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René Esparza, "From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS" (UNC Press, 2025)
00:52:07
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Amanda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Renee Esparza about his book titled From Vice to Midwestern Politics and The Gentrification of AIDS, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025, taking us into topics around LGBTQ, assimilation, liberation, AIDS history, gentrification, interactions with the police. There's a whole bunch of things here that maybe we often think about being related to each other when we're talking about sort of the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s in the US but often I think we're talking about these things in New York or in San Francisco. It turns out if we shift our focus to the Midwest, there's still actually quite a lot to talk about with these interactions. So I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. Renee, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you.
- [02:03]
C
Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here.
- [02:05]
B
Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:11]
C
Sure. I am a historian of race, sexuality, and public health, assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and my research interests encompass urban history and its relation to hivaids. So this book began initially as a puzzle. I grew up in Chicago's West Town neighborhood in the 1990s. As it was being gentrified and as a queer youth of color coming to terms with his same sex desires, I oftentimes ventured to Boys Town, which is the city's gay neighborhood. And I was in search of queer community. But instead, I, like other queer youth of color.
- [02:54]
Found surveillance. And so that tension made me think about what privacy matters so much, both for immigrant families like my own back in West Town, where I grew up, but also for gay men. And how the private housing market becomes a gatekeeper to safety, legitimacy, and sexual citizenship. And so that was the impetus for the book. And then I went to grad school in Minnesota, and I kept hearing about this language around Minnesota Nights, a region that priced itself for being progressive and tolerant. Yet the region is home to some of the starkest racial disparities in the country.
- [03:36]
I was interested in how.
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That rhetoric around colorblindness enabled some of these dynamics around.
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How the region is tolerant of gay people. But in fact, it obscures other forms of structural violence against other marginalized groups.
- [03:58]
B
There's a bunch of things in there that I think we're going to talk about in more detail. So thank you for starting us off with that introduction. I'd love to stay in this mode then, of kind of situating the Minnesota focus of the book. If we go to the sort of beginning of the time period, you look at thinking about the sort of 1970s, as I mentioned earlier, Right. This is a story that we're kind of used to hearing about in the context of New York, around the tensions within gay communities, around. No, no, it's time for a liberation now. Right? We're going to be publicly out. We're going to go for it. This is the moment to make this happen, versus those in the community who are like, actually, let's just assimilate more quietly. Let's not rock the boat too much. And that's something that we hear about New York and San Francisco. Is that something we should know as being part of what's happening in Minnesota in the 70s as well, to kind of lay the foundation for kind of what happens later? Or is something very different happening in Minnesota at this point?
- [04:54]
C
Right. So Minnesota had those tensions, but they looked a little different than they did on the coast. And one of the arguments I make in the book is that the upper Midwest developed its own version of the liberation versus assimilation split, shaped by what I call middleness, which is a Political culture that prices moderation, respectability, and conflict avoidance, often glossed over as Minnesota knives. And so you see a very familiar fight between radicals and moderates, but it was filtered through this regional attachment to being low key, being in the middle, not standing out. And on the liberation side, you've got people like Jack Baker and the student group Free at the University of Minnesota. And they explicitly call themselves militant. They borrowed strategies from the Black Panthers, organized protests and integrated dances, and they even hosted the Midwest's first gay convention.
- [05:57]
On the other side, you had figures like Steve Inding and Alan Spear and Ending, who was the founder of hrc, right, the Human Rights Campaign. They very much self consciously rejected the language of gay liberation, and instead they embraced what they called gay civil rights. And so they built organizations like the Minnesota Committee on Gay Rights that focused on lobbying, electing sympathetic officials, and capturing the middle of the legislature. These members of this more gay assimilationist wing were very explicit that they wanted gay people to appear serious, mainstream, and non threatening. For instance, Ending sent out flyers telling people to come to the Capitol for a protest in the 1970s, but not to be too flamboyant and to dress respectably, as he mentioned, because he didn't want.
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Guys over there with dresses and mascara, as he said. And so those choices create real fault lines because.
