UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation, titled “Tracking Contagious Cases: Venereal Disease, Sex Work, and the Making of the Male Homosexual at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1926-1964,” focuses on three critical areas: public health, sexual identity, and the control of national borders. In my dissertation, I investigate how public health initiatives aimed at combatting venereal diseases have played a significant role in shaping social attitudes toward homosexual men. This investigation is conducted within a multidisciplinary framework that accounts for the geopolitical and cultural landscape of the United States, Mexico, and their shared border.

I argue that Mexican and American health authorities directing these transnational initiatives confined the discourse on venereal disease to heterosexual interactions involving vaginal penetration. Such medical and legal reductionism rendered female sex workers as especially susceptible vectors of infection while minimizing homosexual disease transmission in public health discourse. Instead, the homosexual body was largely negated as a site of venereal infection, reinforcing the idea that male homosexuals and male sex workers were biological and societal anomalies. Constant but covert sexual surveillance and incarceration targeted both groups. My study outlines how these groups were characterized as sexually threatening: psychiatric diagnoses established sexual deviance in male homosexuals, while ongoing venereal disease infections stigmatized female sex workers. Sexual containment policies cemented distinct narratives about the perceived sexual threats posed by each group, further entwining their social and legal standing as social scourges.

My research is innovative in three ways. It is the first study to examine the construction of the homosexual body through the lens of heterosexual prostitution. I argue that prostitution regulation and venereal disease prevention initiatives, while primarily focused on female sex workers and their male clients, were critical to the formation of homosexual identities. Second, the dissertation challenges the traditional chronology of twentieth-century gay identity formation by demonstrating that homosexual men formed transnational communities and confronted widespread persecution well before the 1940s. Finally, my study charts the historical feminization of sex work and the associated erasure of male homosexual venereal disease transmission before the HIV/AIDS crisis. By tracing how homosexual men were rendered invisible and neglected in states’ efforts to regulate sexual health, I provide critical historical context that helps us better understand the HIV/AIDS crisis, when homosexual men became hyper-visible in sexual health projects. This study thus offers a critical intervention into the ongoing conversations surrounding sexual health and identity at the U.S.-Mexico border.