The “International Coming-Out Party”: Transnational AIDS Activism in South Africa, 2000–04

This paper describes the role of transnational sexuality-based HIV treatment advocacy networks in the early programs of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African new social movement.  It focuses on the work of American and South African gay AIDS activists in the creation of the TAC’s HIV ‘treatment literacy’ programs. From its emergence in the 1980s, HIV treatment activism in the United States had previously only revolved around domestic demands, therefore, the American activists’ participation in transnational advocacy networks, from the 2000 Durban AIDS conference onwards, was novel.  The paper argues that this transnational collaboration around South African treatment literacy programs had two major impacts on the politics of global health.  Firstly, they constituted part of the moral authority the TAC wielded in its effective advocacy for treatment access.  Secondly, the programs were emulated by activists abroad.  It draws on research in the records of the TAC and the AIDS Law Project (ALP) and interviews with activists.   The transnational history the paper offers enriches existing literature on what Steven Epstein has referred to as American AIDS ‘activist-experts’.  Histories of transnational AIDS activism remain relevant in a contemporary context where universal access to HIV treatment has yet to be achieved.