“I suspected there was something.” AIDS years archive

Summer 1985, one year after the creation of the first association to fight against AIDS founded by Daniel Defert, whose companion Michel Foucault died of the virus, the sociologist Michael Pollak (1948-1992) undertakes an investigation into homosexuals and AIDS . With his team, he leads a series of long interviews in Paris with people living with HIV, some of whom are hospitalized. Researchers also meet caregivers and relatives of patients. It is the transcription of an interview with the mother of one of them which is published here; in simple words, with modesty and courage, a woman testifies both to the emergence of this epidemic in her family and to the homophobia that reigned then and which is still one of the evils of our societies. Presentation by Philippe Artières.