“Duvalier Is Using the Gay Issue As a Diversion for the Poverty and Exploitation of Haiti”: Gay Rights, HIV/AIDS, and Nativism in Haiti and South Florida, 1977–84

This presentation is a transnational study that explores the distinct social, cultural, and political circumstances that prompted government officials in both Washington, D.C. and Port-au-Prince to scapegoat homosexuals and Haitians as “diseased” and “undesirable” populations.  While past studies—most notably Paul Farmer’s classic work, AIDS and Accusation—have investigated how racial and nativisit motivations influenced U.S. health officials’ decision to categorize Haitians as inherent carriers of HIV/AIDS, little research has documented how that phenomenon became entangled with the newly politicized gay rights movement.  I reveal a new dimension to Farmer’s “geography of blame” argument by demonstrating how the United States’ scapegoating of Haitians for HIV/AIDS mirrored the rhetoric of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s government that “foreign” homosexuals were responsible for spreading the disease on the island.  This analysis pays particular attention to how a politically-charged gay movement in Miami responded to these phenomena, including a small campaign to boycott travel to Haiti in 1983.  This recharged gay community undertook new political avenues to protect sexual minorities in the U.S. and abroad.

This project contextualizes how the emerging sexual “minorities” debate was articulated in the midst of nativist and racially motivated U.S. policies that fueled this construction of Haitians as “diseased” and “undesirable.”  It juxtaposes the experiences of Haitian migrants entering South Florida in the late 1970s and early 1980s with that of the Marielitos; that is, the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro’s government during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.  Much like the Haitians, popular and medical discourse constructed an image of the Marielitos as sexually deviant, encroaching, and undesirable entrants.  This Haitian-Cuban juxtaposition reveals how sexuality collided with existing categories of race and ethnicity, particularly as U.S. policy followed and reified an established and historical hierarchy of immigrant desirability that rendered Haitians at the bottom of the totem pole.