic book and its creator for offering a superheroic portrayal of “the public stigma and emotional baggage suffered by people who are infected with HIV, the AIDS virus.”961 A small, family-run operation, Lightning Comics’ publication of Bloodfire proved that telling stories featuring an HIV-positive superhero could draw media attention to their business, thus attracting new readers and stimulating greater sales, by offering messages that counteracted prevailing, homophobic understandings of the epidemic during an era of intense public interest in the promotion of AIDS awareness.

During the early 1990s, the comic book industry’s rising economic fortunes motivated the establishment of new publishers ranging from small fry, such as Lightning Comics, to titanic operations like Image Comics whose stellar initial sales challenged DC and Marvel’s market

958 Joseph A. Zyskowski, Bloodfire, no. 1-2 (Dearborn, MI: Lightning Comics, June-July 1993). 959 Lori Mathews, “AIDS Crusader,” Detroit Free Press, April 24, 1993, pg. A4. 960 Ibid. 961 Jesse Washington, “Dearborn Man Creates HIV-Positive Comic Book Hero,” Associated Press, April 20, 1993, https://apnews.com/article/a60889c0b69d214eff499578aaa3ec12. 304 dominance. Founded in the early months of 1992, Image was established by a cohort of Marvel’s most popular illustrators whose work generated some of the best-selling comics of all time, but who had become disgruntled by Marvel’s unwillingness to cede them ownership of the characters they created, greater creative control, and the opportunity to earn more money through a profit-sharing plan involving merchandising rights.962 Image Comics appeared at the peak of the early-1990s comic book market at “a perfect time to be in the business of promoting new superhero comics.”963 Image’s oeuvre of new superheroes quickly made the company and its creative talents “the talk of the industry.”964

Among the new superhero series published by Image was author and illustrator Jim

Valentino’s ShadowHawk. Featuring the exploits of an extremely brutal vigilante,

ShadowHawk’s mysterious, Batman-like hero prowled the city breaking the spines of criminals to paralyze them as punishment for their transgressions. One of the marketing gimmicks

Valentino brought to ShadowHawk was that the superhero’s secret identity went unspecified for many issues leaving fans to wonder, “[i]s ShadowHawk Black or White? Hispanic? Is he a he?

Why all the secrecy?”965 Waiting for ShadowHawk’s identity to be revealed kept readers guessing and, more importantly, kept them buying the comic. After divulging that ShadowHawk was an African-American, former district attorney named Paul Johnstone, Valentino decided to incorporate HIV/AIDS into the character’s origin story as another means of holding readers’ interest. In an issue of ShadowHawk preceding the revelation that the superhero was HIV-

962 The New York Times, “Another Blow for Marvel,” February 20, 1992, D11. 963 Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 76. 964 Brenda Herrmann, “The Big Draw Newcomer is Out to Steal the Thunder at Comics Convention,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1992, sec. Tempo, pg. 3. 965 Patrick McCallum, “Image: They’re the Biggest News in Comics Today,” Wizard: The Guide to Comics, no. 14, October 1992, 57. 305 positive, Valentino wrote, “[i]f you thought the revelation of his identity was ShadowHawk’s greatest secret, you were wrong! Prepare yourself for one of the most shocking origins ever revealed.”966 Valentino’s decision resulted from the first inklings of a decline in the comics market during the closing months of 1993 that caused Image creators to “really begin to use their wits by hitting their stride creatively” as both their company and their industry’s economic fortunes entered the initial phase of a recession that lasted until the early 2000s.967

Like Batman, the superhero that most influenced Valentino’s creation, ShadowHawk was a vigilante crimefighter haunted by his past. After being infected with HIV, administered through a tainted injection by mobsters punishing him for refusing to drop a case he was prosecuting,

Paul Johnstone lost his job as a district attorney after he punched a narrow-minded coworker who tried to prevent him from drinking from the office watercooler.968 Terrified to the point of obsession by the “death sentence” of his HIV-positive status, Johnstone decided to adopt the superhero alter ego of ShadowHawk, and the technique of crippling his opponents and imprisoning them in their own bodies, in order to make criminals “suffer…just like I’m going to suffer.”969 Reflecting that, in the early 1990s, no treatments existed that could permanently stop

HIV from developing into AIDS and, eventually, causing a person’s death, Valentino used the anguish of receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis to serve as the motivation behind Paul Johnstone becoming a superhero in the same way that the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents inspired that character to become Batman. The remainder of ShadowHawk’s initial run followed the superhero as he undertook two, often interwoven, quests; battled villains and desperately seeking a cure for

966 Jim Valentino, “Next Issue,” in ShadowHawk III, no. 1, (Anaheim, CA: Image Comics, November 1993), 24. 967 George A. Khoury, Image Comics: The Road to Independence (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2007), 14. 968 Jim Valentino, ShadowHawk III, no. 2, (Anaheim, CA: Image Comics, December 1993), 18-22. 969 Jim Valentino, ShadowHawk III, no. 3, (Anaheim, CA: Image Comics, February 1994), 3, 14. 306

