Mourning in the ‘Peaceable Kingdom’
- Dasha Tanquerae Guliak
- 3 days ago
- 18 min read
Queer Death, Family, and Necropolitics in Toronto's AIDS Crisis, 1980-1995
Introduction
Lyla Peros, mother to Michael Peros, explained in 1994 that she “witnessed first-hand discrimination when she was caring for her son” including the hospital staff leaving her son’s food on the floor outside of his room [1]. Her experience of watching her son die from AIDS while also watching the institutionalized discrimination her son faced mirrored that of many mothers during the AIDS crisis. In Toronto during the 1980s and 1990s, gay men faced not only a devastating health emergency but also widespread societal stigma and abandonment. As the epidemic ravaged the province, claiming countless lives, families of suffering men felt its impacts firsthand. Some of these families transformed their grief into activism and brought greater attention to the injustices their sons faced. Others mourned the loss of their family member not only in the physical form, but in the heterosexual identity they presumed of their sons. Shifting attention to the family members of AIDS victims, and non-government volunteers and found families, challenges prevailing narratives of shame and silence, and introduces a nuanced understanding into how AIDS impacted family dynamics. This asserts into the historical narrative that AIDS reshaped families in the Toronto area.
The role of families and mothers during the AIDS epidemic stands as a testament to the importance of love to mourn, mobilize, and transform society. This study begins in 1983, with Canada’s first diagnosed case of AIDS, and ends in 1995 with the development of protease-inhibitors and non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors [2]. With this advancement, treatment options were revolutionized for HIV-positive people as it turned the once fatal, untreatable disease into a manageable diagnosis. Drawing on newspaper articles published in Toronto and applying the lens of Queer Death Studies, this article argues that the AIDS epidemic in Toronto fuelled maternal activism and shaped mourning and memory in unexpected ways.
Queer Death Studies
Queer Death Studies contextualizes historical and understandings, meanings, powers, and outcomes of death and dying. In this article, postmodernist theorist Michel Foucault’s ideas of power analyze how governments dictate the bodies of the masses. Foucault’s construction of biopower states that political structures define and use bodies themselves, rather than land or technologies, as a means of power and control [3]. An important aspect of biopower is how institutions, like governments, produce citizens best suited to fulfill their policies, often through forms of control and normalization. This governmentality then reinforces which bodies should live in ways that best benefit the state. Achille Mbembe moves Foucault’s analysis away from European nations and who should live to how political power can be exercised to control who dies, particularly in colonial and imperial contexts, which Mbembe labels necropolitics [4]. Mbembe shows how sites of colonialism and government control expose individuals to violence, death, and systematic disregard for life. Biopolitics and necropolitics demonstrate how institutional control and surveillance over bodies dictate which bodies can be mourned and which cannot.
Queer death studies builds on biopolitics and necropolitics to critically examine how bio/necropowers allow certain bodies to die and “queering, a critical consideration of and resistance to the normativities constraining death, dying and mourning in modern society [5].” Traditional Death Studies, which emerged in the 1970s, involves the interdisciplinary study of how people cope with death, how societies visualize or ritualize death, or the role of healthcare in supporting people’s end-of-life experiences [6]. Yet, these studies tend to reinforce normative conceptions of death which centre the dying experiences of particular humans as exceptional while marginalizing stories of people of colour, working-class, Queer, or disabled bodies. As such, Queer Death Studies aims to challenge normative assumptions about death, dying, and mourning while also contextualizing and critiquing the socio-political structures that frames those experiences.
Queer Death Studies does not only apply to Queer bodies. In this paper, it is used to critically examine the systematic injustices meted out by the Canadian government and medical institutions during the AIDS crisis against Queer bodies. Additionally, this theoretical approach explores how the biological and chosen families of these individuals understood their illnesses, mourned their losses, and mobilized in the wake of these state-sanctioned deaths. Importantly, I use Queer Death Studies to shift away from expected areas of violence, such as war zones, to Canada’s “peaceable kingdom” and, seemingly privileged, White men and their families living in a settler-colonial state [7]. In doing so, I demonstrate how seemingly peaceful states actively engage in necropolitics.
