From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards A Collective Memory Of HIV/AIDS Resistance

The goal of my dissertation is to help mobilize a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that confronts the historical erasure, or whitewashing, of Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activists from mainstream remembrances of the movement within and around the city colonially known as Toronto. I formulated this goal with the desire to enable younger and future generations of QT/BIPOC activists, advocates, and organizers to better connect with the region’s rich and ongoing history of non-white HIV/AIDS activisms. Approaching collective memory from a bricolage theoretical framework rooted in posthumanist Black feminism, queer of colour affect theory, and hauntology, I argue that the dominant accounts through which Toronto histories of HIV/AIDS resistance are narrated operate according to the racist temporal-spatial-affectual logics of white futurity: that which grants white folx forward-facing agency against an out-of-time, and thus forgettable, racial Other. With this, a whitewashed collective memory of the movement has emerged, and younger racialized and Indigenous individuals who are currently engaged in gender and sexuality organizing writ large, have become primed to forget the work their elders did in response to the pandemic. Accordingly, I conducted 60 in-depth interviews with racialized and Indigenous gender and sexuality activists, organizers, and advocates between the ages of 18–35 about what they felt they knew about local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance, and why. Interview findings reveal that the historical frames through which HIV/AIDS resistance is most narrated within and around Toronto limit younger organizers’ collective memories of the movement to a first occurrence typology that makes white, gay cis men into the first subjects of HIV/AIDS activism. For many participants, this typology took on the form of a racialized haunting, in which their sense of connection to local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance was constrained to the mainstream historical narrative of the AIDS activist figure: the white, cis gay treatment-based AIDS activist of the late 1980s and early 1990s who engaged in radical public dissent and ultimately set the perfect standard of Toronto AIDS activism. QTBIPOC activists (among others) who do not fit this mould, were made periphery to younger organizers’ memories, perpetually posed as newcomers to the movement. The impacts of this were strongly felt within participants’ past and present-day conceptions of HIV/AIDS politics. Those of negative or unknown serostatus often felt wholly disconnected from the ongoing, and largely racialized, struggles of the epidemic, whereas those currently living with HIV felt this way up until their diagnosis (and sometimes, even afterwards). In both cases, participants remained disconnected from the histories of HIV/AIDS resistance. However, a handful of participants indicated the possibility of disrupting this trend, either through their transnational-lived connections to HIV/AIDS, which ultimately thwarted the whitewashing of their collective memories, or through instances in which they engaged pedagogical-cultural sites that briefly disrupted the first occurrence typology’s hold on their memories. Turning to these outliers, I conclude that, to move towards a collective memory of Toronto HIV/AIDS resistance in which younger racialized and Indigenous organizers feel meaningfully connected to the histories of the movement, we need to cultivate accessible educational sites on HIV/AIDS politics that concertedly disrupt the first occurrence typology. From here, we can start to move towards a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that is built, not from hegemony, but from liberation, from transformation, from radical possibility; from the wonderous echoes of QT/BIPOC organizers, past, present, and future.