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There was debate as to whether or not to include trans and gender expansive people in early gay rights bills, whether to protect also what some radicals called obvious gays, and whether direct action street theater like Python, which was famous in the 1970s among some gay radicals, were effective strategies. So what's unique about Minnesota and the upper Midwest is also how quickly the integrationist side gets institutionalized and how much that has to do with race and region. This at the time, is an overwhelmingly white state, and that whiteness shapes the movement in places unlike places like New York City, San Francisco, or even Chicago. In the Twin Cities, there are thus fewer opportunities for LGBTQ people to be sustaining coalition with black, Latinx or indigenous movements. So many white gay activists don't develop the same analysis of how race and sexuality intersect. And in Minneapolis, some of the most prominent gay leaders come out of this Democratic farmer labor machine, and they see the police in City hall as potential partners. And because of that, they're willing to trade away more confrontational or gender expansive forms of queer politics in order to appear moderate and professional. And so what I argue is that this proximity to whiteness, and in particular to middle class respectability, nudges the mainstream movement toward privacy, domestic couplehood, and Quiet accommodation rather than structural critique. And that presents its own set of challenges and limitations as the aids epidemic unveils itself by the 1980s.
- [09:06]
B
Thank you for explaining the way the tensions are playing out within the gay community. And it's in fact, that point on kind of working with city council type officials that I'd like to extend, because that is a really interesting sort of attitude of like, oh, maybe we can work with them. Right. And that's not necessarily always something we hear at this point within gay communities. But did this extend beyond, like, city council officials? Like, what about, for example, local police forces? What were interactions like. Like with them?
- [09:35]
C
Right. So that's a great question, because there was an effort to integrate the police department as far as hiring openly gay officers.
- [09:50]
So by the mid-1980s, as anti gay violence rose and as gay activists developed an awareness around anti gay violence, Minneapolis activists started to frame violence through both the same epidemiological language that was used to talk about aids, Calling it a second epidemic, but also using the language of law and order to vouch for the inclusion of gay men in particular, within this protected citizenry. So groups like the community united against violence, which was founded by council member Brian Coyle. Coyle was the first openly gay city council member in Minneapolis. They used public health rhetoric to argue that gay men were a vulnerable population in need of state protection. But the way in which that case.
- [10:49]
Was argued mattered because this organization warned gay men to play it safe. It adopted a tone that was paternalistic and moralizing, Suggesting that casual or anonymous sex was not just risky for hiv transmission, but also a gateway to murder. And so safety became equated with domestic couplehood in private homes, and danger became anything that was public. For instance, bars, cruising grounds, parks, even phone booths in parks became seen as threats. And this framework opened the door to coalition with the police. But it also narrowed who counted as a victim. White middle class gay men, those who fit the regional norm of moderation and respectability were framed as insiders deserving of protection. Meanwhile, on how sex workers, transgender women of color, indigenous and black queer people, and those who sought intimacy in public were cast as high risk outsiders, Even complicit in their own victimization. And the police reinforced these boundaries by describing certain victims as sexually irresponsible, psychologically unstable, or inherently dangerous. And activists, for their part, eager to demonstrate that good gaze were respectable and law abiding, Often echoed that language. This is happening in the 1980s, right when we are also witnessing the rise of what the local press in Minneapolis dubbed the Gary syndrome. And this was a racially coded panic about black, brown, and poor migrants from deindustrialized cities like Gary, Indiana, coming to Minneapolis and bringing with them their own supposedly antisocial criminal tendencies. And so while YK activists did not invent that discourse, many align with it, positioning themselves as victims of crime in order to secure protection. And that alignment made it possible for gay leaders to, in turn, support expanded police budgets, harsher sentencing, and more surveillance. Gay. Even though the perpetrators of anti gay violence, as I show, were overwhelmingly young white men, not the racialized others invoked by the Gary syndrome. And so the earlier tension between liberationists and assimilationists becomes, by the 1980s, a full political realignment, with some radicals who had once organized police watch patrols now begin to embrace the politics of policing, domestic privacy, and personal responsibility. And at the same time, integrationists, who had already committed themselves to respectability and moderation doubled down on being reasonable partners to law enforcement. And so, by the end of the decade in Minneapolis, gay activists had helped produce a new narrative of the white gay man as a protected minority, but at the cost of endorsing the criminalization of the racialized poor and erasing queer people who didn't fit the region's norms of middleness.
- [14:24]
B
There's a whole bunch of sort of norms that you have just discussed there around kind of individual things. And privacy. And of course, race is a huge part of that. But privacy comes up actually quite a lot in these discourses in the book. It really seems to be so central to these debates about who counts and who doesn't. Why is that kind of the main thing that becomes the focus here?