Scholarly Work on the AIDS Crisis
While popular media scandalized HIV/AIDS through the focus on famous individuals like Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, and Freddie Mercury, journalists on the ground complicated this narrow emphasis [8]. For example, journalist Randy Shilts’ recount of the crisis in And the Band Played On offered a critical assessment of the American governments role in allowing the AIDS crisis to worsen stemming from anti-gay sentiments [9]. Similarly, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors examines how narratives created around disease impact its perception and treatment [10]. Other early works concentrated on the medical origins of the disease, with particular interest in tracing ‘patient zero.’ Scholar Mirko Grmek published the History of AIDS which considered the role of the flight attendant thought to have brought AIDS to America [11]. Canadian historian Jacalyn Duffin wrote an article in 1994 that reflected on Canada’s limited response to the AIDS crisis. Duffin’s work opened with a line on identifying patient zero [12].
The focus on patient zero was pervasive in early scholarly accounts. While these scholars offered important insights into how the disease spread, they also reinforced a narrative focused on a few individuals rather than an expansive look on the impact AIDS had on a diverse range of communities. Many memoirs and biographies have further examined personal experiences and reflections during and after the HIV/AIDS crisis [13]. More recent scholarship on HIV/AIDS in other parts of the world address these concerns. For example, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret considers the activism of Key West’s drag queens for AIDS fundraising and community building [14]. Other works develop the activism histories in the United States and regional histories in Canada [15].
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s scholars continued to uncover the biological and cultural consequences of HIV/AIDS. Yet, few of these works focus on Canada [16]. There are certainly important and notable exceptions such as Ryan Conrad’s edited collection, Toronto Living with AIDS, which offers an analysis of community-driven AIDS activism and networking in Toronto [17]. Similarly, chapters such as Barry Adams’ work on “poz” sexual culture challenges assumptions around AIDS activism and health [18]. Additionally, Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell explain how the Queer men who were “public” and “out” were meant to both claim rights to medical care and dignity, as part of the public, while also being isolated and left to die by the government, as a marginalized ‘other [19].’ These works develop and hint towards the complex landscape that Queer Canadians navigated during the AIDS crisis. This literature also highlights the importance of considering identity reformation, experiences of health, and community activism.
While important work continues to slowly be published on HIV/AIDS history in Canada there is much work to be done. Canadian historians’ myopic attention to HIV/AIDS history has left a gap within Queer scholarship. In particular, scholarship does not consider the ways that the AIDS epidemic reshaped communities outside of the gay community. In turning attention to the families of gay men with AIDS, this research considers how families dealt with stigma themselves and understood the illness that afflicted their family member. AIDS not only impacted gay men but was a disease that reshaped mourning practices, Queer identities, and family structures.
Social Exclusion and Dehumanization and its Effect on the Experience of Death
For many who battled AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, the disease was not the only barrier they contended with. People diagnosed with AIDS faced social death and exclusion [20]. Often, the treatment that people faced from friends, colleagues, families, and institutions often felt more crushing than the diagnosis itself. The emotional difficulty of a dying family member returning to the community often created difficulties for those at home. Such movement also increased challenges for the individuals moving from Queer communities back into non-Queer familial spaces. Many family members witnessed firsthand the dehumanization that people with AIDS faced. In 1988, the Toronto Star covered Richard Hill, a man who returned to live with his parents in London, Ontario due to his AIDS diagnosis. His sister, Anne Hill, described that when her brother he died in January 1988:
funeral attendants…unfurled a dark rubber bag in the parlor of the old family home, then pulled on thin latex gloves. The explanation was mumbled quickly. They wouldn’t embalm or dress the corpse of someone who had died of AIDS, they wouldn’t even touch him with bare hands [21].
Funerary homes represented a necropower that dictated the experience of death and mourning during the AIDS crisis. The exclusionary practices, or posthumous harm, applied to people who had AIDS denied individuals and their mourning family members dignity in death. The attendants emphasize exclusion and containment through their use of latex gloves and rubber bags, items that physically separated them from the body. These acts symbolize the desire to contain and isolate the bodies of people who had AIDS, treating them as a biohazard rather than a human being. Fear and containment also acted as a way to reinforce biopower wherein some bodies were viewed as inherent threats to the wellbeing of the community or nation, justifying exclusion and dehumanization [22]. Most significantly, the refusal to embalm and dress the corpse of someone who died of AIDS reflects a necropolitical judgment which was that the deceased was not granted the dignity typically afforded to normative or acceptable bodies in death and that marginalization extended into death. Necropowers controlled the experience of death and mourning for AIDS victims and their families, creating a difficult stigma to navigate.
