Sexual and Postcolonial Minorities in 1990s France

An Impossible “Convergence of Struggles” against AIDS?

Abstract

Act Up-Paris was created in 1989, modeled on its New York counterpart. It was mainly composed of gays and lesbians, but it developed a theory and practice around the convergence of struggles with other minority causes. At the end of the 1990s, a new organization appeared, Migrants Against AIDS, that protested against public authorities’ negligence in the face of HIV/AIDS affecting migrants. They also criticized various actors for their hegemony in the fight against AIDS, including predominantly gay organizations. Migrants Against AIDS was coveted by Act Up-Paris, which would have liked it as its ally. But Migrants Against AIDS expressed its distrust of Act Up-Paris, which was perceived as one of the actors it considered to be hegemonic in the fight against AIDS. This conflict stemmed from the racial dimension having a social aspect. Act Up was predominantly composed of white, middle- and upper-class gay men and women who were structurally privileged relative to racialized men and disadvantaged social minorities. In its theoretical approach to equating minorities, Act Up did not consider that certain categories enjoy privileges inaccessible to others. Migrants Against AIDS’s critique thus concerned the unequal distribution of power and social legitimacy. Based on an ethnographic survey carried out during the 1990s, this paper analyzes the ambivalent and conflicting relations between Act Up-Paris and Migrants Against AIDS during this period.