My research project examines the portrayals of queer, primarily lesbian and bisexual, women with AIDS
in medical pamphlets, queer organizations’ newspapers and newsletters, as well as artistic media,
specifically comics and photography, between the 1980s and 1990s. I am interested in how media
representation and medical research intersect and how they reciprocally shape one another.

While consuming different types of AIDS media, whether it be musicals or novels, I noticed that many
stories center gay and bisexual men. However, I also knew that WSM (women who have sex with men)
are currently the predominant population with AIDS. This made me wonder if there was a possibility of
queer women contracting AIDS, especially since I had heard about how lesbians were on the frontlines
helping queer men with AIDS. Upon further research, I began to learn about the sheer amount of erasure
that queer women with AIDS have faced in the past and still face today. Even though queer women were
dying, people refused to acknowledge that they could get AIDS due to misconceptions about the
definition of a lesbian and a refusal to decenter men in research. This made me want to embark on a
project where I uplift the voices of silenced women who were betrayed by the healthcare system and to
share their stories.

Reading about the stories and looking at photographs of different queer women who were unable to get
the care they were entitled to really resonated with me. It saddened me that there were so many clear
examples of people who were suffering due to improper AIDS research, and I was filled with indignation
about the purposeful exclusion of queer women in precautionary medical and public-aimed material.
There were so many deaths that were preventable and yet, even these deaths are not enough to have
people acknowledge, to this day, that queer women were also victims of AIDS. In a similar vein, I was
surprised to find out that when many different organizations, including queer ones, used the phrase
“anyone can get AIDS,” they meant that queer men and heterosexuals, especially heterosexual women,
can get AIDS.

My project addresses the broader issues of demographic erasure in medical research, affecting who we see
as susceptible to different medical conditions and what makes them vulnerable. Much of the medical
practices and standards that we have adopted still center cisgender white men, such as BMI (Body Mass
Index), and although more people are becoming aware of these problems and there has been research to
combat this, there is still much to be done.