The stigma of the “gay disease” similarly haunted Bill’s family in Owen Sound, Ontario, which made the decision to ‘come home to die’ that much harder. Hill experienced “teenagers who taunt[ed] him with the gruesome chant, ‘AIDS Kills,’ [and] the landlord…changed the locks while he was in the hospital [23].” Bill’s mother sought to protect him from the town’s vitriolic rhetoric. To do so, she claimed her Billy had “cancer.” Throughout the 1980s, the label of cancer, especially amongst young men, became shorthand for HIV/AIDS with the disease being framed as a “gay cancer [24].” In the Toronto Star article “Coming home to Die,” the journalist notes that Dr. Iain Mackie claims that more harm is caused to families when they lie in these situations [25]. Certainly, “few people were fooled” by Bill’s mother’s claim that he had cancer [26]. Yet, the decision to reshape her son’s disease in more palatable terms stemmed from her desire to protect her son’s identity and memory, however futile the effort appeared to be. This tension between remembering and forgetting underscores how Queer grief during the AIDS epidemic was often disenfranchised or reshaped through language that obscured the reality of the disease [27]. Some deaths, such as that of cancer, were more noble to mourn than those of AIDS, prompting some mothers to try and protect their son’s memory as they navigated their own grief [28].
Another mother faced social stigma as well in her decision to support her son while after an AIDS diagnosis. A Toronto Star paper reported that “the pain of a dying son is cruel enough but some of these mothers have good friends who won’t invite them into their homes anymore because they are afraid of catching AIDS [29].” Mothers who faced these social stigmas felt their grief compounded by social rejection, as they were perceived as contaminated or morally suspect simply by association. This rejection stripped them of community support at a time when they were most vulnerable, reinforcing a cycle of shame and silence.
At the same time, necropowers determined who was allowed to live and who was left to die, both literally and socially, through institutions. As such, during the AIDS crisis, necropowers operated through governmental neglect and lack of medical resources while reinforcing public indifference. This meant it also manifested socially, where certain lives, particularly gay men, were deemed less grievable, less worthy of care. Mothers experienced the effects of necropower not only through the death of their sons but through their own symbolic death in the eyes of society; extended family or friends turned them away from their social circles and retracted support from them as they went through the pain of watching their child die. These women were excluded from the social fabric, treated as if they carry the taint of death, and denied the dignity of communal mourning.
Community and Chosen Families
Due to the social stigma associated with AIDS many men lost connections with their family members. To fill this gap, AIDS organizations began to recruit “volunteer buddies” to support people with AIDS. Many of these volunteers were women. Linda Boyd, one of the many volunteer “buddies” for men diagnosed with AIDS explained that “the most effective support we give is to the one who is closest – a lover, maybe a mother [30].” Many people with AIDS were abandoned by institutions that should have protected them such as hospitals and governments [31]. Boyd’s quote highlights how, in the absence of systemic care, the burden of support fell to individuals who resisted necropolitical abandonment by offering care, dignity, and presence. These caregivers became one of the last lines of connection and support within a system that had already decided these lives were expendable.
Boyd’s existence as a volunteer buddy reveals how this idealized line of defense, the family, was not always available. Some families rejected their dying sons due to homophobia or fear of the disease. Derek Miller, a Toronto man who died of AIDS, experienced this fate. His father and siblings rejected him when they found out he was gay and refused to let him home after he told them about his diagnosis. Miller’s mother explained that after Miller passed, she visited her other son; he warned her “that I mustn’t kiss them because I could give them AIDS. He feels that the farther away I am, the healthier they’ll be [32].” Experiences like Miller and his family demonstrate how often the care and support of people with AIDS was shifted to chosen families or volunteer organizations. Boyd’s mention of “a lover, maybe a mother” reflects the lived reality that people with AIDS were fortunate to have a supportive parent, but many relied on non-familial kin who became surrogate families. This absence of traditional familial support intensified the emotional and logistical challenges of dying with AIDS. Such stories also reflect how social systems formed in the presence of necropowers.
