PRIDE: Hong Kong’s AIDS history (or the lack of)

This is a conversation about Hong Kong’s AIDS history (or the lack of), and its legacy in shaping the city’s LGBTQ+ development, services, and community.

While AIDS awareness campaigns are the cornerstones of LGBTQ+ development in many societies, but Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ development is quite different from that in Western countries, with AIDS continues to occupy unique and conflicting positions - as the now forgotten starting point of awareness and organizing, as continuous taboo and stigma both inside and outside of the community, as a focal point of public health campaigns, as the main source of funding of LGBT related services, but above all, silence. It is the silence of all voices but the official, medicalized public health narrative; it is the absence of personal and community stories, memories, and history of how it impacted people back then, and how it continues to affect us today.

What is our history with AIDS, and why is it important to talk about it now? Let’s get together to start the conversation about how AIDS was and has been experienced, remembered, talked about, and how our present is being shaped by its narratives and silence.