Before HIV: Homosex and Venereal Disease, c. 1939–84

In the process of carrying out research for my doctorate, which examined the 'patient zero' myth of the early North American AIDS epidemic, I joined a number of other scholars in a stark realization: very little has been written on the subject of gay male sexual health before the 1970s. My contribution to the roundtable will be a work-in-progress presentation of my current postdoctoral research project, which takes the emergence of AIDS in the 1970s and 1980s in the gay community as its starting point (and chronological endpoint) and moves backwards in time to the middle of the twentieth century. The project seeks to chart the transnational flows of information, activism, and concern about men having sex with men in relation to venereal disease, with a focus on six cities in Canada, the United States, and England.