HIV/AIDS.970 Ultimately thwarted in his search for a cure, Paul Johnstone/ShadowHawk succumbed to his illness in a hospital surrounded by reporters intoning that the vigilante died “a prisoner of his own body, even as he made his victims a prisoner [sic] of theirs.”971

At the close of 1993, when Valentino decided to include HIV/AIDS as an integral element of his superhero’s origin story, messages about HIV/AIDS were omnipresent fixtures within all arenas of American culture. Describing the degree to which HIV/AIDS permeated the culture of the early 1990s scholar Amy Schindler wrote that the topic was “unavoidably confronted in the media. Newspapers and periodicals, popular movies such as Philadelphia, and television shows…flood the information networks with stories of this affliction. Well-known athletes…have made public their infection with HIV. Even celebrities who are not infected display red ribbons to demonstrate their awareness of AIDS and the public can buy jewelry and ribbons modeled on this statement.”972

Transience is an essential component of consumer fads and the novelty of addressing

HIV/AIDS in products of American popular culture was beginning to dissipate even as, and precisely because, its proliferation was nearing its apex. One fan letter printed in ShadowHawk pointed to that fact and presaged the impending disappearance of HIV/AIDS topics from popular

American comic books by noting that “AIDS is the bandwagon of choice being endorsed by nearly every celebrity.”973 Whereas discussions of the subject were once considered novel and edgy additions to comic book storylines, that fan letter indicated that by the mid-1990s they were becoming a bit dull when anyone “could have just turned on the TV for AIDS reports, picked up

970 Jim Valentino, ShadowHawk, no. 12-18 (Anaheim, CA: Image Comics, August 1994-May 1995). 971 Valentino, ShadowHawk, no. 18, 26. 972 Amy Schindler, “Angels and the AIDS Epidemic: The Resurgent Popularity of Angel Imagery in the United States of America,” Journal of American Culture vol. 22, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 54. 973 Jason Ginsburg, “Out of the Shadows,” in ShadowHawk III, no. 4, by Jim Valentino (Anaheim, CA: Image Comics, March 1994), 24. 307 the hundreds of circulating AIDS pamphlets, or called any number of available AIDS hotlines; all at no charge.”974

Even though considerations of HIV/AIDS saturated the cultural landscape of the early-

1990s, the epidemic’s lethality precluded any dismissal of the subject, perpetuated widespread interest in it, and ensured that comic books would address the subject with regularity until the epidemic receded or other, economic factors intervened. In 1994, “[a]mong persons [both men and women] age 25-44 years, HIV was the leading cause of death and accounted for 19% of deaths in this age group.”975 With a “devoted following of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s” reading comics, it is unsurprising that the industry continued to tackle a topic that could potentially impact the lives of its consumers and their friends or family.976

As early as the summer of 1993, Jim Starlin, an author and illustrator who quit working for Marvel Comics that year, claimed he left the company because its editorial staff limited what themes he could explore including subjects pertaining to HIV/AIDS.977 However, Starlin’s accusations against Marvel Comics seem specious when the company continued to present stories related to the epidemic in comic books showcasing its flagship superheroes including

Spider-Man, its most popular and internationally recognizable property. For example, in Spider-

Man Unlimited #3 the titular webslinger battled his archnemesis Dr. Octopus after the supervillain broke into a research lab to “steal AIDS-infected blood.”978 At first, Spider-Man

974 Ibid. 975 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Update: Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection Among Persons Aged 25-44 Years—United States, 1994,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 45, no. 6 (February 16, 1996), https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00040227.htm#:~:text=Among%20persons%20aged%2025%2D44 %20years%2C%20HIV%20infection%20was%20the,YPLL%2D65%20from%20all%20causes. 976 Amy Bernstein, “Where Have You Gone, Jughead?” U.S. News & World Report, August 15, 1994, 56. 977 Paul Robb, “Beyond Life and Death,” Wizard: The Guide to Comics, no. 24, August 1993, 82. 978 Tom DeFalco, “An Obituary for Octopus,” in Spider-Man Unlimited, no. 3, ed. Danny Fingeroth (New York: Marvel Comics, November 1993), 7. 308 wondered if Dr. Octopus was “planning to blackmail the city by threatening to contaminate its blood supply.”979 But, by the story’s end, readers learned that Dr. Octopus was only using the stolen blood as part of his research to find a cure for HIV/AIDS so that he could save the life of his long-lost love.980 At the height of AIDS awareness in the United States, even supervillains, like their superhero counterparts, fought valiantly, though in vain, to end the scourge of

HIV/AIDS.

The Incredible Hulk #420 is another example of Marvel’s willingness to print stories that explored the subject of HIV/AIDS in their flagship superhero titles despite Starlin’s claim that the company clamped down on using the subject in 1993. Marvel’s utilization of HIV/AIDS was so blatant that customers did not need to open The Incredible Hulk #420 to know that the epidemic would be addressed within it because the cover carried the image of a red AIDS- awareness ribbon, a tagline stating “In the Shadow of AIDS” beneath the comic’s title, and an illustration of a dejected Hulk standing over a hospital bed and holding the hand of his friend,

Jim Wilson, as that character succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses.981 The combination of AIDS awareness symbolism, unambiguous text, and the image of the Hulk rendered powerless in the face of the epidemic’s ravages made the cover of The Incredible Hulk #420 an iconic piece of

1990’s comic book art.982 It also gave the impression that Marvel was pandering to audiences’ altruistic instincts through a cloying attempt to exploit the trend of AIDS awareness in order to sell more copies of the comic book.

