Not Sanitized for Your Protection: Diseased Pariah News and the Political Uses of Humor

This is a guest post by intern Harold Hardin, who is working on the NEH Grant-Funded Project The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic.

I came across recently a sardonic, humorously bizarre little zine in the Beowulf Thorne papers (GLBT Historical Society, 2003-10) called Diseased Pariah News (DPN). DPN was a zine created during the early 90’s that used gallows humor to humorously educate/entertain mostly gay (often white) cisgender men about HIV/AIDS among other gay men’s health issues. Humor is not something I would immediately associate with AIDS/HIV. Certainly, in the popular imagination AIDS and humor couldn’t be further apart. Queer white, cis, men living with HIV/AIDS in popular media depictions are generally akin to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia: a “noble, suffering AIDS victim”.

Further, many current LGBTQ media consumers tend to shy away from LGBTQ depictions that have overt internalized homophobia/transphobia, straying away from media depictions that might seem to make light of oppressive circumstances in ways that are ultimately self- cannibalizing. Rupaul was famously castigated for having content on her show that was deemed transphobic. Lisa Lampanelli, though not queer, is known for her gallows humor and recently left show business citing, “people in their 20s and 30s weren’t getting into that [insult comedy] tradition”. I spoke to a friend on Facebook about DPN and they echoed a popularly resonant sentiment, “I really don’t like to view historical media/works of art relating to our [queer] community. Because they always carry the hint of shame, of internalized homophobia and transphobia.”

 Clearly, we are currently living through a shift in what we find humorous from particular groups of people based on their identities.  And to be honest, it shouldn’t be ok for a white, cisgender, straight, man or woman to make jokes about communities that they historically (or contemporaneously, for that matter) oppress.  But should queer people with HIV/AIDS be able to laugh at their own lived experiences? If observational comedy is about illuminating the mundane and often untintentionally humorous aspects of our everyday lives then DPN represents to me a group of queers with HIV/AIDS taking this to its’ logical conclusion: finding humor in the everyday lives of queer folx living with HIV/AIDS. Additionally, I think something is foreclosed when we as a queer community rush to quash inter-group humor that may on its surface appear aberrant.  Queer people should be able to laugh at their own lived experiences if they so desire, especially, if by laughing, we find a form of resistance while skewering social and political realities that we ultimately find empowering.

New Archives Intern: Ganzolboo Ayurzana

Today’s post is an introduction from Ganzolboo Ayurzana, one of our current interns here in the Archives. Ganzolboo has actually been working with us for several months now, and he is helping us inventory born-digital collections materials which are currently stored with physical collections so that we can capture the data off of them before they become unreadable.


Hello, my name is Ganzolboo Ayurzana. I am a senior year student at San Francisco State University. I am currently pursuing a double major of computer and math. I am from Mongolia, and I came to this country in pursuit of greater knowledge and career. One thing interesting about me is that I am able to converse in 5 different languages — Mongolian, Korean, English, Japanese, and Russian. Ever since I was young I had a talent for picking up new languages faster than my peers. In my free time I like to play basketball, hang out with my friends, and write computer code. I am also a huge Marvel movie fan, and every movie that came out in theaters I would go watch at least twice; sometimes even thrice. I also love Harry Potter, and I have read the book and watched the movie enough times to know about it all inside out.

I am very much looking forward to getting to know this excellent group of people and learning more about what librarians do.