AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics

Histories of AIDS in the United States typically regard San Francisco and New York to be the epicenters of the crisis. The Midwest, if considered at all, appears as a footnote to the social, medical, and political struggles of coastal queer communities. But the US heartland cultivated its own distinct strategies for survival that became the surprising and lasting blueprint for LGBTQ politics today. Unearthing this complex story, health activism expert Katie Batza masterfully illustrates the diversity, resilience, innovation, and influence of the Midwest’s responses to the AIDS epidemic.

Though AIDS cases were relatively low compared to the coasts, the conservative political and religious landscape, lack of medical infrastructure, and diffuse gay communities brought Midwesterners together in unexpected ways. Weaving compelling oral histories with remarkable archival research, Batza sheds light on the moving stories of a constellation of essential responders such as crop duster pilots, church van drivers, nuns, tribal leaders, and synagogue ladies, in places such as decommissioned convents, backyard barbecues, high school gyms, and city parks. These unique collaborations fostered loud, radical queer politics and homonormative strategies alike, but the myth of a homogenously white, Christian, and heterosexual heartland endured. In AIDS in the Heartland, Batza contends that the respectability and palatability of the heart of the nation prevail as core values in national LGBTQ political strategies today.

Katie Batza is chair of women, gender, and sexuality studies at The University of Kansas and author of Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s.