979 Ibid. 980 Ibid., 22-25. 981 Peter David, The Incredible Hulk, no. 420 (New York: Marvel Comics, August 1994), front cover. 982 Cathy Leogrande, “Live and Let Die: Jim Wilson, the Hulk and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s,” in The Ages of the Incredible Hulk: Essays on the Green Goliath in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 175. 309

Shortly after the ribbon’s first appearance, on the lapel of host Jeremy Irons at the Tony

Awards ceremony in June of 1991, it became an obligatory fashion accessory at all entertainment industry awards shows, then a common sight in American life, and, finally, so ubiquitous that

The New York Times called 1992 “The Year of the Ribbon.”983 The Incredible Hulk #420 was not the first comic book to carry an image of the ribbon on its cover, The Mighty Magnor #1 had an illustration of Sergio Aragonés, the series’ creator, wearing one, but The Incredible Hulk #420 was the most conspicuous display of AIDS awareness symbolism on the cover of a flagship superhero comic.984 Amid the early-1990’s frenzy to festoon everyday objects with red ribbons, cultural historian Simon Watney remarked that “[f]ew surfaces have been spared; there are AIDS posters and T-shirts, bags, mugs with the names of loved ones, commemorative paperweights, embossed poems” all flaunting the red ribbon “which serves as a commercial prototype for designers eager to exploit its easy symbolism, making velvet and diamond-encrusted ribbons and even red ribbons for pets.”985 It was only a matter of time before comic book publishers decided to cash in on the craze.

The “Livestrong” wristband of its day, the red ribbon pervaded every strata of American society and, according to communications scholars Myleea D. Hill and Marceline Thompson-

Hayes, helped establish an “awareness culture” personified through symbolic gestures that do not lead their performers to “further participation, education, or commitment to behavior change,” but are, instead, an end unto themselves in that they signify solidarity with a cause but require no additional commitment to its advancement.986 Furthermore, the signifiers of

983 Jesse Green, “The Year of the Ribbon,” The New York Times, May 3, 1992, sec. 9, pg. 7. 984 Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, The Mighty Magnor, no. 1 (Westlake Village, CA: Malibu Comics, April 1993), front cover. 985 Simon Watney, Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity (New York: Routledge, 2000), 166. 986 Myleea D. Hill and Marceline Thompson-Hayes, From Awareness to Commitment in Public Health Campaigns: The Awareness Myth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 17-18. 310 awareness culture can be commodified easily by commercial interests to fill corporate coffers through taking advantage of citizens’ desire to feel like participants in an important social movement. Hill and Thompson-Hayes state that, “[q]uite frankly, the symbol of awareness culture is, arguably, not so much ribbons as dollar signs.”987 In the case of The Incredible Hulk

#420, that seems especially true.

When The Incredible Hulk #420 hit the racks of retailers in mid-1994, the comic book market was in freefall. What had been an industry that enjoyed year after year of rampant growth during the late 1980s and early 1990s had become, in the mid-1990s, an industry on the verge of imploding. Veering from all-time high sales in April of 1993, and an annual revenue that approached $850 million that year, to sales that were down by half in April of 1994 the comic book industry entered the second half of the 1990s financially embattled.988 Marvel’s decision to feature the red ribbon on the cover of The Incredible Hulk #420 seems like an attempt to increase the issue’s circulation through branding it with the symbology of AIDS awareness in the hope that the sight of the ribbon might lure socially conscious customers into purchasing it. Although the issue’s plot revolved around topics such as AIDS-based prejudice and the struggle of people with AIDS to come to terms with their condition, readers of The Incredible Hulk #420 did not respond with the same universal positivity which they embraced the series’ previous foray into

HIV/AIDS in The Incredible Hulk #388 years earlier.

Fans wrote angry letters lambasting author Peter David’s decision to revisit the topic stating “[i]n #388, we see Jim for the first time in ages, and he tells us he’s HIV-positive. Great.

…So, what does Peter do? He completely ignores Jim until #420, where Jim conveniently dies of

987 Ibid., 19. 988 Shawna Kidman, Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019) 180. 311

AIDS.”989 Another reader wrote, “[a] person with AIDS entered the HULK storyline after a three-year absence…and is killed off in in one night. End of Issue. I am sorry, I have nothing to give you but anger, but the time for token gestures is over.”990 After years of American comic books being flooded with superficial AIDS awareness messaging, readers were looking for stories that dealt with the topic in a more substantive manner. Single-issue stories that only scratched the surface of the subject could no longer expect to win laurels from fans who were, by

1994, far better informed about the HIV/AIDS epidemic than they had been three years earlier when publishers began allowing creators to mention the topic in the context of titles featuring their most popular and valuable superhero properties. Introducing HIV-positive characters and hastily kill them off could no longer be counted on to automatically induce the pathos of readers.