- [14:47]
C
Sure. So privacy became the central terrain of gay politics in Minnesota in the mid-1980s. But as I mentioned in the earlier chapters of this book, the groundwork for that shift was already laid much earlier by the region's own cultural norms. In Minnesota, in the upper Midwest, privacy had enormous cultural capital. It was part of what it meant to be a good neighbor, a respectable citizen, and a participant in what people call Minnesota knives. It was a way of signaling that you belonged to the region, that you didn't make a scene, that you handled your affairs discreetly, and that you kept anything potentially disruptive behind closed doors. Doors. So even before the courts got involved around sodomy repeal, privacy functioned as a regional language of legibility. But in 1986, when the Supreme Court issued Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding sodomy laws, that ruling electrified activists in Minnesota. People experienced it as an invasion of the bedroom, but they also immediately Understood privacy as their strongest legal and cultural claims. Leaders like Brian coyle seized on that language, Arguing that consensual sex between adults in private deserved constitutional protection. And because Minnesota had failed to repeal its sodomy law in the 1970s, making it the only upper midwestern state to still criminalize sodomy, Privacy became the most palatable politically centrist strategy available to activists. But what's important is that privacy was not just a legal argument. It was also a moral boundary right, because activists deliberately divided sexual conduct into two categories. On the one hand, you had homosexual love, as they call it, that was private, adult, and monogamous. And on the other hand, you had what they called outrageous acts that were framed as public, coercive, commercial, or even involving minors. And everything in that second category, from cruising and parks to anonymous sex to sex work, was offered up to continued policing. So, in effect, activists traded away public sex in order to protect private intimacy. And that trade made sense in a region where domestic privacy was already a marker of. Of normative citizenship. But with aids, that intensified this logic, because public sex was not portrayed as risky, and privacy was recast as a form of prophylaxis As a way to quarantine gay sex out of public view. Conservatives continue to frame gay sex as inherently diseased, While moderate gay leaders counter that only public or impersonal sex spread hiv. So that alignment between privacy, safety, and domestic respectability Fit perfectly within the cultural expectations of Minnesota. Nice, because it allowed some gay men to present themselves as responsible citizens deserving of legal protection, while distancing themselves from those whose lives didn't conform to those norms. There's a public sex bill that's argued in Minnesota in 1987, and that bill sought to decriminalize private consensual sex, but to do so while strengthening penalties for sexual conduct in public places. So, in other words, that bill legally and culturally, Cemented the idea that the path to inclusion ran through the private home. The cost, of course, as I've been suggesting throughout, has been uneven because queer and trans people of color, sex workers and unhoused people, those without access to private space, Were left more exposed than ever to policing, and their lives didn't necessarily fit the model of respectable privacy. And so the state continued to treat them as public problems. In other words, privacy secured access to safety for some, While it denied it to others.
- [19:22]
And so, in conclusion, privacy becomes central in Minnesota not only because of bowers, but because it resonates deeply with the region's effective politics. It's a way of Claiming rights that aligns with midwestern ideals of modesty, domesticity, and self containment. But it's also a reminder of how legal categories can map onto existing cultural geographies. Like, in Minnesota, to be private was to be proper and increasingly to be worthy of protection.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, this is really clearly drawing some boundary lines between what is and what is not allowed and why you mentioned that it was. There were discussions around HIV going around as part of this. How much of this emphasis on privacy was because of awareness of HIV aids?
- [20:13]
C
So looming awareness of AIDS didn't necessarily create the centrality of privacy in Minnesota. Rather, it intensified and weaponized the infrastructure that was already in place there long before aids. Minnesota's political culture and Minnesota nice had elevated privacy, domestic respectability, and not making trouble in public as key markers of belonging. What AIDS did is that it supercharged that framework, giving both gay leaders and their opponents a powerful new language of risk, contagion, and responsibility that mapped onto existing ideas about private versus public sex. So gay leaders mobilized this infrastructure of privacy in the service of the epidemic. They argued that repealing sodomy laws and ending the criminalization of private gay sex would actually help fight aids because people would be more likely to get tested, disclose partners, and talk honestly with doctors if they weren't afraid of self incrimination. Privacy thus became a public health tool. And activists used that logic to push for sodomy repeal, to demand that police stop using sex laws and as a blunt instrument, and later to frame domestic partnership ordinances as a way to encourage stable monogamous relationships that would supposedly curb transmission. At the same time, AIDS also gave conservatives a potent counter story. They argued that any gay sex, private or public, was inherently diseased and thus dangerous. So the epidemic that allowed activists to claim privacy as protection also let opponents insist that no amount of closed doors could make gay sex safe. And crucially, this privacy strategy mostly benefited those who could inhabit a respectable domestic space, while leaving others.
