Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Lesbian Blood Sisters of the HIV Crisis

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Why did 200 people queue to give blood in the San Diego summer heat on 16 July 1983?During the AIDS crisis, many people living with HIV developed severe anaemia as a result of the disease and the treatments available at the time, leaving them dependent on regular blood transfusions. But where would the blood come from, especially with gay men being turned away from donating?In this episode, we're exploring one of the most inspiring examples of solidarity between lesbians and gay men in modern history: the Blood Sisters.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kela Lister. Welcome back once again to another episode of Betwicks the Sheets. Hello, thanks for coming back. But before we go any further, I do have to tell you, and I have to keep telling you.

I mean, you can say it with me. We can make a wrap out of it. I don't know, but here we go. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty wake or a range. It's been adult. So, right, let's just get the fuck on with it.

It is early in the morning of July 16th, 1983, and we are in San Diego, and we are at a gathering of women who are actually queuing. They're queuing down the road to get into something. What the hell's going on? We'll get a little bit closer and find out. These women are lesbians. The lesbians amassing. But what for? Why are they here?

Well, they're here to donate their blood, and they're donating to a very, very, very. special cause. They are donating their blood to hospitals treating patients with HIV. But why do these women feel the need to do it? Why weren't regular blood supplies enough? Who organized this? And what impact did they have? These are the lesbian blood sisters of San Diego and today we're going to find out about their story. Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. By the end of 2024, the world's Health Organization was estimating that HIV had been responsible for the deaths of up to 53.4 million people. This is a disease that has caused no end of heartbreak and misery and tragedy,

but it has also exposed all manner of vile prejudice and horrendous intolerance, as one of the main groups afflicted were gay men. But that's not the whole story. As the HIV epidemic hit, people also banded together in forms of community support and activism, as the government seemed to be doing nothing at all. And today we're looking at one such group, the story of the lesbian blood sisters. Why was giving blood so important in the early years of this crisis? What were they up against?

And how were they seen by other members of the LGBTQ plus community? Well, today I'm joined by Jennifer Breyer, author of Infectious Ideas, U.S. political response to the AIDS crisis, to talk about these women. to hear more. I know I am. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Jennifer Breyer. How are you doing? I'm well. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You are Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. So how is Chicago doing?

Well, it's a difficult time here in the States, I will say. But the University of University of Illinois, Chicago is an amazing place and this city is, it's a crossroads of many things and it's got a rich history of lesbian lives to be perfectly honest. So I'm excited to talk to you and to listen to what people have to say. This is a fascinating, but it's so strange to call it history because I was here when it happened, but it is history. We're looking at reactions to the AIDS epidemic. as it emerged in the 1980s, but particular how lesbian groups in America responded to it, the lesbian blood sisters, which is just the most extraordinary story. But before we even get to that, let's just do a real page one starter beginner question.

What is HIV? What is AIDS? Well, there's a biological way to answer that question, a historical way to answer that question, in a sociological, political way. I'll take it from the historical side because I'm sure that there are people who can do a better job on the deep biological side. At the most basic level, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus,

is the virus that causes AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which is a constellation of illnesses and opportunistic infections that basically create in the human body the inability to resist various kinds of infections and causes, really dreadful consequences in the human body. Different in people assigned female at birth than people assigned male at birth. It is something that we now understand is acquired through blood.

So that means blood and blood products. So semen, blood being shared in various ways, including blood donations and blood products, but also through intravenous drug use. It's something that can move from pregnant women to fetus. Although, you know, that's an interesting story as well, how women have basically been at the forefront of helping us figure out how to stop that. from happening and therefore stop it from happening across all humans. But it is a virus that was discovered in the early 1980s. AIDS as a syndrome, as a as a constellation of illnesses, was identified first in 1981, just in June of 1981. But of course, it predated its existence, predated those early reports. So we, and I'm part of this, I wrote a book about the history of HIV. We say it started in June of 1981, but of course HIV was endemic in many places, certainly in the states and in other parts of the world in the 1970s without question. So we just call it that. That's when we start to name it as something, right? Strange illness.

affecting homosexual men. But we know that HIV, that virus, even though it wasn't called that yet, and even though it wasn't identified yet, was in the blood supply, was in people's bodies, was we were living with it long before 1981. Do we know yet where HIV or AIDS came from? Do we know the source? Why suddenly? I mean, it didn't suddenly, as you've just explained, but it began to present in the 70s and leading into the 80s? Well, yeah, I mean, there's been some incredible natural history work. A colleague, Richard McKay, wrote a great book about the making of patient zero, which sort of, and has done some work with some people who studied natural history.

