re not approving of the way they are. In the “Village” they are not exposed to insults that makes them feel as a lesser being. Particularly susceptible are youth that are stigmatized as being deviant and delinquent (Herdt, 1989). Even Erik Erikson’s (1968) work on identity and youth makes the deviant image essential to and almost obligatory for understanding gay youth. “Negative identity prevails in the delinquent (addictive, homosexual) youth of our larger cities,” Erikson (1968, 88) argued, because of hostility to family and culture. Only through complete identification with such deviant subcultures can relief from psychopathology be found for “cliques and gangs of young homosexuals, addicts, and social cynics” (176). The need to have a community in which you are accepted for what you are is a universal theme. As the 1980s began gay and lesbian people were again facing a crises from an entirely unexpected source, with the discovery of a hitherto unknown fatal virus, which by 1985 claimed more than seven thousand lives, three-quarter of whom were gay men (Kayal, 1993). Lesbians, who were swept along in the discriminatory tide that afflicted gay men following identification of the syndrome, were nevertheless spared from the disease itself. That a disease should apparently pick out certain social groups and not to others is no surprise to epidemiologist. The virus apparently responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) flourished in blood and semen, leaving gay men uniquely vulnerable to it through semen transmission from man to man. AIDS was first brought to broad public consciousness in the summer of 1981. On July 3, the New York Times reported that forty-one American homosexuals were dying from a rare cancer and infectious complications stemming from an unexplainable depression of the immune system. From the beginning, AIDS was socially constructed along...