On the contrary, it seemed to only raise the ire of readers who were beginning to interpret such considerations not as groundbreaking and laudable investigations of the epidemic, but as pandering and shallow attempts to appear socially conscious.

The last consideration of HIV/AIDS to appear in a flagship superhero comic book, before publishers essentially abandoned the subject for several years, came in a story featuring

Superman, a character whose 1938 debut spawned a new genre of popular fiction and became a blueprint for countless superhero stories to follow. Superman: The Man of Steel #39 told the story of Keith, an abandoned child who became reunited with his AIDS-stricken mother only to watch her die.991 Failing to approach the topic of HIV/AIDS from a new or innovative angle, author Louise Simonson’s story used the death of a person with AIDS for melodramatic effect.

989 Rand Bellavia, “Green Mail,” in The Incredible Hulk, no. 426, by Peter David (New York: Marvel Comics, February 1995), 23. 990 Kevin Frazier, “Green Mail,” in The Incredible Hulk, no. 426, by Peter David (New York: Marvel Comics, February 1995), 23. 991 Louise Simonson, Superman: The Man of Steel, no. 39 (New York: DC Comics, December, 1994), 12, 19-20. 312

Once again displaying a superhero’s powerlessness in the face of the deadly disease, Simonson’s script focused on the inevitable lethality of HIV/AIDS and availed itself of the epidemic’s inherently tragic nature to offer readers a heartrending death scene that delivered generic melodrama but neither insight nor substantive social commentary beyond Keith’s mother fearing that he son will not be adopted if prospective parents discover how she died.992 The comic book’s closing pages provided readers with the telephone numbers of the National AIDS Hotline,

Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS Project Los Angeles, but, by the end of 1994, such information was readily available from any number of sources and its inclusion was an obligatory feature of every comic book that mentioned HIV/AIDS as opposed to a pioneering act of knowledge exchange.

1995-1996: The Epidemic’s End and the Waning Days of AIDS Awareness

All trends have a shelf life, and most trends in American popular culture have an exceptionally short one. When AIDS activism became transformed from a grassroots social movement of the 1980s into a commodified, cause célèbre of the early 1990s, it was only a matter of time before the public grew weary of it and began scanning the horizon for the next consumer fad. Depictions of HIV/AIDS in flagship superhero comic books during the years 1992 through 1994 epitomized the commercialization of AIDS awareness during that time period as the realization dawned on publishers that having their most profitable superhero properties associated with considerations of the epidemic would not be innately damaging to them and, on the contrary, would likely enhance their cultural prestige and increase sales. Publishers understood that in a cultural climate that extolled the importance of raising AIDS awareness doing so, through PSAs or the narrative content of their most popular titles, could enhance their

992 Ibid., 14. 313 company’s standing in the eyes of their fans and the wider public alike. Emboldened by a booming market, the likes of which have not been seen since, comic book publishers felt free to explore the subject of HIV/AIDS with a prominence they had previously eschewed and allowed discussions of the epidemic to appear outside of titles designated solely for adult readers.

Recognizing that Americans’ attitudes about HIV/AIDS were progressing away from the ill- informed and homophobic beliefs that had characterized them since 1981, comic book publishers capitalized on the renewed interest which that transition engendered and, in concert with other areas of American arts and entertainment, featured products that dealt with the epidemic conspicuously. When the comic book market suffered a severe economic downturn in 1994, and

AIDS awareness was gradually becoming no longer in vogue, comic book publishers and the creatives they employed ceased the production of stories related to the epidemic.

Although popular comic books abandoned the subject of HIV/AIDS after 1994, the cultural turn away from championing AIDS awareness causes began in 1993. Whereas The New

York Times called 1992 “The Year of the Ribbon,” 1993 became the year of backlash against the ribbon for what its critics interpreted as its rapid transformation into a fashion accessory and “an empty, commercialized symbol…[that] has never prodded Congress to spend more money on

AIDS, never saved a single life.”993 An especially critical article published in The New Yorker that year claimed the ribbon’s primary function was “to make people feel comfortable without having to do anything.”994 The ribbon continued to circulate widely throughout American culture as a venerated symbol of AIDS awareness, the U.S. postal service issued a 29-cent stamp of the red ribbon in commemoration of 1993’s World AIDS Day, for example.995 But, just as AIDS

993 Marc Peyser, “Tyranny of the Red Ribbon,” Newsweek, June 28, 1993, 61. 994 David Seidner, “The Red Ribbon,” The New Yorker, February 15, 1993, 31. 995 Barth Healey, “The Red Ribbon of AIDS Awareness,” The New York Times, November 28, 1993, pg. V17. 314 awareness reached the apex of its popularity, it entered a precipitous decline. It was only a matter of time before red ribbons specifically, and the cultural phenomenon of AIDS awareness in general, became passé. By 1995, the red ribbon had been reduced to comedic fodder as evidenced by an episode of the television sitcom Seinfeld where the character Kramer is savagely beaten by “ribbon bullies” after he refuses to wear one while participating in an AIDS walk for charity.996