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Continued exposure to heightened policing and stigma. And so, in that sense, AIDS didn't just make privacy central, it also made the inequalities that built into that privacy regime painfully clear.
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B
Yeah, it's definitely from what you were describing from the 70s, like, this doesn't come out of nowhere when people are more aware of aids, but these things definitely kind of go back and forth and build on each other. So I wonder if we can talk a little bit more about the privacy as protective aspect. You've mentioned that it was seen by some as being kind of a way to conceptualize protection against aids. There's also an element in the book around its protection against anti gay violence. Can you tell us more about the idea of privacy as protection?
- [23:05]
C
Sure. So gay leaders and policymakers in the 1980s started to imagine privacy as a kind of cure all, because they were confronting what felt like a double emergency. Not only AIDS on the one hand, but also a spike in anti gay violence on the other. And so in Minneapolis, there were a string of murders of mostly older gay men who were often killed after taking home hustlers that they met in bars. And this was interpreted as evidence that casual anonymous sex in public or semi public spaces was deadly in two first, because it might expose you to hiv, and that might also get you beaten or killed. Instead of focusing primarily on state neglect, structural racism or economic precarity, some gay leaders, like Brian Coyle, framed the problem as one of individual behavior and what he mentioned, complacency. So the unsafe places became bars, parks and streets and bath houses, and the unsafe practices became cruising, intoxication, sex with total unknowns. And that logic made it easy to present the home right and especially the monogamous couple household as the obvious safe harbor. In other words, if you date, settle down and know who you're taking home, you supposedly reduce your exposure to both the virus and to gay bashers. And the mechanics of that shift show up clearly in the campaigns and policy fights of the mid-1980s. As I mentioned earlier, these organizations borrow the language and aesthetics of AIDS education. For instance, play it safe. They use images of condoms, warnings about drugs and poppers. But they push beyond that to also encourage a moral program of sobriety, limiting partners and retreating from public sex. Public space thus gets cast as a zone of shadows, knives and lurking strangers, while the private sphere becomes imagined as controllable, but also crucially respectable and safe. And at the same time, gay leaders start to align themselves with tough on crime policing and emerging hate crime efforts. Figures like Alan Spear, who was the first openly gay state representative in Minnesota, argued that privacy rights would restore gay men's self worth, draw them out of anonymous encounters and make them legible to the state as victims who deserve protection. But once again, that bargaining was deeply selective, right because of who it centered and who it excluded from. So privacy became a protective space through this homonormative, neoliberal idea of moving sex into the private household, aligning it with policing and racialized notions of outsiders. And in exchange, the state would recognize some gay subjects as worthy of protection from both AIDS and anti gay violence.
- [26:22]
B
And to be clear here, these are not just discourses or kind of efforts the police were making. There's actual sort of criminalization going on, right. For example, towards sex workers and especially those who don't fall into these sort of white gay, middle class males.
- [26:37]
C
Right, exactly. So HIV criminalization really takes off at this time. Right around the emergence of anti gay violence and also cause for the state to protect certain gay victims. In the mid to late 1980s, politicians in the media started treating HIV not just as a public health crisis, but also as a crime problem. And this is because it becomes apparent that white heterosexual people can also become infected with HIV aids. So instead of asking why don't people have housing, health care or drug treatment, officials start to ask, how do we control and punish people who have this virus and who spread it consciously or even unknowingly? And so you see new laws that let health departments throughout the country and courts label certain people as non compliant carriers. And these laws allow departments to quarantine those carriers and even commit them if they're seen as not following orders. Some states go even further and say that if you know that you're HIV positive and still have sex or do sex work, you can be charged with a felony. For instance, places like Nevada could charge people with attempted murder. And so public health and law enforcement start working hand in hand with what Trevor Hoppe calls punitive disease control, which consists of using cops, courts and prisons to manage an epidemic that was in fact created and intensified by austerity and neglect. And black sex workers end up in the bull's eye of this system because of racism that's layered on top of moral panic around HIV aids. The media and officials could have told many different stories about HIV and sex work, but instead they fixate on black figures and frame them as reckless human weapons that threaten innocent white families.