Organizations Challenging the Dying Experience
Necropowers dictated dehumanizing deaths for people with AIDS. Organizations like Toronto’s Casey House confronted and challenged these expectations of dying. Casey House opened in 1988, founded by a group of volunteers and activists, served as the province’s first “free-standing hospice [33].” Jim Donovan, a nurse who worked at Casey House, explained how the organization aimed to offer a “good death” rather than a “hospital death” to people suffering with AIDS [34]. By creating a space outside the hospital institution and necropolitical medicalization, Casey House disrupted the monopoly hospitals had over death and dying. Casey House expanded past just an organization that provided end-of-life care to a place that offered emotional connection to people dying of AIDS, often acting as emotional kin in the face of abandonment by family and friends. Donovan told the Toronto Star, “I’ve been to funeral services where the church was packed and others where if the nurses and volunteers weren’t there, there wouldn’t have been enough people to carry the casket to the graveside [35].” Casey House challenged the idea that some lives are less grievable and showed up for all patients who came to die at their organization. They created spaces where death was not a lonely, medicalized event but a communal, dignified passage. In doing so, Casey House disrupted the power structures that sought to control and devalue the deaths of marginalized people, offering instead a model of care rooted in community care and found familial kin.
As organizations stepped up to support people with AIDS, many workers and volunteers recognized the difficulty that these patients’ families experienced. One social worker, Judy Zeilig, recounted a “mother who moved into her son’s apartment to watch him take his own life. He wanted to die before he went blind so he made the decision to stop eating and drinking [36].” It was not easy for family members to watch their loved ones go through these difficult times. The mother’s presence in her son’s final days highlights once more the collapse of public support which left families to bear the emotional and physical weight of their loved one’s deaths from AIDS. The failure of the state powers, like the medical system, resulted in an indifference rendered to certain lives which make them disposable under necropolitical justifications.
Conclusion
The AIDS crisis in the Toronto area was not only a public health emergency but a social reckoning that exposed the limits of institutional compassion and the reach of necropolitical power. By centering the experiences of mothers, families, and non-government caregivers, this paper expands stories of AIDS histories that often focus on the experience of people with AIDS themselves. My paper highlights the way grief formed and impacted familial relations to those related to or working with people with AIDS in the Toronto area during the 1980s and 1990s. Through the lens of Queer Death Studies, I show how mourning became a site of resistance in the face of necropowers that dictated whose lives were worth caring about. Indeed, for volunteers or families it was their care that defied the state’s abandonment and societal stigma. The select stories of those who bore witness, offered care, and demanded dignity reveal how AIDS reshaped familial bonds, public memory, and the politics of death. This work is significant not only for recovering overlooked histories but for illuminating how grief can mobilize justice, and how the politics of death continue to shape whose lives, and deaths, are deemed worthy of recognition.
Footnotes
[1] “Grieving mother honors son by starting AIDS support group,” Toronto Star, May 12, 1994. ProQuest Newspapers.
[2] Alice Tseng, Jason Seet, and Elizabeth J. Phillips, “The Evolution of Three Decades of Antiretroviral Therapy: Challenges, Triumphs, and the Promise of the Future,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 79, no. 2 (2015): 182-194, https://doi.org/10.1111/bcp.12403; Sean Strub’s memoir discusses the experimental treatments people with AIDS tried see Sean Strub, Body Counts: A Memoir of Activism, Sex, and Survival (Scribner, 2014).
[3] Jakob Nilsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, eds., Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality (Sodertorn University, 2013); Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (Picador, 2003).
[4] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019).
[5] Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective,” Australian Feminist Studies, 35 no. 104 (2020): 85, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952
[6] Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Coming to Terms with Death Differently: An Introduction,” Women, Gender, and Research, no. 3-4 (2019): 4, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v28i2-3.116304
[7] Scott W. See, “The Intellectual Construction of Canada’s ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Ideal,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 52, no. 2 (2018): 510-537, https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.2017-0067.r1
[8] For example, John Lynch, “‘Support our Boys’: AIDS, Nationalism, and the Male Body,” Paragraph 26, no. ½ (2003): 175-186, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43263722
[9] Randy Shilts, And the Band Played on: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Other journalistic works include, Andrew Holleran, Ground Zero (Plume, 1988).