And they have some sense. There's evidence of one of the first people in the states to have lived with HIV and, like, died from AIDS, a teenager named Robert Rayford in St. Louis, 1969. His biological remains existed and were tested, you know, in the 1990s and found out that he was living with HIV in 1969. There are a lot of things related to blood, actually, that happen in the 1970s that helped to explain. I mean, we know that it has roots in sub-Saharan Africa. And, you know that it has roots in sub-Saharan Africa and the sort of language of that, the imperial medical language of that, which the Brits are certainly at the forefront of, is a subject that is well beyond my scope. But I have been thinking a lot about what happens in the 1970s that produce the conditions of what would be and what we now know is an AIDS epidemic and that we associate so deeply with the 1980s and the Reagan and Thatcher administration.

and what the political economy of that is. But the 70s are just an incredibly important moment. And the way we've understood the 70s to date is from something like Randy Schultz's and the band played on that starts with the 1976 bicentennial as we are about to celebrate the 250th in an entirely different context in the states. So you hear about gay liberation. and gay men's sexual practice as the driving force of what becomes AIDS. But the politics, the political economy of blood, the political economy of drug use is so fundamental in the 1970s.

And part of what we understand is when we focus on particularly gay male sex, we forget about everything else. that was also happening. So it's the first time in, it's the first time that it's possible to sell your blood, right? So poor people who are able, the blood products industry is really revolutionized in the 1970s. And so you're able, if you're poor and that's the only thing you can sell, you can sell your blood and your plasma. You can pool blood products together to create different things. And that's the piece about hemophiliacs. It's also a time when people who are incarcerated are able to give blood. I mean, there's a whole set of things related to blood. And then there's the reality that heroin drug use becomes quite substantial in the 1970s. And there's some sense that men returning from

the Vietnam War who have become addicted to using heroin. or just changes in urban economies that make that kind of survival economy necessary. So there are just a whole host of things happening to the blood supply. So we talk about blood sisters. They come out of a context where the meaning of blood was really shifting. So I think there's a lot to be said for the 1970s and studying it. And the reality is that we know that communities were developing survival strategies that predated safer sex, that predated even the blood sisters. There's a lot to be said for studying the 1970s. It's something that I really encouraging people who are thinking about AIDS to start to do.

We've got the 80s. We need to think about the 70s. think about the 70s. There will be many people listening to this podcast who weren't alive in the 70s or 80s and good luck to him. But there'll be many, many more who were and who remember when the AIDS crisis started to emerge. But to anybody that perhaps didn't live through it,

wasn't even aware of it or perhaps kept it on the periphery of their experience, can you describe what that environment was like when the illness started to take hold and it started to present itself. Just to put a small pin in that and say, we don't yet know what happened in the 70s. I just want to this one example.

If you look at the Journal of the American Medical Association and then I will talk about the 80s, I promise. I spend a lot of time thinking about the 80s also. There are articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the mid-70s that talk about community-acquired pneumonia among intravenous drug users. In the mid-70s? In the mid-70s.

So I say that as a precursor to explain that if you read that article that appeared in the New York Times on July 3rd, 1981, I have many versions of it. I have the single column that runs along the left side with a huge advertisement for a bank on the other.

I grew up in New York City. That was where I was a young preteen in 1981. And the first person my family knew who died of AIDS, Kevin Majors, was 1983. So I have a real sense of this. I'm a real deep, visceral memories of it. And then as a historian, I've looked back on it to try and understand it as well. But if you read that article, you and that shaped how you came to understand AIDS for the next, I don't know, five, ten years, five, 10 months even, you would believe that this was the first time this ever happened. And it was happening to white homosexual men.

And that is, and it was happening to what we now call white gay men or white men who have sex with men. That is real. But they were so far from the only group being affected. But it really did something. that association and the deep homophobia of it and the deep hatred of gay men and the deep fear of them and somehow that they were dirty or, you know, ill. Because this is just on the heels of homosexuality being declassified as a psychiatric disorder in essence. So that's 73.