Howard Chaykin, one of the first comic book creators to address HIV/AIDS in the mid-

1980s, saw the writing-on-the-wall months before the publication of The Incredible Hulk #420 and its ill-fated use of the red ribbon. In his 1994 mini-series Power and Glory, Chaykin poked fun at celebrities who conformed to the trend of sporting large and conspicuous AIDS-awareness ribbons through his illustration of a character attending an entertainment awards show while wearing a dress comprised almost entirely of enormous red ribbons.997 Chaykin’s critique of the red ribbon and those who donned it for their own aggrandizement serves as something of a metaphor for the comic book industry and its considerations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. What began in 1986 as an effort on the part of comic book creators to confront a controversial, contemporary issue had, by 1994, morphed into something no longer capable of advancing comic books as a medium or attracting new, adult readers through perceptive social commentary.

Whereas discussions of HIV/AIDS in American comic books of the mid and late 1980s had an air of countercultural rebellion, in opposition to the establishment beliefs of heterosexual citizens content to ignore the ballooning health crisis, references to the epidemic in the comic books of the mid-1990s smacked of conformity in a popular cultural landscape awash with AIDS-

996 Seinfeld, season 7, episode 9, "The Sponge," directed by Andy Ackerman, aired December 7, 1995, on NBC. 997 Howard Chaykin, Power and Glory, no. 1 (Westlake Village, CA: Malibu Comics, February 1994), 18-19. 315 awareness messaging and offered readers little beyond pandering and insipid stories of tragic

AIDS-related deaths.

Exemplifying the fleeting and faddish nature of early-1990s AIDS awareness, considerations of HIV/AIDS disappeared from popular comic books during 1995 and 1996 as surely as red ribbons disappeared from the awards shows where they were once abundant. At the

1992 Academy Awards “[v]irtually every star in attendance wore the red AIDS ribbon…host

Billy Crystal explained what the red ribbons meant and presenter Richard Gere called on the government to put more money into the fight against AIDS.”998 By 1994, celebrities like

Whoopie Goldberg and others habitually wore the red ribbon “at highly visible events like the

Emmys and Oscar presentations as a ‘symbol of awareness.’”999 However, in March of 1996, a ribbon-less Whoopie Goldberg hosted the 68th annual Academy Awards and used her opening monologue, not to encourage further action on the part of AIDS-awareness causes, but to lampoon “ribbon proliferation” before laughing and equally ribbon-less audience of celebrities who only four years early had approached the matter of donning the red ribbon with great solemnity.1000 Two major events occurred between 1992 and 1996 that precipitated the abandonment of AIDS awareness as a cause célèbre and the first was the election of Bill Clinton as President of the United States.

Philosopher Timothy F. Murphy has argued that, amid the presidential campaigning of

1992, HIV/AIDS finally “took its place alongside the economy, the military, and abortion as matters of fundamental public interest.”1001 While George H. W. Bush, the incumbent

998 Michelangelo Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 317. 999 Murphy, Ethics in an Epidemic, 77. 1000 Jacobs, “Can AmFAR Survive AIDS,” 30. 1001 Timothy F. Murphy, Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 144. 316

Republican candidate, struggled to defend himself against critics who considered his party’s decade-long response to HIV/AIDS halfhearted if not entirely inadequate, Democratic challenger

Bill Clinton cast himself as the compassionate alternative who answered heckling activists with the rejoinder “I feel your pain” and promised that, if elected, his administration would revolutionize America’s response to the epidemic.1002 In their analysis of Clinton’s campaign rhetoric, communications scholars Mitchell S. McKinney and Bryan G. Pepper wrote that

“[w]hereas candidates in presidential contests have competed for such titles as the

‘environmental president,’ or the ever-popular ‘education president,’ not until the candidacy of

Bill Clinton in 1992 had one sought to be recognized as our ‘AIDS president.’”1003

With Clinton’s electoral victory, practitioners of AIDS awareness posturing believed that they had done yeoman’s work merely by ousting Bush and the last remnants of the reviled

Reagan administration from the White House. Many ardent, committed, and longtime AIDS activists also believed that they could relax and trust Clinton to fulfill the pledges he made on the campaign trail to make combatting the epidemic a top priority of his new administration.1004

However, as McKinney and Pepper concluded, “[o]nce in office, President Clinton found little time—and perhaps political courage—to honor such pledges.”1005 The oppositional politics that stimulated AIDS activism through the 1980s and two Republican administrations stalled when a

Democrat and perceived ally ascended to the presidency, leaving activists without a ready figurehead of federal authority to combat. Deborah B. Gould, a sociologist and former member

