AIDS, the Religious Right, and Gay Sex in Late 1980s North Carolina

Recent scholarship has challenged the idea that the AIDS epidemic and the Religious Right in the 1980s caused a monolithic conservative response in American society.  Indeed, prominent gay publications and organizations in Boston, New York, and San Francisco extolled the virtues of gay sex.  Yet, how did AIDS and the Religious Right shape discussions of sexual agency and gay liberation in areas that did not contain large gay populations?  My paper explores such responses from the perspective of gay male periodicals based out of North Carolina, a state that by the late 1980s had both a flourishing gay press and a solid base of socially conservative spokespeople including US Senator Jesse Helms and evangelist Billy Graham.  Due to the state’s conservatism coupled with its lack of a large gay community, gay male writers here were less forthcoming in promoting homosexual activity than their metropolitan counterparts with substantial gay populations.  Yet, they were not anti-sex either.  Instead, most of them offered strategically coded endorsements of gay sex in the name of gay liberation; they promoted, however indirectly, that gay men needed to have sex regularly in order to express their humanity, to persevere spiritually, and to survive as a community.  This finding illuminates the widespread national appeal of sex-positivism as a response to the challenges posed by the AIDS epidemic and the Religious Right in late 1980s America, but how that response varied due to local political and commercial considerations.