So you think about what gay liberation meant. And then to have this, it's like the kind of exclamation point that homophobes could only dream about. So it has all of these consequences. And part of what it was like to be, I mean, you probably have these memories too. You know, people were men for the most part in that moment, although it certainly wasn't only men. Men were visible then. We're dying and many of them wasting away

and their cheeks getting completely gaunt. They would have Kaposi sarcoma, the sort of lesions that would appear on the body, one of the opportunistic infections that we know, is more likely to affect people assigned male at birth and people assigned female at birth. So more likely to affect men than women. But it was terrifying.

There was a health care system that didn't want to care for people. There were some, I mean, there were certainly doctors and nurses and pharmacists, dermatologists, who did all sorts of things to take care of people. But people were literally dying in front of us. And again, just to say, we know how HIV travels through the human body. So we know that by the time we were seeing that, manifest itself in these communities, it meant that HIV had been in their bodies for a long time, right? Because we understand how the evolution, like, we understand how the disease travels

through the body and how it emerges. So, and it's all before the internet. It's all before cell phones. So we're living in a world there where we're seeing these profound changes to our community and there are no digital cameras. We're working with telephones on a wall and mail and fax machines and the mechanisms of communication that we now know were completely different and non-existent. So you would see posters up all around the East and West Village of New York City. You would see phone trees. There were buddy systems. The gay men's crisis emerges, I think in 82, 83, it happens in San Francisco. There's this incredible effort, primarily initially by gay men, but then by huge, like much bigger allied communities emerging

to create a care system in a vacuum. I mean, the Reagan administration, the city government, it's true in the UK as well. I mean, the government is nowhere at all. No, nowhere at all. No. And it's these individual people and organizations that are fledgling that are forming in response to a crisis that really shapes the early 1980s in some profound ways. And the blood sisters are part of that. The levels of homophobia that emerge are really astonishing. They are visceral and they are aggressive and they range from... And I get the chills just hearing. I mean, I can feel it in my body. People felt absolutely free to just say the worst things and they did.

This is a community that brought it on themselves. That I saw interviews with politicians saying that gay people should have to wear badges, marking them out, that they should be locked up, that there are cases, as you said, of doctors, many doctors doing heroic things, but also cases of people in the medical professional refusing to touch or be in the same room as... Refusing to bring food into people's. Holy fuck. Hospital rooms.

It's that desperate. I think that I've watched a lot of documentaries and read a lot, and I think one of the most profound documentaries I ever saw was it's called We Were Here. And I would recommend anybody go and watch that if you want to see just how this thing hit and how it gripped. And the devastation that it wrought. And there are people being interviewed saying that I would lose several friends in a week. It would just be bam, bam, bam. and there was no help.

So let's talk about who the lesbian blood sisters were and what they set out to do against this backdrop. Yeah. Well, the lesbian blood sisters, they were in lots of different places, but the ones that have the greatest historical record are the ones in San Diego, California, which is in Southern California.

It's a Navy town. It's a town that has a huge Navy base and a long-standing democratic, democratic tradition. Blood sisters were primarily in the case of San Diego and also in some other places. They were part of a sort of budding and it's a complicated story. And obviously your listeners will not be surprised to hear this. This is before there is some, there's an acronym called LGBT. it's certainly before there's an acronym called LGBTQ, right? This is the early 1980s, 1982, 1983.

And it's a time when, just to put one more contextual piece in place, we were working with the representation coming out of particularly popular media, but not entirely just popular media, I think also public health, was this idea that there were four H-H-Hs. The 4 H's of the categories of people who were at risk for acquiring this thing called AIDS was actually maybe even then still called sometimes grid gay related immunodeficiency. So just to sort of think about that, that there would be something called gay related immunodeficiency that then became AIDS. But the 4Hs homosexuals, and there it was never totally clear if that meant gays and lesbians. So again, just to sort of say that homosexual, which is a word used still, I think, more in Great Britain than it is in the States now, maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But that word at the time applied to both gay and lesbian, at least potentially. So homosexuals, hemophiliacs, people who had hemophilia and had to have blood products and they knew pretty soon that that was a key piece of it.