1002 Hal McDonald, "‘I Feel Your Pain’ (Literally),” Psychology Today, October 25, 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/time-travelling-apollo/201610/i-feel-your-pain-literally. 1003 Mitchell S. McKinney and Bryan G. Pepper, “From Hope to Heartbreak: Bill Clinton and the Rhetoric of AIDS,” in Power in the Blood: A Handbook on AIDS, Politics, and Communication, ed. William N. Elwood (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1999), 77. 1004 Tamar W. Carroll, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 180. 1005 McKinney and Pepper, “From Hope to Heartbreak,” 89. 317 of ACT UP, wrote that “not only did Clinton fail to implement his AIDS-related campaign promises, but transferring any remaining hopes we might have had from ourselves and our own activism to Clinton, and thereby surrendering our power to him, contributed to the demise of the direct-action AIDS movement.”1006

During Clinton’s first term, ACT UP chapters across the country, as well as other direct- action groups, began to splinter and disintegrate as a combination of exhaustion, disillusionment, and infighting between members over organizational priorities sapped them of their ability to mount effective protest and advocacy campaigns.1007 In the case of ACT UP/LA,

“demobilization took place over a period of five years, from the latter half of 1992 to late 1997” and whether the chapter’s demise was “a natural, unheralded petering out or a democratically made decision by its last few die-hards” remains debated by its final participating members.1008

Either way, the termination of the direct-action AIDS movement, which did so much to bring

HIV/AIDS to the forefront of national political debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, occurred concurrently with the passing of AIDS awareness as a trend in U.S. popular cultural and was hastened by Clinton’s political ascendency, first viewed as a great triumph, but soon revealed as a pyrrhic victory that broke the spirit of a direct-action movement.

After Clinton’s election, the second event that occasioned the end of AIDS awareness as a cause célèbre was that in 1994 the number of newly diagnosed cases of AIDS in the United

States declined for the first time since the epidemic started in 1981.1009 For the remainder of the

1990s, the annual number of new AIDS diagnoses continued to decline.1010 In 1996, sharp

1006 Gould, Moving Politics, 417. 1007 James Monroe Smith, AIDS and Society (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 278-281, 284. 1008 Benita Roth, The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA: Anti-AIDS Activism in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the 2000s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 194. 1009 Brodie and others, “AIDS at 21,” 2. 1010 Ibid. 318 declines in both new incidences of AIDS and AIDS deaths began.1011 The principal catalyst for those declines was the introduction of an entirely new class of antiretroviral drugs in late 1995 and early 1996 called protease inhibitors. The discovery that using protease inhibitors together with other antiretroviral drugs, in a treatment called highly active antiretroviral therapy

(HAART), could, if administered properly, prevent a patient’s progression from being HIV- positive to having AIDS begat a sea change in the treatment of HIV/AIDS.1012 Patents receiving treatment with HAART exhibited a drastically lower viral load suggesting that the therapy not only benefitted individuals undergoing it, but also helped reduce the risk of viral transmission from HIV-positive people to uninfected individuals as well.1013 Protease inhibitors and HAART, while not a cure for HIV/AIDS, transformed HIV from an invariably lethal infection into a manageable, chronic health condition.1014

Among the facets of HIV/AIDS that most terrified and fascinated Americans was its ostensibly inescapable lethality. A sizable number of narrative explorations that considered

HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and early 1990s explored, to one degree or another, the mortal terror that came from being marked for death upon receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis, the inner turmoil that followed such a diagnosis, and/or the interpersonal drama that ensued between an

HIV-positive person and the loved ones that they might soon be leaving behind. Regardless of the medium, plotlines of HIV/AIDS related narratives invariably addressed themes of lose, decay, and death. When those themes were not brought overtly to the fore, they existed as

1011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “HIV and AIDS—United States, 1981-2000,” https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm. 1012 Alan Berkman, “An Adult Infectious Disease Doctor’s Encounter with HIV/AIDS,” in A History of AIDS Social Work in Hospitals: A Daring Response to an Epidemic, eds. Barbara I. Willinger and Alan Rice (New York: The Hawthorn Press, 2003), 9-10. 1013 Lawrence O. Gostin, The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations, Studies in Social Medicine (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 153. 1014 Geoffrey Cowley, “Living Longer with HIV,” Newsweek, February 12, 1996, 60-62. 319 inescapable undercurrents of the story. The American public had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, via countless news reports, PSAs, and other cultural products that spoke of

HIV/AIDS and inevitable death in the same breath, that even the slightest invocation of the illness instantly conjured fatalistic associations. Death makes for ready melodrama and when

HIV became a manageable condition many writers, not just those working in comic books, did not know how to address HIV/AIDS without returning to it. Faced with the prospect of creating stories that now needed to explore the complexities of living with HIV, as opposed to simply dying from it, comic book creators decided to avoid the topic altogether.

