Professor Jennifer Breyer

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344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Professor Jennifer Breyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Lesbian Blood Sisters of the HIV Crisis · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

So we and I'm part of this.

I wrote a book about the history of HIV.

We say it started in June of 1981.

But of course, HIV was endemic in many places, certainly in the States and in other parts of the world.

in the 1970s without question.

So we just call it that.

That's when we start to name it as something, right?

Strange illness affecting homosexual men.

But we know that HIV, that virus, even though it wasn't called that yet, and even though it wasn't identified yet, was in the blood supply, was in people's bodies, was, we were living with it long before 1981.

Well, yeah, I mean, there's been some incredible natural history work.

A colleague, Richard McKay, wrote a great book about the making of patient zero, which sort of and has done some work with some people who studied natural history and have some sense there's evidence of one of the first people.

in the States to have lived with HIV and likely died from AIDS.

A teenager named Robert Rayford in St.

Louis, 1969, his biological remains existed and were tested in the 1990s and found out that he was living with HIV in 1969.

There are a lot of things related to blood, actually, that happened in the 1970s that help to explain.

I mean, we know that it has roots in sub-Saharan Africa and the sort of language of that, the imperial medical language of that, which the Brits are certainly at the forefront of, is a

subject that is well beyond my scope.

But I have been thinking a lot about what happens in the 1970s that produced the conditions of what would be and what we now know as an AIDS epidemic and that we associate so deeply with the 1980s and the Reagan and Thatcher administrations and what the political economy of that is.

But the 70s are just an incredibly important moment.

And

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