[10] Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989); Other authors have considered the history of AIDS alongside war metaphors see, Sheryl Stevenson, “‘World War I All Over’: Writing and Fighting the War in AIDS Poetry,” College Literature 24, no. 1 (1997): 242, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25099640
[11] Mirko D. Grmek, History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic, trans. Russel C. Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
[12] Jacalyn Duffin, “AIDS, Memory, and the History of Medicine, Musing on the Canadian Response,” Genitourinary Medicine 70, no. 1 (1994): 64, https://doi-org.cyber.usask.ca/10.1136/sti.70.1.64
[13] Terry Boyd, Living with AIDS: One Christian’s Struggle (CSS Publishing Company, 1990); Sean Strub, Body Counts; Ann Silversides, AIDS Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community (Between the Lines, 2003).
[14] Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Drag Queens and the 801 Cabaret (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Chapter 7.
[15] For an example of the study of activism in a Queer and Christian context see, Melissa M. Wilcox, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (New York University Press, 2018); For literature on American HIV/AIDS history and activism see, Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Johnathan Bell et al., “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and U.S. History,” The Journal of American History 104, no. 2 (2017): 431-460, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48548637; Rachel Kahn Best, Common Enemies: Disease Campaigns in America (Oxford University Press, 2019); Cynthia Chris and Monica Pearl, eds., Women, AIDS, and Activism (South End Press, 1990); Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and André Krouwel, eds., The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement (Temple University Press, 1999); Taylor Perry, “From West End to Eastside: The Vancouver HIV/AIDS Epidemic, 1983–2013,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 33, no. 1 (2016): https://doi.org/10.3138/cbmh.33.1.103
[16] Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19-21; Susan M. Chambre, Fighting for our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (Rutgers University Press, 2006).
[17] Ryan Conrad, ed., Toronto: Living with AIDS (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2024).
[18] Barry D. Adam, “Emergence of a Poz Sexual Culture: Accounting for ‘Barebacking’ among Gay Men,” in Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, eds., Maureen FitzGerald and Scott Rayter (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012), 197.
[19] Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, “Continental Drift: The Imaging of AIDS,” in Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, eds., Maureen FitzGerald and Scott Rayter (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012), 191.; Strub, Body Counts, Chapter 24.
[20] Joe Wright, “Only Your Calamity: The Beginnings of Activism by and for People With AIDS,” American Journal of Public Health, 103, no. 10 (2013): 1789, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301381
[21] Kelly Toughill, “Coming home to Die,” Toronto Star, September 10, 1988, D1.
[22] Shaping the visuality of death is key in how necropowers justify the deaths of “The Other.” See Miriam Deprez, “Visual Necropolitics and Visual Violence: Theorizing Death, Sight, and Sovereign Control of Palestine,” International Political Sociology 17, (2023): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olad016
[23] Toughill, “Coming home to Die.”
[24] Grmek, History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic, 6; for more on the history of AIDS hospice, particularly in relation to cancer hospice, see Marshall Forstein, "Aids: A History," Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 17, no. 1 (2013): 40-63, https://doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2013.740212
[25] Toughill, “Coming home to Die.”
[26] Toughill, “Coming home to Die.”
[27] Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds., Queer Necropolitics (Routledge, 2014), 96.
[28] Susan Sontag analyzes how society treats illnesses like cancer through metaphors, creating distance, denial, and blame. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Farra, Straus, and Giroux, 1978).
[29] “Love Doesn’t Die at Casey House,” Toronto Star, December 8, 1990. ProQuest Newspapers.
[30] Hugh Weston, “50 Volunteer ‘Buddies’ Work long Hours to Ease the Emotional and Physical Pain Suffered by those with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” Toronto Star, August 3, 1985. ProQuest Newspapers.
[31] Duffin, “AIDS, Memory, and the History of Medicine,” 65.
[32] Weston, “50 Volunteer ‘Buddies.’”
[33] Casey House, Our Origins, 2023, https://caseyhouse.ca/about-us/our-origins/; Melissa Bessie, “The Casey House Archives: A Private Archival Collection From Canada's First Hospital for People Living With HIV,” Toronto Metropolitan University, MA Thesis. https://doi.org/10.32920/26042701.v1
[34] Weston, “50 Volunteer ‘Buddies.’”
[35] Weston, “50 Volunteer ‘Buddies.’”
[36] Weston, “50 Volunteer ‘Buddies.’”
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