Beyond the difficulty of adjusting their storytelling style to account for HIV as a chronic health condition, comic book creators, in all likelihood, ceased their considerations of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1990s because addressing the illness was, for lack of a more precise descriptor, no longer “cool.” An article from a 1995 issue of The Comics Journal adds credence to that assessment through its criticism of The Incredible Hulk #420. Titled “Shit List,” the article made merciless fun of Peter David’s work on The Incredible Hulk and signaled to other comic book writers that their readers’ appetites for encountering discussions of the epidemic in superhero stories had been satiated to the point of indigestion.1015 Written using the first-person voice of the

Hulk, the article ridiculed David’s ham-fisted foray into AIDS awareness and mocked him with statements like “Hulk no more fight bad men . . . Hulk smash AIDS!”1016 In the popular culture industry, products are only valuable as long as they possess that ephemeral, “it” factor of coolness. As soon as it appeared that HIV/AIDS was no longer a bankable commodity, writers, artists, and publishers avoided the subject like the plague. The fact that the comic book market

1015 The Comics Journal, no. 179, “Shit List,” August 1995, 126. 1016 Ibid. 320 was collapsing at the same time that the cycle of AIDS awareness in American popular culture was losing steam only accelerated its abandonment.

After 1994, comic book sales were in full retreat from the heights of their turn-of-the- decade boom years and thousands of direct-market comic book shops were closing their doors as they and the industry they catered to went under.1017 The implosion of the market took years, never fully recovering, and the remainder of the 1990s became an era when the industry largely reinvented itself. Drifting further away from publishing monthly comic books as their primary concern, companies like Marvel and DC redefined themselves as entertainment companies for whom comic books were just one, rather small component of much larger and far more lucrative film, television, and merchandising interests.1018 In that maelstrom of industry-wide renewal, representations of the HIV/AIDS crisis essentially disappeared.

Before they did, comic book creators had proven that they could skillfully handle a controversial, contemporary topic as deftly as other, more revered cultural mediums and, to their credit, the vast majority of their representations of HIV/AIDS avoided harmful gay-plague stereotypes and provided readers with narratives that countered the heterosexist and homophobic discourses that informed journalistic considerations of the subject since its early-1980’s emergence. Portrayals of the epidemic in popular American comic books delineated shifting heteronormative conceptualizations of HIV/AIDS at the dawn of the 1990s when erstwhile bigotries gave way to a more democratic appreciation that acknowledged HIV/AIDS as a matter of medical concern for all Americans irrespective of their sexual orientation. Exhibiting a sincere desire to address HIV/AIDS for purposes greater than adding shock-value through its

1017 Dan Gearino, Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture, 2nd ed. (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2019), 143. 1018 Kidman, Comic Books Incorporated, 181. 321 incorporation, comic creators first incorporated HIV/AIDS issues into their work at a time when adult readers were demanding relevant, “grown-up” storylines. Creators hoped that such depictions would be taken by readers, as well as the general public, as a sign that comic books could be socially relevant. Newspaper articles, letters from comic book readers, and the explosive growth of the industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s prove that comic book creators succeed. Nevertheless, at precisely the moment when comic books and American popular culture appeared most willing to engage with the subject of HIV/AIDS, the commodification of AIDS awareness ran its course leaving the subject and the social movement it purportedly supported to languish during the final years of the 1990s.

322

CONCLUSION

Studying the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic through its representation in popular comic books reveals how the ideas espoused in those comics denote the various phases of the national discourse on the epidemic. Created for an audience primarily consisting of heterosexual, male readers, ranging in age from the teens to the mid-thirties, representations of the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular American comic books demonstrate the degree to which the national discourse, from 1981 to 1996, was driven by heteronormative interpretations of the crisis.

Depictions of HIV/AIDS in popular comic books not only elucidate the nation’s evolving sociocultural and political considerations of the epidemic from a mainstream, heteronormative perspective, they demonstrate how comic book creators utilized a controversial and hotly debated matter of national significance to achieve artistic and commercial aims. In that respect, the study of HIV/AIDS in popular comic books proves that in spite of the socially constructive messages that some comic book creators believed their work conveyed, the commercial dictates of their industry, particularly the need to attract and retain new buyers amid a booming market of adult readers, motivated the medium’s considerations of the epidemic.

During the early 1980s, homophobic assessments pervaded the epidemic’s coverage by the U.S. news media who characterized AIDS as a “gay plague.” Reports in newspapers and periodicals notified Americans of a medical crisis occurring within some of the nation’s largest gay communities, yet, in doing so, they encouraged the perception of gay men as universally infected and the physical embodiment of an illness whose danger lay not in its decimation of stricken gay populations, but in its potential to threaten the general, i.e., heteronormative population. Couched in rhetoric that conjoined the cultural taboo of homosexuality with implicit illness, formative works of AIDS journalism invoked the possibility of a catastrophic public 323 health emergency if AIDS slipped from its confinement in the costal, gay communities of New

York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where the majority of the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed, to imperil heteronormative citizens in the nation’s heartland.

Popular comic books addressing HIV/AIDS materialized from the maelstrom of the mid-

1980’s heterosexual panic when journalistic, artistic, and commercial interest in HIV/AIDS reached a fevered pitch following the death of Rock Hudson, the success of theatrical and television productions that considered the epidemic, and the acceleration of economic opportunities related to HIV prevention, diagnostic testing, and medical treatment. As those events occurred, the comic book industry entered a period of explosive growth due to a new method of direct market distribution that enabled comic book creators to produce adult-oriented stories unconstrained by the censorship guidelines of the CCA. Those alterations within the comic book industry awakened a dormant market of adult readers who were attracted to thematically darker comic books featuring stories more grounded in reality.