- [28:48]
So in my book I talk about certain case studies and I use pseudonyms, right? And I refer to this individual named Brenda Williams, who is a precariously housed black woman in Minneapolis with a history of drug use and prostitution arrest. And the media and the police treat her and they use a reference to a bomb, as though she's carrying a bomb down the street. The media meanwhile, published her photo and address in the paper. The judge sets bail very high and the vice unit discusses her as though they need to lock her away to protect everyone's safety. Meanwhile, also in Minneapolis at this time you have another white male escort, may also use a pseudonym. I call him Scott Reynolds, who admits to unprotected sex with hundreds of mostly married suburban White male clients, but he is treated with treatment, and his case is framed as part of a health problem, not a criminal1. So HIV criminalization hits black sex workers the hardest because they sit at the intersection of, of every moral panic of the era. Blackness, poverty, drugs and dangerous sexuality. And the Gary syndrome, which I mentioned earlier, which is this racist idea that outsiders and the racialized poor are ruining nice white communities, gets fused with aids. Black sex workers become the perfect symbol of this non compliant carrier trope that needs to be quarantined, surveilled and imprisoned rather than housed, treated, or even listened to. So these laws aren't really about stopping HIV so much as they're about deciding whose bodies are disposable and whose fear counts and using the virus as the new justification to police, cage and disappear black people, queer and trans people, and the poor.
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B
And this has an impact not just in terms of kind of the emphasis on private housing, but on some specific other places that you mentioned earlier. Bath houses, parks, for instance. I wonder if we can talk about bath houses first. The tensions that you've been describing, the discourses you've been telling us about. Are there any other factors that kind of led to bath houses and other sorts of commercial sex spaces being closed at this point in Minnesota?
- [31:20]
C
Sure. So one of the arguments of the book is that the moralizing language around HIV AIDS then becomes transplanted into the fields of urban restructuring, using HIV AIDS as a justification to revitalize these blighted areas of the city. Bathhouses in particular are kind of ground zero for those debates. And throughout the country, bath houses closed at this time. And they closed for a number of reasons, consisting of fear, politics, but also changing urban spaces. On the one hand, the AIDS crisis produced real fear as people got sick and died. Some gay men, including folks who had once patronized bath houses themselves, began to reframe bathhouses as dangerous spaces, as hazardous. Sides, you had figures like Randy Shields, right, famous journalist who wrote and the Band Played on. And he pushed the idea that HIV was spreading because of bathhouses. He came to Minneapolis during the tour of his book, and the Band Played on. And he became friends with Brian Coyle. And he urged Brian Coyle to closed the 315 Health Club, which was the last bathhouse in the upper Midwest, or rather in the Twin Cities. And he insisted that closing bath houses was a public health necessity, even though some public health officials and even some aid service organizations argued the opposite.
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They argued that bathhouses were actually important to HIV prevention because you had gay men who did not necessarily identify as gay access HIV prevention in these spaces, which they otherwise would not. But on the other hand, you had moral reformers who saw anonymous sex as risky, and they argued that bathhouses had to be closed. So while these debates were going on, the city of Minneapolis was trying to clean up downtown. And long before aids, the city had targeted commercial sex establishments as part of urban renewal campaigns to attract investment in new residents. When AIDS hit, it provided the perfect justification to finish a job that redevelopment advocates had already started in the 1970s. City planners, vice squad officers, religious conservatives, anti porn feminists, and some gay elected officials suddenly found themselves on the same side. So fear of HIV fused with this neoliberal vision of a modern, respectable city. So when this anti bathhouse ordinance that I discuss in the book came up in 1988, it drew its power from all three forces. Fear of AIDS, divisions within the gay community over what responsible sexuality looked like, and the city's desire to transform downtown into an upscale, investment friendly space. By the time the vote happened on the ordinance, the political winds had already shifted. Business at the 315 bathhouse was already collapsing, and the bathhouse closed without much of a fight. But its closure marked more than the end of a sex venue, and it also signaled the rise of this politics of homonormativity, the narrowing of acceptable gay life into the private home, and a new era of urban redevelopment in which public or communal queer sex no longer had a place in the city. But part of what gets lost in this story is also the radical potential of these public and semi public sex venues. Thinkers like Samuel Delaney and Jose de la Munoz remind us that bathhouses and sex clubs were places where men of different races, classes, and backgrounds came into contact and formed unexpected bonds. So these messy erotic encounters could grow into what Delany calls contact relations, or what Munoz would frame as a queer counterpublic. A world where pleasure, care, and solidarity were built outside the norms of straight, white, middle class domestic life. So when Minneapolis shut down its bathhouse in the name of safety and maturity, it also helped shut down a set of erotic and political possibilities that had the potential to unsettle the very boundaries of who counts, who belongs to, and what kinds of intimate life are imaginable.
