Hidden Epidemics, Hidden People Black Queer Communities and the Epicenter of the United States HIV/AIDS Epidemic
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Abstract
In 2016 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Black gay and bisexual men had a one in two chance of acquiring a positive HIV diagnosis in their lifetime. The report highlighted how advances in HIV prevention had failed to prevent the virus’ spread in Black communities. Journalists called the findings of the CDC report a “hidden epidemic” among Black queer communities
in the US South. This article takes the “hidden epidemic” as a spatial vernacular rhetoric that reveals the ways Black queer communities’ practices of self-care and response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic are made absent within HIV/AIDS discourses. Through illuminating how the hidden epidemic reveals spatial vernaculars within news media depictions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Atlanta, GA, I demonstrate how spaces and places are central to vernacular discourses. This expands our understanding of vernacular discourses as having both regulatory and liberatory elements that are bound to geographies.
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References
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