The vacation has sped by, and suddenly it’s term time again! And so the Wellcome Unit Seminar Series begins once more. This term’s theme is
‘Reproduction, Gender, and Sexuality in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Marisa Benoit and Julianne Weis
The first seminar will be held on Monday 28th April (Monday 1st week). Our first speaker will be former WUHMO member Richard McKay, now of King’s College London, who will be presenting a paper entitled
‘Flush out the “gay ones”: venereal disease investigation and homosexual activity in post-WWII North America’
In 1964, the Mattachine Society of New York – then one of the United States’ largest groups advocating for the public understanding of homosexuals – found itself under pressure to address the issue of venereal disease (V.D.). Amid nation-wide concern that V.D. rates had been increasing steadily for a number of years, several reports highlighted the seemingly new and prominent role of homosexual men in the spread of sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis. At a time when homosexual relations were still penalized by law and many gay men were deeply uneasy about co-operating with public authorities, the New York Mattachine Society collaborated with the city’s health department to publish an informational leaflet, entitled ‘V.D. is no camp’, which was aimed specifically at this group.
This presentation will examine the delicate navigations undertaken by members of the Mattachine Society to produce and distribute its leaflet. It will contrast the organisation’s collaboration with the city’s health department, on the one hand, with the suspicion of public health authorities advocated by its Californian contemporaries on the other. The presentation’s focus on these debates will highlight the need to complicate a conventional historical periodization which implies that VD did not emerge as a serious concern for men having sex with men until the 1970s. Finally, by tracing the leaflet’s circulation beyond U.S. borders, the presentation suggests that a transnational framework may be important when analyzing responses to V.D. during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Richard A McKay completed a Wellcome-Trust-funded DPhil in History at the University of Oxford before joining King’s in January 2011. His thesis – ‘Imagining “Patient Zero”: Sexuality, Blame, and the Origins of the North American AIDS Epidemic’ – examined the emergence, dissemination, and consequences of the ‘Patient Zero’ origin myth of HIV/AIDS. Before coming to Oxford in 2005 to read for an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, he studied film and history at the University of British Columbia. In June 2008, he received the H.N. Segall Prize for Best Student Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine.
His research interests include the social and cultural history of medicine in 19th and 20th century Britain and North America; Sexuality and sexually transmitted infections; History of HIV/AIDS; LGBT history; and social responses to epidemic disease.
The seminars will be held at on Mondays at 2.15pm
Coffee will be available from 2.00pm. Please note there is no parking at the Unit.