The other one in the great imperial project of the Western Hemisphere is Haitians. So there was this sense that AIDS came from Haiti. And there is a very deep history of what the AIDS epidemic looked like and continues to look like in Haiti and entities like partners in health, which are some of the key activists around the world thinking about global access and care. They have their first clinics in Haiti. But so Haiti, so Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin, IV drug users. And then sometimes alternatingly, and this is part of the story as well, hookers were sometimes an H as well. So what we today call sex workers.

So these are the four or five. H's, and you start to understand that what was happening in that model is that people were being given an identity. So if you held that identity, you were at risk. It wasn't yet about behavior. It was about how you were identified. So homosexual, in that case, right, Hooker, right, that you're an identity. That's your identity. It's not about something that you do. Heroin, Ivy Drug Use. maybe is more about behavior, but it is not entirely about behavior. It's about an identity. Remember, my community acquired pneumonia among intravenous drug users from the 1970s, and then hemophiliacs, again, an identity, not a behavior. So the blood sisters emerge in that

context. So blood is identified as the thing. Blood is the danger, right? Blood is the danger. And gay men, are basically banned from, you know, not legally quite yet, but very close. Like, they are not going to be able to give blood. They also need blood. They're in the hospital. They're dying. They need different kinds of infusions. We don't have treatment yet. We don't know what is going to make people better. And we're not going to know for a long time. But the blood sisters emerge in that context. You know, this is still a time. And I think it's true today, too, although I think AIDS in many ways changed this. Gay men and lesbians are running along separate tracks. It's not a unified movement. I mean, I think LGBTQ now rolls off our tongue so quickly that we forget that

those are very different struggles, right? They're different political struggles. They're different sexual liberationist struggles. They're different sociological struggles. The women's health movement that had preceded that was in the 1970s as well, the abortion, reproductive justice movement that has its roots in the 1970s and well earlier as well. Gay men don't necessarily connect themselves to lesbian health.

But we start to see, especially in places where there's a strong gay and lesbian democratic club, which there is in San Diego. So those people have been forged together in some kind of political struggle, right? Even if it's mainstream, but mainstream political struggle throughout the course of the 1970s, you start, that's where you start to see lesbians make a decision that they are going to start to give blood to support who they call their gay brothers. So they define themselves as blood sisters.

It's a kind of patriotic move, support our boys, right? It has that kind of rhetoric to it. And some historians have talked about that. But they really understand the need to give blood as a way of caring for their gay brothers in a context in which there's nothing else that they can do. I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break. I remember seeing, well, I don't remember because I wasn't there, but I have seen one of the original posters from the San Diego lesbian blood sister drive

and it just said, our boys need our blood. I just found that so moving. Yeah. Just that, you know, that, I think it's the our boys bit of just like, right, now we have to step up. So how did you know how that this system worked then? Were they able to donate their blood and make sure that it specifically went to gay men dying of AIDS in the hospitals? I have never gotten that sense that that was. that it was like a, what we today have is like a targeted blood donation. I mean, you have to sort of

think about it again, there's no test. HIV doesn't exist as a thing yet. There's no test. So to just look back on, and I'm, I am not making a comparison between COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS. I'll just say that at the outset. But the speed. with which we developed and isolated SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That was because we had done the work of HIV, like, and it was 40 years later. There's no test yet. There's nothing. So I don't think it really worked the way it would go on to work later.

There were blood shortages because people were afraid. It was pretty clear that I don't remember when the U.S. system basically tells gay men that they can no longer donate blood. They, too, are seeing their friends, their, you know, comrades, their fellow Democratic club members die. And they think this is one of the things that we can do. And they also know that they're not dying. Yeah, yeah, of course. We know historically and epidemiologically that the lesbians who are most impacted by HIV-AIDS, even in the early 1980s, are likely women of color who have been engaged in some kind of sex work or survival economy work or have some history of drug use or are women who have sex with men and women. And we know that now.

