# Sexual and Postcolonial Minorities in 1990s France: An Impossible "Convergence of Struggles" Against AIDS?

Christophe Broqua

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Christophe Broqua. Sexual and Postcolonial Minorities in 1990s France: An Impossible "Convergence of Struggles" Against AIDS?. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2025, 34 (2), pp.219-241. 10.1353/sex.00018. hal-05524972

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# Sexual and Postcolonial Minorities in 1990s France: An Impossible “Convergence of Struggles” Against AIDS?

CHRISTOPHE BROQUA

French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Since the 1990S, migrants from Africa and gay men have been the two populations in France most impacted by HIV. Nevertheless, despite epidemiological evidence that has remained unpublished for a long time, governmental authorities have long refused to name migrants as one of the populations most at risk of contracting HIV.<fnref n="1" /> Similarly, the political histories of AIDS activism of these two groups largely remained distinct in the 1990s.

This article considers the fraught relationship between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS. What aspects facilitated or hindered a coalition involving those two organizations in their AIDS-related mobilization? Moreover, to what extent did cross-border flows of ideas mediate this relationship? I approach the transnational question through the historical effects of migration and France’s relationships with its former colonies, keeping in mind that the transnational history of France in its territories or former colonies shapes relations between migrants or descendants of migrants from Africa and other residents. I also explore the impact of transatlantic flows on migrant AIDS activists in France. I focus on Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS because they were among the most radical grassroots AIDS campaigners in France. Act Up–Paris was one of the most prominent campaigning groups in that country in general.<fnref n="2" /> By contrast, Migrants Against AIDS was a tiny group, but one that had a disproportionate significance in debates around AIDS and migration in France, initially among grassroots activists and, subsequently, in relevant institutions in France. This article extends from the formation of those groups in the late 1980s (Act Up–Paris) and mid-1990s (Migrants Against AIDS) until the early to mid-2000s, when the latter became increasingly involved in the activity of mainstream institutions in France dealing with AIDS.

My main argument is that the grassroots campaigns of these two social groups, gay men and migrants, which had been initially separate, came together around the AIDS crisis in the second part of the 1990s, but not without conflict. This article focuses on this complex “convergence of struggles,” namely, militant coalitions between diverse groups.<fnref n="3" /> I aim to nuance the majority of the social science research on activist coalitions that concentrate on those that have succeeded while frequently ignoring what hinders long-lasting collaboration within those coalitions among

<footnote n="1">¹ Alexia Savignoni, Florence Lot, Josiane Pillonel, and Anne Laporte, *Situation du sida dans la population étrangère domiciliée en France* (Institut de veille sanitaire, 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² On the significance of Act Up-Paris, see Christophe Broqua, *Action = Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France* (Temple University Press, 2020).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ See, for example, Andrea Felicetti and Donatella Della Porta, “Between Deliberation and Contestation: The Convergence of Struggles Against Austerity and Its World in the Nuit Debout Movement,” *Social Movement Studies* 17, no. 6 (2018): 658–75.</footnote>
members from different social backgrounds.<fnref n="4" /> By contrast, my article focuses on the asymmetrical and contentious relationship between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS, two significant protagonists in the AIDS epidemic in France in the 1990s. I explore why, despite shared elements in their rhetoric and action, the alliance between these two groups could not continue past a certain point. I particularly resonate with the work of Karma R. Chávez, who has investigated coalitional possibilities and politics regarding the specific subject of the confluence of queer and migrant mobilizations, demonstrating their prerequisites as well as their limitations. In this vein, my article contributes to an emerging tendency in research on AIDS in the humanities and social sciences to complicate a biomedical success story orbiting around improvements in HIV treatments from the mid-1990s.<fnref n="5" /> Rather, the article and this tendency in general highlight the social divides and the ways in which activists and mainstream institutions positioned themselves toward such hierarchies.<fnref n="6" /> Instead of a linear narrative of ever-growing success in the fight against AIDS, a curved pathway appears as a more viable way to analyze reactions toward AIDS: AIDS campaigners often reinforced forms of social exclusion in their campaigns, which could result in conflicts among them and, consequently, unsuccessful coalitions.

To understand the situation of gay men and migrants with regard to AIDS activism, we need to take into account the principle of republican universalism that dominates the political life in France.<fnref n="7" /> Republicanism's cornerstone is the supposed equality of any individual before the law. Concomitantly, any emphasis on a particular minority appears in public debate as an infringement of this rule and tantamount to “communitarianism” (which conveys a negative idea in French usage). Yet in reality, inequalities and discrimination exist, including color-based racisms, to which the principle of republican universalism is blind. In this context, when the article refers to “immigrants” or “migrants,” it addresses people of color, who may be French nationals born in France.

The condition of gays and lesbians in France was in a state of transition at the time AIDS first appeared in the early 1980s. The remaining laws criminalizing homosexuality were repealed in 1981 after François Mitterrand, a Socialist, was elected president. As gay political activism diminished in the 1980s, the initial anti-AIDS organizations did not explicitly address