- [36:21]
B
Yeah, it might seem like something really straightforward. We're closing the bathhouse full stop. But actually, as you've described, there's a whole bunch of other things going on just below the surface that are worth excavating. Can we do the same then? If we turn to looking at public parks and why These were also targets of condemnation.
- [36:39]
C
Yeah. So once the bathhouse closed and the bookstores were nearly pushed out of business, the city had squeezed most of the commercial sex spaces out of downtown Minneapolis. This was in the late 1980s. But the desires and needs that had animated those spaces did not disappear. They simply moved. And so the most obvious place that they moved to was Loring park, which was the city's longtime queer gathering spot. At the same time, Loring park was sitting right at the center of two powerful forces. First, it had the highest concentration of queer people in Minneapolis. These were young, single renters, many living in cheap rooming houses near downtown. So the park already had an established sexual geography. Right. It had dark paths, thick trees, proximity to the bars, and it was attracted to many gay people for that reason. It had been a cruising hub for decades. Second, the park was also becoming prime real estate, and so was the neighborhood around it. City planners and developers were pouring money into turning the neighborhood into a revitalized, upscale one. So there were new condo owners who didn't want men having sex in the park below their picturesque windows. And they made that clear to the police and to city council members. But what's unique about this moment is that some of those new condo owners were also gay themselves. And so, once these interests aligned, once you had eight moral panic complaints from new property owners and a decades long urban renewal agenda coalesced, Loring park became the next target. And it became easy for us to frame cruising not just as a nuisance, but also as a problem of quality of life, HIV prevention, and neighborhood safety. That logic gave the city of Minneapolis moral cover to treat cruising as something that needed to be controlled or eliminated altogether. Public sex became cast as a threat not just to people's lives, but also as a threat to property values, to the city's new middle class identity, and the respectable version of gay life that local politicians were increasingly invested in promoting. But the deeper reason that the park became such a flashpoint is that cruising itself disrupted the city's vision of what public space could be or should be. Right. Cruising is all about subverting the everyday choreography of urban life, rewriting what a park bench, a path, or even a patch of trees can mean. And that's precisely what made it feel dangerous to the city, because it blurred the line between public and private, between stranger and lover, between the respectable gay homeowner and the queer outsider who refuses domestication. And so, in the era of redevelopment and aids, those blurred boundaries and the forms of community and intimacy that they made possible. Were exactly what the city was trying to shut down because it was also less amenable to private property development and to the vision that the city was trying to promote of itself at this term.
- [40:13]
B
Yeah, it's this vision of the city and what it wants to promote that I'd very much like to turn to next as we start to come to the end of our discussion about the book, in fact, by talking about something that you both open and close the book with, a sketch from the Daily show, the TV show. Why do you start and end here?
- [40:34]
C
So I open and close the book with this sketch from the Daily show because satire can sometimes reveal more truth, right, than a straight historical argument. And that segment distilled in just a few minutes the dynamics that I was trying to theorize across the entire book that you got this archetypal old gay of San Francisco that the segment illustrates, consisting of public, collective, erotic, and rooted in community institutions. And the segment sets this against the new gay of Minneapolis that's baking banana bread, shopping at Target, and living in almost aggressively private, domesticated life. And the joke, of course, is that this new gay identity is presented as fresh, modern, and aspirational when it's actually the product of decades of neoliberal and homonormative politics. And so satire here works because it exaggerates the truth that many people already assume that somewhere along the way, large parts of LGBTQ politics have shifted from the street to the living room, from collective struggle to individual comfort, from liberation to lifestyle. And so by beginning with that humorous contrast and ending by returning to it, I wanted to show how those images aren't just jokes, but rather that they're symptoms of deeper histories of whiteness, privatization, respectability, and gentrification that reshape queer life in the Midwest, but also, one could argue, in many other parts of the country. And so framing that book with that sketch lets me ask a bigger question that runs throughout the conclusion, right, of who gets left out of the new gay fantasy? What happens to these poor, black, brown, indigenous, trans and gender expansive people who never have the option of retreating into a safe, private, domestic sphere? And using the Daily show is a way of inviting readers into that tension with something familiar and funny, while also making clear that behind the satire lies this profound truth about the movement, about who has been welcomed into the fold, who has been pushed out, and what kinds of queer futures remain possible and also impossible.