But then they would just be like, we're just regular old dykes. Like nothing's happening to us. You know, nothing's, we're not dying. They're dying. We're not dying. And they knew that that meant that I think that they knew that that meant that they could do this and it would be okay. Can you describe that first San Diego lesbian blood sister drive? Because it was Barbara Vic, I think, was one of the founding members.

and they thought maybe a few people would turn out? Yeah, I mean, it is an incredible story. I went back when I was preparing for this and read the teen vote, like there's a teen vogue article about it. But I imagine that dozens of women came together and sort of in the tradition of women's health that had happened before, in the tradition of lesbian feminist organizing that happened all across California and the country,

but particularly in the West Coast. I think that they were already deeply politicized. They understood how homophobia functioned. They experienced their children being taken from them. They experienced what it was like to have the state make a decision about them because of who they loved and how they loved. They had experienced the misogyny and lesbophobia of the state, even though they were not people living with a condition. that was causing them to waste away. That first drive, they actually had a queue of 200 people and they took over 130 donations. Yeah. I mean, that just, it just proves the point that, I mean, I'm not saying that they were political operative. You know, like I'm not, but they had been politicized. They had a consciousness about what it meant to be in this thing called a gay and lesbian

community. So those are the two that are part of it. They understood that they had, that they were part of this. And I bet among them were also many separatists who didn't name and embrace the possibility of having an alliance between gay men and lesbians. So it's both. Both of those things existed at the same time. And we know that in spaces like this, lesbians were at the forefront of caring for people dying from this thing called alternately gay-related immunodeficiency and AIDS. So we were the people who were on the front lines of that. Going into the hospitals, going into hospitals, taking care of people, being parts of buddy systems that brought food, helping people get to care, staffing hotlines, giving blood.

The thing that I think is important to know, and I'm hoping that you and I can take up in another podcast, is that, of course, lesbians were living with AIDS too and dying from AIDS also. Yes, yes, yeah, often overlooked in this story. But this one is about how, much we were leading the charge to take care of people around our friends and and comrades and family chosen and biological who were dying. I have a quote from Barbara Vick,

who was a founder member of the San Diego Blood Sisters, and wondering what your reaction to it is. And she went on record to say, there was a powerlessness everybody felt, but the lesbian community seemed immune to the disease. I don't want to say there was guilt. but you look at the counterparts bearing the burden for no reason. At that time, women had less to give economically, but blood is such a basic thing. I mean, I think there's so much in that quote to unpack, but at its fundamentally, it describes precisely what it felt like to have nothing left to give but your blood. And, you know, we could rehearse all the ways that women are.

always part of the caretaking economy, are always at the forefront of that sort of devotional, whatever it is. And we could talk about the misogyny of that and we could talk about the lesbophobia of it. We could talk about the fundamental disregard for care as something that is meaningfully economically sustaining. You could talk about all those things. But at its core, what they were doing was responding to a crisis that was. happening all around them. The part that's tricky is the sense that lesbians were immune because, of course, we weren't.

We were not. Those lesbians, it was not happening in their community. But a couple hours north of them in Los Angeles and a couple hours north still in San Francisco, it most certainly was. That goes back to your earlier point about the networks of communication, that this isn't a time when we had the internet or smartphones that, you know, that people are trying to network, but maybe it's very difficult to build those lines of communication to join up these conversations. Well, and also we don't, this is also a moment and it lasts for a very long time where we only

know what AIDS looks like for men. We don't know what AIDS yet looks like for women. Women are vectors. So the other piece of this is, so the lesbians are immune part, that Barbara Vic quote, it's so important. And it's about their understanding of the world, the world that they were living in and what they saw happening. And the other language that's existing at this time around women and here they're not necessarily talking about homosexuals or lesbians. They're just, they're talking about straight women or who that people they believe are straight again, remember the identity, it's not the behavior, is that sex, you know, prostitutes,

sex workers were vectors. They were the thing that spread. So it's weird. Like, how do you have these two things at the same time? So part of what Vicks quote asks at its basis is we're not those women, we're these women. So I just think it's an important thing to note not to undercut the incredible mobilization of it. But it does require a way of understanding themselves in relationship to other women who have sex with women. And define themselves as distinct. I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break. The lesbian blood sisters, the San Diego's were the first, but then this is a movement that becomes replicated in different states.

And it continued for, at least the San Diego blood sisters. were operational for about four years. A decade. I mean, they do, they work, they work through the early 1990s around the country. There are different ones. Yeah. It's fascinating that you are picking up on the kind of, the things about this movement. Because at the time, there was a massive support for it.

