"We Lived as Do Spouses:" AIDS, Neoliberalism, and Family-Based Apartment Succession Rights in 1980s New York City
Abstract
Real estate is crucial to understanding the story of AIDS in 1980s New York City. Although LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people’s vulnerability to eviction predated the AIDS epidemic, AIDS-related deaths brought questions of succession rights over rent-regulated apartments to the forefront of LGBTQ rights efforts. And, with it, questions of who counted as “family.” As gay men died of AIDS-related complications, their survivors were often threatened with eviction by landlords who did not consider them family members of the deceased tenants as defined by blood, marriage, or adoption. Landlords were incentivized as they could profit by evicting unrelated “roommates” or by forcing them to sign new leases, either of which generated higher rents. This article examines the strategies AIDS housing activists and gay rights litigators undertook in persuading the courts that some same-sex couples were, indeed, families for the purpose of succession rights. Through archival research of court documents, private letters, and city reports, I delineate the possibilities and constraints of a privacy-based political approach to apartment succession rights. The most successful legal challenge was 1989’s Braschi v. Stahl Associates Company, in which the plaintiff’s attorneys petitioned the New York State Court of Appeals to widen the definition of family to accommodate the new situation of AIDS-related homelessness. I argue that Braschi actualized a central tenet of neoliberalism: the regression to the privatized nuclear family as a primary unit of economic and social interdependence. This legal endeavor foreshadowed the transformation of LGBTQ politics into an ethos of homonormativity—a development that conscripted the private housing market as one of the dominant means of addressing AIDS-related homelessness and prefigured more recent calls for same-sex marriage.
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