A Gathering Of Voices: LGBTQ+ Activists Talk About Pandemics Past & Present

More than half the population of the United States has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Case counts and virus-related deaths are dropping by the day. And as we look toward the end of the pandemic, I’ve started to have a recurring fantasy. In my dream, it’s 2023, and the first multi-million dollar COVID-19 film is making its debut.

In movie theater auditoriums around the nation, audience members tiptoe between aisles, gingerly balancing popcorn bags, candy boxes, and soda cups as they settle into their seats. The energy is one of buzzy anticipation. The film has been touted as an epic of herculean proportions. It’s only loosely biographical, but the pre-screen reviews have breathlessly detailed how the writers and directors coordinated and consulted with several public health, governmental, and non-profit organizations to detail the sheer magnitude of the pandemic, and the ineptitude that was to blame for the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives domestically and millions worldwide. The film sources from post-pandemic indictments and investigations, and the trailers have claimed that it will provide viewers a“never-before-seen” look into the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film begins, and the audience is introduced to beautiful and exceptionally chiseled Asian American actors in the roles of Wuhan scientists. Their subtitled conversations give the film a veil of internationalism, despite its ultimately overwhelming Americentrism. One storyline in the film focuses on an inner-city Latinx character, whose life spirals out of control as his family members succumb to mysterious symptoms. I can picture the close-up perfectly: the character’s tear-streaked face, watching in horror as an exhausted physician takes his mother off of a ventilator. Sniffles will echo through the auditorium, and in a few months, the young Latinx actor will definitely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor awards. There are likely a handful more POC character actors sprinkled throughout the film. However, the majority of screen time will be usurped by white veteran actors playing Trump, Pence, Fauci, Birx, Redford, Biden, Cuomo, Newsom — plus the fatigued physicians, pharmaceutical CEOs, Ivy League-educated epidemiologists, zealous anti-maskers, and voracious journalists that round out the rest of the cast. 

In my daydream, the film has the pacing of And The Band Played On (1993) and the character development of Dallas Buyers Club (2003), two widely acclaimed movies about the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It also has the same narrative trappings of white-washing a global pandemic that disproportionately affected Black people, Native American people, brown people, poor people, and immigrants. And The Band Played On was based on the commercially lauded 1987 book by white journalist Randy Shilts. The film adaptation had a white director, screenwriter, executive producer, and music composer, and a principal cast of four white men and one white woman. A decade later, Dallas Buyers Club (2003) fails to improve the optics. The two films are part of a canon of portrayals that center whiteness in the “early days” of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, ignoring the fact that by June 1984, the CDC reported that 50% of all pediatric AIDS cases were among African American children. In 1986, a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that Hispanic/Latino individuals had a mortality rate that was 3.5 times higher than their white counterparts, during a time when survival outcomes were already very poor. 

This matters. There is tremendous power in story-telling, and our collective memory is malleable and transient. The popular media recountings of the HIV/AIDS crisis are an extension of the medical racism that informed response to it and are directly correlated to the outcomes of communities whose members are still affected by HIV today, almost exactly 40 years after the first case of the “mysterious disease” that would eventually be known as AIDS was published. In 2018, Black and Latinx Americans accounted for 69% of new HIV diagnosesin the U.S. Among gay white men, robust public health initiatives focusing on PrEP and PEP; legislative support to prevent discriminatory practices due to HIV status; pharmaceutical pressure to develop antiretroviral therapies with minimal side effects; and a monopoly over HIV-related narratives have allowed HIV to be rendered a chronic disease. But among communities of color, HIV remains a silent pandemic. 

Similarly, Americans are witnessing the distortion of COVID-19 narratives in real-time. There was a palpable shift within the national response and the public framing of the virus once data revealed that minority groups were most likely to die and most likely to lose their employmentduring the pandemic. Now, imagine these same narratives five, 10, 20, and 40 years in the future; imagine the figures who will be remembered — and the faces who will be forgotten. In my recurring daydream of the first COVID-19 blockbuster, nothing has changed. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Refinery29 brought together several LGBTQ+ activists — some of whom lived through the HIV/AIDS crisis or work in that space now — to reflect on what COVID-19 revealed about the existence of medical racism. Their conversation explores how the nation's history with HIV/AIDS influenced the public health response to the 2020-21 pandemic, and what lessons about protecting our most vulnerable communities still haven’t been learned. 

Above all, the roundtable is a gathering of voices with a promise to remember the truth about the lives disproportionately lost to COVID-19 in our memories, the stories we tell, the legislation we enact, and the art that we create. — Dalí Adekunle is a health director at the Family Health Centers at NYU Langone, and a writer for TheBody, a HIV/AIDS resource.