But there was also pushback contained within this particular movement of where identities clash. And there were some voices saying that women shouldn't be the ones to having to have. provide this care. They were there right at the time. It's a complicated moment to understand political context. You know, we talked about how AIDS is identified as a thing at the start of the Reagan administration in the states. And it's at a point of gay and lesbian liberation, right? Gay and lesbian liberation has really transformed over the course of these 15 or so years. from, if you mark it as starting, gay liberation as a particular movement starting in the 70s. So that by the early 1980s, there are these gay and lesbian democratic clubs, as I said.

There are also, and this is part of the blood sisters, gay and lesbian affinity groups, what we would now call affinity groups, inside of various religious congregations. So reform Jews, the metropolitan community church. And those are congregations that support blood sisters as well. So again, like brothers and sisters moving together and doing the things that they can do. It's part of now the national organization from women, the YWCA, the Young Women's Christian Association in different parts of the country. It's part of Glad, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. And, you know, it's all of these things.

So it's become sort of more mainstream. It's hard to call it mainstream. It's what we would today call mainstream gay and lesbian politics. And there is a very strong argument, first among lesbian separatists who also have a history in California and across the country, but particularly on the West Coast, making an argument that they would never do. do this for us. They would never do this for us. Gay men would never be fighting for reproductive justice. They would never be doing something for women trying to survive breast cancer. Those were some of the voices at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So it's a complicated story. You know, it's just, I do think it goes back to the fact that now we say LGBTQ. And this was at a time when not only that

acronym didn't exist. But I don't, I mean, and I don't even know that when we say LGBTQ today, that we recognize how much inter-acronym struggle there is. You know, we understand it for trans folks, but we don't necessarily understand it between gay men and lesbians. We skip bisexual completely. You know, there's a lot in that acronym. There's a lot of disagreement, conflicting political struggles. There's not always solidarity. But this was a moment of a particular kind of solidarity that I think is worth knowing. And it has been celebrated.

The lesbian blood sisters have been awarded numerous awards, like the National Gay Task Force. Yeah, and that it was in Teen Vogue within the last three or four years, just says something about how this kind of something. solidarity work speaks to us at this moment when we are so desperate for seeing solidarity. We are so, we need it so deeply. I find the whole story so moving that these women came together and they didn't have anything else to give, but they gave their blood and they gave their time and their care and they wanted to do something.

And I think maybe that's it is it's the solidarity of that moment of a group facing such oppression and such hostility and literally dying and people weren't helping in the way that they should have done and these women came together and stepped up and I honestly I just find it so moving and maybe maybe you're right maybe that's why it resonates so much is because at the moment especially discussions around sexuality and identity feel so fractured that this feels like a moment where it was like look none of this matters we just have to help yeah I mean it's It's mutual aid. It's all of these things that we thought we learned in the pandemic, in the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, as I think I've tried to describe, you and I have been living in pandemic times our entire life. The way AIDS care emerges over the course of the 1980s is a profound example of mutual aid, what we now call mutual aid. And we know that it existed in the 1970s and the 1960s. We know that this idea.

of a solidarity, economy, of a practice of survivance, of survival and thriving. We know that these things come out of communities that have been disenfranchised, that have faced racist and homophobic assault that have been incarcerated, that have been told that what they do is illegal or immoral or dangerous. So we know the roots of our solidarity come out of that. And I just think that this is one of those moments where we see it put in very sharp relief. And happening across a divide that right now we don't see as a divide but then was there was no predicting that we would get to something called LGBTQ. First of all, that we would put the L before the G.

And then that we would have this whole list of words. Plus, IA, no way, didn't exist. These people didn't, that didn't exist in their minds. Jennifer, you have been absolutely fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for telling us about this often overlooked part of history. But if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can read infectious ideas, which is the book I wrote almost 20 years ago, one of the first historical monographs about the evolution of the AIDS crisis. And I beg you to go look at a website and a history project that I've been working on for about 10 years.

And I hope you and I can talk about the next time called I'm still surviving a living women's history of HIV in the United States. which is about women living with HIV in their bodies, some of them lesbians, still surviving.net. One word, still surviving.com. Thank you so much. We will absolutely do that. You have been wonderful. Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Jennifer for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along, whatever it is, you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject or we just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The Senior Producer is Freddie Chick.

Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.