Queer History 140: AIDS Education Banned or Censored

Introduction

During the most devastating plague of the modern era, when AIDS was butchering our communities and filling morgues faster than society could build them, the very people charged with protecting public health became fucking murderers through willful ignorance and deliberate censorship. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed not just a viral epidemic, but a systematic campaign of information warfare waged against LGBTQIA+ people by governments, schools, religious institutions, and media organizations that prioritized moral panic over human survival.

This wasn't just censorship—it was genocide by silence. Every banned educational pamphlet, every prohibited safer sex demonstration, every censored prevention campaign represented thousands of preventable infections and deaths. The blood of an entire generation stains the hands of politicians, school administrators, religious leaders, and media executives who chose moral comfort over gay lives. They didn't just fail to prevent AIDS deaths; …