Holding on to power during a crisis

PUBHLTH 405
Social History of Infectious Disease
University of Michigan School of Public Health

Jon Zelner
[email protected]
epibayes.io

Agenda

• Discuss and map the ⚡ power ⚡ relationships in The Baths

• Keep working on digesting feedback and planning next steps for projects.

The Baths

• Intro: Cleve Jones discusses the sense of possibility in SF in the 1970s.

• For the beginning of this episode we are following Cleve Jones’s history.

• Episode begins with Harvey Milk assassination in 1975

How do you hold onto power in a crisis?

• Play first ~2m of this 60 minutes piece from 1986 about AIDS and the Gay Liberation Movement

Getting Started

• On your own: What was the key question at the heart of Episode 3?

• In pairs: Do you see connections to the present day in the arguments in this episode?

Who were the key players in this episode?

• Cleve Jones

• Marcus Conant

• Jerry Falwell & the Moral Majority Crusade

• Mervyn Silverman

• Diane Feinstein

• Key players in this episode include Cleve Jones (HIV Activist), Marcus Conant (gay physician), Mervyn Silverman (Director of SF Dept. of Health), 1980s policy baddies (Falwell, Reagan)

“We did everything from brain surgery to bath house inspection.” - Mervyn Silverman

Riding the Roller Coaster 🎢

• Marcus Conant realizes that people are going to the baths b/c they are open, and that this implies safety.

What made this such a controversial message?

• Break into small groups of ~4

• Half of the groups are going to map out the pro-closure argument.

• The other half of the groups will map out the anti-closure argument.

Think about this as a contest over power

The controversy over the baths is a complex mix of social and biological power dynamics

• How can we understand these arguments in terms of perceptions of power?

Stigma serves to create and maintain power imbalances

Remember the different ways (Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, and Link 2013) describe how stigma and power interact:

1.Keep people down via social and economic exploitation.

2. Keep people in via the enforcement of restrictive social norms.

3. Keep people away as a means of avoiding contact with individuals perceived to be diseased.

Understanding the pressure not to cave in to the “Moral Majority”

• Jerry Falwell on the steps of the Kansas statehouse in 1981.

• “I Love America” really not too far off from MAGA

Hatzenbuehler, Mark L., Jo C. Phelan, and Bruce G. Link. 2013. “Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities.” American Journal of Public Health 103 (5): 813–21. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2012.301069.