Rethinking the Role of HIV/AIDS Memories in Gay Men's Experiences of COVID‐19 Fear: The Centrality of Social and Ethnic Inequalities

This paper examines how gay men in the UK experienced fear during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these experiences were shaped by memories of HIV/AIDS, ethnicity, socio-economic position and access to social support. Although much scholarship assumes that HIV casts a long shadow over gay men's responses to subsequent health crises, we explore to what extent HIV memories actually structured COVID-19 fear. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with gay men of diverse ages, ethnic backgrounds and HIV statuses, we identify three overlapping forms of COVID-19 fear: fear of contagion, fear of infecting others, and fear about societal futures. Although some participants explicitly drew parallels with the AIDS crisis, most described HIV and COVID-19 as too different in transmission, temporality and social meaning for HIV memories to be central to their experiences of fear. Instead, COVID-19 fear was most powerfully patterned by socio-economic precarity and the presence or absence of social support networks. These forms of vulnerability were disproportionately reported by ethnic minority men. Our findings challenge assumptions about the primacy of HIV memory in shaping gay men's pandemic experiences and re-centre contemporary inequalities as key determinants of COVID-19 fear.