Over the past couple decades, queer and trans scholarship has created, circulated, and revised stories about past movements from the 1960s to the 1990s. These earlier movements in the context of the United States, which were overlapping in complex ways, include gay liberation, lesbian feminism, women of color feminism, AIDS writing and activism, and early writing about transgender identity. This chapter offers less a conventional intellectual history than addresses the range of ideas within these movements and the ways they’ve served as inspirations and provocations to which later scholars repeatedly have returned.

Though sexually transmitted diseases have existed for thousands of years, from the late twentieth century AIDS became an enduring pandemic, mapping onto and exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. It must be historically contextualized within the global spread of older STDs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea, as a result of colonialism and imperialism. From its earliest identification among gay and bisexual men in the United States in the 1980s, AIDS-related stigma and discrimination acted as barriers to effective HIV prevention. In Africa women”s experiences of gender oppression, including through the criminalization of sex work, rendered them susceptible to HIV infection. The racial oppression of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour placed them at special risk of HIV. The pandemic also occasioned fundamental, adverse social changes, including AIDS orphans. It is against this backdrop that AIDS activism emerged. Activists have campaigned for sex-positive prevention education, adequate funding, and greater political will to develop treatments. The history of AIDS is deserving of study for the way in which it conceptualizes how structural oppression and human rights violations shape sexual and reproductive health, and how gender- and sexuality-oppressed groups can challenge human rights violations and advance global health justice.