Footnote 3 Throughout the following decade, facing intense scrutiny and widespread hysteria about gay sexual practices and the diseased gay body, they had to address the role of sex in homosexual urban cultures. Many gay and bisexual San Francisco residents expressed their sexual identities in the 1970s through open participation in sexual activities in and out of the city's bars and clubs with the safeguard of free and readily available treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. For gay men, AIDS posed more than a health threat it also signified an identity crisis. Footnote 2 However, the public perception of AIDS as a ‘gay disease’ and the medicalization of the gay male body and its physical and discursive spaces dominated early debates, especially around gay bathhouse closures in 1983–84. Footnote 1 As a result, San Francisco was equipped with organizationally mature gay and lesbian groups in 1982, upon the first AIDS diagnoses, to fight the pandemic. In the second half of the twentieth century, gay and lesbian spaces and organizations in San Francisco created formidable infrastructures of support, accumulated resources and expanded both knowledge regimes and the horizon of possibilities for queer people that extended far beyond the city itself.
