For the first session of the year on Thursday 15th October at 5pm-6pm (London time), we’ll be reading Douglas Crimp’s (1987) “How to have promiscuity in an epidemic”. In this essay, written at the height of HIV/AIDS crisis, Crimp describes the emergence and critical importance of safer sex practices. In a time when certain morally conservative forces (including from amongst gay men and AIDS activists themselves) railed against queer men for continuing to have sex under the conditions of “gay plague,” Crimp argues that it was the very insistence upon ‘promiscuity’ (i.e. non-monogamous sex) within the gay community that was responsible for the development of life-saving safer sex practices. The implications here for the post-COVID era, where enforced abstention from all non-essential practice has become the norm in certain regions, are ripe for discussion and it’s for this reason that I’ve chosen this text as the first for discussion in the new physically distanced incarnation of Queer STS.
A link to the text is here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397576?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. If you have any difficulty accessing it, let me know.
And the details of the Zoom meeting are as follows:
Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/95502943442?pwd=bVlHbXY5YUY1UVJsMk8vM0tjV3U5Zz09 Password: queerSTS1 Date: 15th October 2020 Time: 5pm-6pm (London time)