HIV Denialism and African Genocide

By Lawrence Mass, MD

IN THE PERIOD of the first reports of the new syndrome of immune deficiency (1981 to 1985), before we were certain about the primary role of HIV in the epidemic, sides were taken about putative cause(s), and about what the future held for the epidemic, gay sexual life, and the gay community in general. The range of viewpoints fell into several discernible camps.

First, there was Larry Kramer’s view, which he had already laid out in his 1978 novel Faggots, the image of gay men as obsessed by sex and fucking ourselves to death. Implicit in Kramer’s critique was the assumption that AIDS, the latest and deadliest in a series of STD epidemics in the gay community, was the inevitable culmination of it all...

Click here to read the entire article in the May-June 2011 edition of the Gay and Lesbian Review.


Lawrence D. Mass, MD, is a cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the author/editor of four books. He wrote the first news report on what came to be called AIDS (in The New York Native, May 18, 1981). He is a specialist in addiction medicine in New York City.