Motivated by the need to produce entertaining works of genre fiction, that spoke to an adult audience through storylines that invoked issues of contemporary relevance, comic book creators employed the topic of HIV/AIDS to enrich their narratives and attract adult readers.

Using an attention-grabbing subject that was topical and tantalizingly linked to matters of sexuality and death, creators of popular comic books addressed HIV/AIDS on a consistent basis to expand their readership, elevate perceptions of their medium, and make sociocultural and political statements that reflected the developing U.S. national discourse on HIV/AIDS. After the heterosexual panic, representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comics proliferated as the comic book market grew and the nation continued to grapple with the epidemic’s challenges in new and different ways. 324

During the late 1980s, heterosexuals’ fear of mass infection subsided and mainstream, heteronormative discourses started to reinterpret the epidemic as a tragic, national crisis as opposed to a frightful “gay plague.” Overtly homophobic assessments of HIV/AIDS diminished and empathy for people with AIDS grew. Evidenced by examples of government intervention, growing HIV/AIDS activism, and compassionate depictions of HIV/AIDS in popular culture, the process of reinterpreting the epidemic greatly diminished, but did not wholly extinguish, the currents of homophobia that ran through mainstream, heteronormative discourses on the epidemic. Popular comic books reflect the discursive shift toward increasingly empathetic understandings of HIV/AIDS and creators routinely addressed the epidemic as a means of enhancing their stories’ social relevance through narratives that countered the stigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS.

Creators of the late-1980s exercised a substantial degree of care whenever they addressed the AIDS crisis. Nearly all of them avoided referring to HIV/AIDS in a flippant or demeaning manner and, with rare exception, included the subject only within stories that revolved around other equally serious issues. While comic book creators used the subject as part of an attention- getting strategy to attract more readers, the vast majority of their references to HIV/AIDS promoted a progressive view of the epidemic that eschewed bigoted and homophobic depictions.

Comic books that spoke to the topic of HIV/AIDS from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s did so, almost universally, in a broadminded manner and from a standpoint of support for persons with HIV/AIDS.

After the landmark events of 1991, notably the passage of the ADA, the death of Ryan

White, and Magic Johnson’s disclosure of his HIV-positive status, HIV/AIDS awareness became a cause célèbre and HIV/AIDS activism became commodified in the style of a consumer fad. 325

Popular comic books represent that transition through conspicuous displays of AIDS awareness that used internationally recognizable, flagship superheroes, whose association with HIV/AIDS had been fastidiously avoided until the early 1990s when the popularity of HIV/AIDS awareness made their use a fashionable and profitable decision. At that time, comic books featuring the industry’s most popular superheroes, in stories or public service announcements that spoke directly to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, became a common sight.

Representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comic books offer a vivid example of the meteoric rise and even hastier demise of HIV/AIDS awareness as a pervasive, national concern during the first half of the 1990s and provide an example of how efforts to produce socially conscious products of popular culture become abandoned swiftly when commercial and sociocultural forces make their prolongation no longer economically viable. Like all consumer fads, Americans’ enthusiasm for HIV/AIDS awareness eventually fizzled. By the late 1990s, the novelty of HIV/AIDS awareness as a cause célèbre had worn out.

Because individual Americans took greater care to prevent the transmission of HIV and new pharmaceutical treatments helped extend the lives of HIV-positive people, rates of HIV infection and the number of AIDS-related deaths started declining. With those declining numbers came declining public interest. After witnessing an expanding epidemic for more than a decade,

Americans of the mid-1990s met the news of the epidemic’s end with relief followed by disinterest. Fatigued by years of HIV/AIDS issues being a fixture of the nation’s sociocultural and political discourse, mainstream, heteronormative Americans were eager to put the epidemic behind them.

At the same time, comic book sales were in full retreat from the heights of their turn-of- the-decade boom years. In 1994, thousands of direct-market comic book shops closed their doors 326 when the industry they catered to underwent a massive downturn. Many smaller comic book publishers went out of business while established entities like DC and Marvel reduced their output significantly. Across the board, publishers backed away from presenting representations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic because their industry’s economic fortunes were in freefall and the subject was no longer attractive to consumers who were tired of hearing about it.

After fifteen years of the epidemic, Americans had learned a great deal about HIV/AIDS and the national discourse had transformed from a dialogue overshadowed by homophobia and heterosexual panic to one that, while ultimately coopted, commodified, and abandoned by the commercial forces of American culture, exhibited a remarkable degree of tolerance, understanding, and support for people with HIV/AIDS. Because they were created for a primarily heterosexual male audience, representations of HIV/AIDS in popular American comic books comprise an exceptional resource through which to gage the evolution of the nation’s mainstream, heteronormative discourse during the years of the U.S. epidemic. This study expands the cultural history of the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic by revealing how the nation’s mainstream, heterocentic discourse on HIV/AIDS developed and how the epidemic’s treatment within popular comic books, influenced by industrial, economic, artistic, and sociocultural forces, reflected that.

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