COWBOYS, “QUEERS,” AND COMMUNITY: THE AIDS CRISIS IN HOUSTON AND DALLAS, 1981-1996 Molly Ellen Bundschuh, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2014 APPROVED: Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Major Professor Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Committee Member Michael Wise, Committee Member Richard B. McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Bundschuh, Molly Ellen. Cowboys, “Queers,” and Community: The AIDS Crisis in Houston and Dallas, 1981-1996. Master of Arts (History), August 2014, 105 pp., bibliography, 78 titles. This thesis examines the response to the AIDS crisis in Houston and Dallas, two cities in Texas with the most established gay communities highest number of AIDS incidences. Devoting particular attention to the struggles of the Texas’ gay men, this work analyzes the roadblocks to equal and compassionate care for AIDS, including access to affordable treatment, medical insurance, and the closure of the nation’s first AIDS hospital. In addition, this thesis describes the ways in which the peculiar nature of AIDS as an illness transformed the public perception of sickness and infection. This work contributes to the growing study of gay and lesbian history by exploring the transformative effects of AIDS on the gay community in Texas, a location often forgotten within the context of the AIDS epidemic. Copyright 2014 by Molly Ellen Bundschuh ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the help of countless individuals. I relied on the knowledge and encouragement of my committee members, Dr. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Dr. Jennifer Jensen Wallach, and Dr. Michael Wise, throughout my graduate career. Their assistance, guidance, and patience have been truly immeasurable. I am incredibly grateful for their efforts and wisdom. I would also like to thank Larry Criscione of the Botts Collection of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History. My research benefitted remarkably from his time and insight. I am sincerely grateful to Matthew Needham; his advice, understanding, and companionship have inspired me for years. Finally, I reserve my greatest appreciation for my parents, who have instilled in me a love of learning and supported all my endeavors. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER II: HOUSTON AND DALLAS GAYBORHOODS ON THE EVE OF THE AIDS CRISIS .............................................................................................................................. 12 CHAPTER III: AIDS SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS, BEGINNINGS AND EVOLUTION .... 31 CHAPTER IV: AIDS, ITS METAPHORS, AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES .......................... 50 CHAPTER V: AIDS AND THE TEXAS HEALTH CARE SYSTEM ....................................... 73 CHAPTER VI: CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 100 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In the spring of 1988, AIDS activists in Houston and Dallas busied themselves in preparation for showcasing the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a massive piece of community folk art. The quilt was embarking on a twenty-city tour following its initial display at the Washington Mall. NAMES Project, the pioneers of the AIDS quilt, had selected Houston and Dallas as two stops on their tour, and the quilt was due to arrive in Texas in the first weeks of May. For months, people in the cities had crafted memories, stitched fabrics, and painted names and messages onto cloth panels. Some worked in private, while others cut and sewed alongside friends at community centers in Dallas’s Oak Lawn neighborhood or bars in Montrose, Houston. In any case, all hunched their backs or pricked their fingers on sewing needles and laughed or cried in remembrance of their loved ones who had died from AIDS. Each panel measured three feet by six feet, the average size of a casket. For activists, family members and friends of those who had died from AIDS in Houston and Dallas, the chance to display the quilt was an opportunity to lay claim to the epidemic. Their efforts allowed them to show the world that although the nation had focused its attention on AIDS in New York and California, Texas, too, had suffered. That quilted coffin served as the only memorial for countless queers and cowboys who lost their lives in the fight against AIDS. Project coordinators in Houston and Dallas sent their completed panels to San Francisco, where the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt had started, to be sewn together with panels from across the country. It was, effectively, the perfect symbol for what that fight had become, a six- 1 ton comfort created by the survivors of an epidemic that had necessitated the growth and consciousness of gay communities across the country.1 Although organized gay communities had existed in Houston and Dallas for a number of years, the AIDS crisis cemented the sometimes-tenuous bonds that had held those communities together since the 1960s. Gays and lesbians in Houston and Dallas, Texas’ two cities that saw the greatest number of AIDS cases, were drawn together by tragedy, against the common enemies of illness, discrimination, and health equity.2 To be sure, for Texans affected by AIDS, the epidemic revealed a number of shortcomings in the state’s health care system, including a proclivity to marginalize individuals with infectious diseases, an unwillingness to engage with the community for the purposes of health promotion, and a hesitancy to provide adequate care for the medically indigent. Because of these shortcomings, gays and lesbians in Houston and Dallas became their own caregivers, advocates, and activists. They honed a skill-set they had developed in gay rights battles in the 1960s and 1970s to raise awareness about AIDS, create institutions capable of caring for AIDS patients, and fight politically to protect individuals with AIDS and secure their right to treatment. Their lives depended on it. The AIDS crisis occurred during a pivotal moment in American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history. By the time the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) first issued a report on what would later be termed AIDS in 1981, the New York City Stonewall Riots, a 1 “AIDS Quilt Called a ‘Tangible Remembrance’ of Houston Victims,” Garry Abrams, “AIDS Quilt Comforting U.S. Grief,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1988; Nancy Kruh, “AIDS Quilt – Tour to Bring Memorial to Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, February 9, 1988. 2 While the HIV/AIDS epidemic is ongoing, the AIDS crisis refers to a specific, notably bleak, period during the epidemic’s history. This period occurred between 1981, when scientists first described AIDS and 1996. It was an era marked by widespread illness, high death rates, discrimination and alienation, and a lack of effective treatment for AIDS. 1996 was chosen as the cut-off point for important reasons. First, it was in that year that Dr. David Ho’s research on highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), the first treatment that proved effective in the fight against AIDS, was presented at the 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver. Second, AIDS lost its position as the leading cause of death for Americans aged twenty-five to forty-four. Finally, 1996 was the first year since the epidemic’s beginning that the number of new AIDS diagnoses declined in the United States. 2 1969 symbolic turning point in the history of the gay rights movement, was more than a decade in the past. David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked a Gay Revolution examines the importance of Stonewall in the creation of a politically conscious gay community. Carter argues that while gays and lesbians certainly existed within safe spaces in the years before Stonewall, the riots “led to the inclusion of sexual orientation as a protected category in the civil rights and human rights movement” and birthed organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance.3 Though homosexual behavior remained illegal until 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas, the Stonewall Riots, owing much to the political climate in which the riots occurred, ushered in an era of relative openness within the gay rights movement. According to Carter, it was Stonewall that pushed a number of gays and lesbians out of the closet, beginning a new era of gay activism in American history. As a result, in major cities across the country, including New York, San Francisco, Houston, and Dallas, nascent LGBT communities formed. Though most of the literature on LGBT history is national in focus, a handful of works detail southern LGBT history. James T. Sears’s Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South uses narrative tales to illustrate the nuances of gay relationships and lifestyles in the U.S. South. Using archival information and interviews, Sears discusses local watershed gay-related political moments in the South while unveiling a rich and complex LGBT history that is often ignored in national gay histories.4 Likewise, John Howard’s Men Like That: A Southern Queer History explores the world of gay living in rural Mississippi. Howard contends with the notion that gay history is