Identity

Identity is made up of the qualities, beliefs, personality traits, looks and expressions that define a person or a group. Identity is created through emotional perceptions of the self and of the other, and naturally creates feelings of inclusion and exclusion. It is always in the meeting with the other that the identity of the self is formed.

The rapid spread of HIV amongst at risk communities quickly led to its associations with homosexuality, sex work and drug use. Labels such as the ‘Gay Plague’ or ‘Gay Cancer’ vilified communities.

Through our ethnographic research we found that the social nature of HIV, its links to lifestyle and ‘risky behaviour’, and the consequent stigma means that HIV is often the defining marker of identity for patients. The plague-like nature of HIV in the 80s and the associations with ‘reckless lifestyle’ have created a need for actively endorsing a patient’s own HIV status within the gay dating scene. It becomes a marker of social status, one that reads responsible and mature, attached to being HIV positive and on anti-retroviral treatment (non-infectious). In this way, they transform an identity that for so long has been associated with ‘risky behaviour’. They find identity through definition of ‘the other’, the ‘dirty’ and ‘irresponsible’ HIV patient.