"It was like something I had never seen before": Black Gay Sexual Spaces and 'Situations' in the Age of AIDS

2021 Sexual & Gender Diversity Speaker

Speaker: Dr. Marlon Bailey (Arizona State University)

My presentation examines the structural vulnerabilities to HIV that black gay men experience in the U.S. and what these men do about it. I draw from ethnographic data to highlight what some black gay men do to withstand the anti-black racism and homosex-normativity that underpin HIV prevention public health strategies. I argue that sexual practices, spaces, and situations in which Black gay men engage are a means through which they claim and enact sexual autonomy during this HIV crisis that disproportionately impacts them.

Marlon M Bailey is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies, African and African American Studies, and American Studies at ASU. Marlon is an ethnographer whose scholarship focuses on Black LGBT cultural formations, gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS prevention research. Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013) was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Book Award in LGBT Studies in 2014. Dr. Bailey has published in American Quarterly, GLQ, Signs, Feminist Studies, Souls, Gender, Place, and Culture, The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, AIDS Patient Care & STDs, LGBT.