Before HIV: Venereal disease among homosexually active men in England and North America

Abstract

The transmission of sexually transmitted infections among homosexually active men would not regularly command headlines in England and North America until the emergence of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in the early 1980s. Yet this topic had, by then, been a developing social and public health concern for over thirty years; it remains a pressing issue today, over thirty years later. This chapter aims to sketch the contours of this pre-AIDS history, one which has languished in the shadow of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and has received relatively little attention from historians.