Queer community, care, grief, and mourning in America’s most conservative state
As the AIDS epidemic devastated the nation, Utah had only one doctor and one hospital willing to treat people with the disease. The death toll rose and homophobic stigmas grew stronger as young gay men, who had once fled to coastal cities, returned to their conservative hometowns. Suddenly, families were forced to confront the humanity of their ailing queer loved ones as queer people became reliant on care from the people and institutions who had previously rejected them. Historian Elizabeth Alice Clement chronicles this crisis of caregiving and reveals how reckoning with AIDS shifted conservative attitudes toward queer people.
Drawing on extensive oral histories, Clement recounts the work and activism of Dr. Kristen Reis—Utah’s “AIDS Doctor”—the sisters of the Holy Cross Hospital, and Utah’s queer community. Though they may not have described it as such, their labor was political and they understood and believed in the power of caregiving to change minds. In Utah’s conservative landscape, the intensity and intimacy of caregiving, not direct-action politics, led Catholics and Latter-day Saints to grapple with their beliefs about queer people.
The Reckoning narrates how AIDS led straight people to accept how common queerness was and that, unbeknownst to them, they loved queer people already.
