How does past experience shape a community’s response to crisis? Through my research, I sought to answer this question as it relates to the queer community, specifically how understandings of disease and health that arose during the HIV/AIDS pandemic influenced how queer-identifying people approached public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. This task was two-fold: primarily, I was interested in mapping the various social institutions that are responsible for collective memory formation within queer communities, the spaces in which individual experiences are translated into communal narratives of trauma that are passed down in such a way as to have a lasting impact on the community, effecting members with no first-hand experience of the initial trauma. Exploring these institutional attachments was an important prerequisite for understanding how these communal narratives shaped individuals’ perceptions of public health during the COVID-19 pandemic through shared understandings of disease and health. This is not unique to the queer community, though it provides a compelling case study, as I believe that all communities are imbued with collective meaning that necessarily shapes their members’ experiences of public health.

My project was inspired by previous work among critical race scholars that drew connections between instances of historical biomedical racism and present skepticism of medical institutions among Black and Brown communities. Often referred to as the “Tuskegee effect,” this well-documented phenomenon demonstrates the ways in which individual trauma is made collective and passed down through generations to affect lasting relationships between community members and health institutions. Through my project, I sought to determine if a similar effect could be observed within the queer community as it relates to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The traumatic impact of the pandemic is well established within queer communities, however, little research exists on the intergenerational effects of such trauma, or how it has manifested itself in relationships between the queer community and public health institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This project primarily used interview data from self-identified members of the queer community across a wide range of ages, allowing me to establish an intergenerational perspective on community memory that facilitated my analysis of the importance of social institutions on public memory formation. My data from interviews with people who had first-hand experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic were an important comparative metric by which I determined how younger generations’ understandings of HIV/AIDS demonstrated change over time within the queer community. This also allowed me to examine how the spaces that older interviewees participated in during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic shaped the narratives of later generations.

My interviews were organized into two main subsections. First, I tried to understand individuals’ experiences of the COVID pandemic, what institutions they sought out for help, and how their relationships with public health informed their responses to the pandemic. My next subsection focused on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, beginning with less-specific questions about what individuals remembered and “took away” from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As some of my interviewees were not alive during the height of this pandemic, this question was designed to assess the methods through which they came to understand HIV/AIDS, specifically within the context of the queer community. The following questions were asked how institutions mediated knowledge of HIV/AIDS. I was particularly interested in which institutions were responsible for transmitting public memory, and how these institutions shaped shared narratives among younger interviewees.

In total, I was able to interview five individuals–two of them were alive during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and three were not. Two of them were male-identifying, two were female-identifying, and one was non-binary. Of the interviewees who were not alive during the pandemic, all three fell between the ages of 20 and 30. They lived in different places across the United States at the time of the interview, but the majority of them were raised in the urban midwest. They also identified with a diverse set of racial and ethnic backgrounds– two of them were white, while the rest were Black, mixed race, and Latinx respectively.

My research uncovered strong evidence of intergenerational trauma within queer communities as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This trauma manifested itself differently within each age group, but nonetheless impacted interviewees’ identification with their communities. I observed that those who had lived through the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic drew on personal experiences when comparing the two pandemics, reflecting more specific, individualized trauma. However, the institutions through which older participants processed this trauma, namely gay bars, schools, and family networks, created and spread broader, more general narratives of HIV/AIDS that younger interviewees related to their COVID-19 experiences. All of my respondents made comparisons between COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS mitigation strategies that reflected greater awareness of public health policy within the community, generating greater investment in public health. These findings suggest that pandemics are trauma-generating, with lasting, intergenerational effects that impact a community’s future public health outcomes.

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Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2008. “The Specter of AIDS: Testimonial Activism in the Aftermath of the Epidemic.” Sociological Theory 26(3): 230–57.

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Siconolfi, Daniel E., Perry N. Halkitis, and Robert W. Moeller. 2015. “Homo Economicus: Young Gay and Bisexual Men and the New Public Health.” 25(5):554–68.

Image Credits: Rick Landavazo "Gay Bar" Lambda Archives of San Diego