- [43:04]
B
Yeah, I'd actually like to talk a little bit, as a final question, about the book, around kind of possible futures. What sorts of alternatives were there to all of this. And are there any that still might be out there?
- [43:17]
C
Sure. So I don't think that the story that I'm telling is one where there are no alternatives. Right. And one where we're doomed to target runs and banana bread forever. Even in Minneapolis, in the heart of the so called New Gay, there were people that were building very different models of queer life and care. You had groups like Gay house in the 1970s, the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force in the 1980s, and later Minnesota Men of Color in the 1990s that were insisting that health and survival were not private individual endeavors, but but rather collective ones. They treated HIV not as a biomedical problem, but as something that was entangled with racism, poverty, stellar colonialism and policing. And because of that, they responded with forms of care that were radical ones that attended to the political economy of how disease spreads, that centered cultural interventions and not simply drugs into bodies. And in Minnesota, with its vast history of indigenous communities and organizing, this consisted of talking circles of cultural work, of two spirit gatherings of power to the people stages at pride. And these projects were messy, they were fragile, and they were sometimes short lived. But they show that even in the age of homonormativity, that there were people who were refusing the script of safety through respectability and real estate. And this is where I return back to the work of Jose Stevan Munoz, because he helps us theorize queer futurity. And if homonormativity says that this is as good as it gets, right, that marriage, mortgages, and maybe a police chief wielding a rainbow flag is what queerness is about. Munoz's theories remind us that queerness is a horizon, but not yet. That we move toward actually. And he calls us to practice a kind of critical hope, not naive optimism per se, but a stubborn insistence that the present isn't the only option, that in our cultural work, in our organizing, in our everyday scenes of care, we can catch glimpses of other worlds. And so I see that with the work of some of these organizations that I identify.
- [45:51]
That they establish what Munoz calls as a brown Commons. People being with and alongside each other across race, gender and HIV status, trying to build forms of life that don't throw the most vulnerable under the bus. So the alternative isn't simply going back to bathhouses and street protests either. And it isn't also pretending that we can opt out of neoliberalism by sheer force of will. The ideal and the alternative, I think, is to take seriously those experiments in radical communal care and to see them as instructions for the future, not just as curiosities from the past, to acknowledge that there were other ways of organizing queer life in Minneapolis, but that they were simply underfunded, over policed, and often pushed to the margins of the official movement. And so the question now for us, and the question I leave readers with, is whether we're willing to orient ourselves toward that horizon again, to let the Brown comments, so to speak, guide us back to a politics where being gay or queer isn't just about being a good neighbor in the suburbs, but rather about reimagining what the good life can mean for everyone.
- [47:06]
B
I think that's a great way to end our conversation, as well as obviously an effective way of how you've ended the book, leaving me to just ask whether there's anything you're currently working on that you want to give us a sneak preview of, whether or not it's book or research related. Anything you want to leave us with?
- [47:23]
C
Sure. So I'm currently working on my second book project, which is different from From Vice to Nice, but it's connected to this larger question of who actually gets to count as deserving in the name of queer rights and citizenship. And it's tentatively titled Exile and Queer and Trans Refugees, Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the making of U.S. sexual citizenship. And I'm following queer and trans Cubans who came to the United states during the 1980 Mariel boat lift, and they make a presence in the From Vice to Nice, but I don't necessarily talk about them a lot, but nonetheless, these Cuban refugees were branded as antisocial deviants by both the Cuban state and then they were treated as psychopathic and dangerous or disposable once they arrived here in the United States. And so the book traces them from Havana to US Detention centers in the Midwest like Wisconsin, and further south like Arkansas, into also psychiatric institutions like St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. but also once they resettled in cities like Miami, Minneapolis and Boston. And what I'm interested in doing for this project is how these refugees enacted a form of sexual citizenship. Not citizenship in the legal sense of who is admissible or deportable, but more so a cultural and social claim to belonging to and that's what I'm working on for my second book.
- [48:53]
B
Well, that sounds very interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [48:56]
C
Thank you so much.
- [48:57]
B
While you are off doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled From Vice to Midwestern Politics and The Gentrification of AIDS, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025 Renee, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [49:19]
C
Sam.