<footnote n="4">⁴ On those that have succeeded, see Nella Van Dyke and Holly J. McCammon, eds., *Strategic Alliances: Coalition Building and Social Movements* (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Diarmaid Kelliher, “Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–5,” *History Workshop Journal* 77 (2014): 240–62; Holly J. McCammon and Minyoung Moon, “Social Movement Coalitions,” in *The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements*, ed. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani (Oxford University Press, 2015), 326–39; Nella Van Dyke and Bryan Amos, “Social Movement Coalitions: Formation, Longevity, and Success,” *Sociology Compass* 11, no. 7 (2017): e12489, http://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12489; Erin Mayo-Adam, *Queer Alliances: How Power Shapes Political Movement Formation* (Stanford University Press, 2020). On those with differential coalitions, see Clément Petitjean and Julien Talpin, “Tweets and Doorknocks: Differentiation and Cooperation Between Black Lives Matter and Community Organizing,” *Perspectives on Politics* 20, no. 4 (2022): 1275–89; Sabrina Zajaka and Sebastian Hauns, “The Politics of Alliances: The Making and Breaking of Social Movement Coalitions; Introduction to the Special Issue,” *Social Movement Studies* 21, no. 1–2 (2022): 1–7.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Karma R. Chávez, *Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities* (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Chávez, *The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance* (University of Washington Press, 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ On this scholarly tendency and works emphasizing a narrative of biomedical progress, see the introduction to this special issue.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ On a critical approach to republican universalism, see Joan Wallach Scott, “French Universalism in the Nineties,” *Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies* 15, no. 2 (2004): 32–53.</footnote>
homosexuality until the end of that decade, when Act Up–Paris emerged as the hub for both the anti-AIDS movement and political gay activism. Act Up–Paris has thus contributed to the improvement of the social and legal status of gay men and women, who benefited from the adoption of the first form of legal recognition of same-sex couples in 1999.

Postcolonial minorities faced a very different set of circumstances. France has a sizable migrant population from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb due to its colonial past. Early in the 1980s, the new Socialist administration proposed naturalizations for a significant number of undocumented migrants and made it legally more accessible for organizations supporting migrant rights and combatting racism to organize. Additionally, it developed state-sponsored campaigns that turned the fight against racism into a moral rather than a political issue, sidelining the independent movements started by the “March for Equality and Against Racism” campaign in 1983. Nevertheless, the government shifted gears from the mid-1980s, when the Gaullists won the parliamentary elections in 1986: The Pasqua-Debré statutes (1986, 1993, 1997) significantly contributed to the steady hardening of immigration policy. Against this backdrop, the rights of undocumented migrants were supported by protests against deportation threats.<fnref n="8" /> Regarding the fight against AIDS, until the middle of the 1990s, very few organizations focused on the issue of migrants before the establishment of the Migrants Against AIDS collective.<fnref n="9" />

This article is based on an ethnographic study I conducted within the Act Up–Paris organization between 1993 and the early 2000s as a member-observer, using semistructured interviews, archival documents, and participant observation, during which I allowed myself only moderate involvement. I was a member of the organization, but from the outset, I set certain limits to my participation, forbidding myself any active intervention in the spaces where the organization's actions and discourse were developed, which constituted my main objects of observation. Without explicitly looking into this collective, I witnessed the ambiguous connections made with Migrants Against AIDS from within Act Up–Paris, and to compensate for this imbalance, I interviewed the founder of Migrants Against AIDS, Reda Sadki, on 29 June 2024. I also worked as a librarian for another AIDS group in Paris around this time, the Regional AIDS Information and Prevention Center (Centre régional d'information et de prévention du sida, CRIPS), which offered me a more comprehensive understanding of how these two organizations were seen in the AIDS community. Where other sources are not mentioned, the material presented in this article is drawn from my ethnographic observations.<fnref n="10" />

The article starts by introducing the two organizations. Subsequently, it addresses how they came to work together and how challenging this collaboration was. Finally, it examines the factors that made their campaigns incompatible, the main one being divergent ways of conceptualizing groups affected by HIV/AIDS.

<footnote n="8">⁸ Johanna Siméant, *La cause des sans-papiers* (Presses de Sciences Po, 1998).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Sandrine Musso, “Sida et minorités postcoloniales: Histoire sociale, usages et enjeux de la cible des ‘migrants’ dans les politiques du sida en France” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Initially, this article was to have been written in collaboration with anthropologist Sandrine Musso, who had devoted her PhD dissertation to mobilization against AIDS among postcolonial minorities in France. In this context, she had observed the relationship between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS, focusing primarily on the latter. Her approach was, therefore, symmetrical to mine. When Sandrine died of a devastating illness in 2021, we had not started writing the article yet. A few months later, I decided to write it on my own, citing some of her work.</footnote>
## Act Up–Paris in the 1990s: Strategic Orientations and Class Relations

Based on its New York equivalent, Act Up–Paris was established in 1989. In contrast with other already existing AIDS campaigning groups, such as AIDES, which was created in 1984, Act Up–Paris did not aim to offer direct support to HIV-positive people or organize actions that would prevent the transmission of HIV. Instead, it intended to wage a political battle. Act Up–Paris formed part of a new generation of organizations at that time that wanted to raise awareness of the experiences of gay men and other people living with HIV. Unlike in the United States, where the first AIDS organizations were later criticized for focusing too much on gay men, in France the new activist organization challenged AIDES and other earlier AIDS organizations for having obscured the homosexual dimension of the epidemic. Act Up–Paris established itself as “an organization that originated in the gay community and is working to defend all of the populations affected by AIDS equally” from the beginning.<fnref n="11" /> The organization attributed AIDS to political causes: It claimed that the epidemic affected various marginalized and minority populations, which have been neglected by the public authorities and exposed to increased health risks. While most of Act Up–Paris’s members were cisgender gay men and lesbians, the organization aimed to implement a strategy of converging efforts with other minority causes based on this understanding of the epidemic. It advocated for a coalition, or “minority front”: “Act Up serves as a machine for bringing communities closer.”<fnref n="12" />

The ideology espousing the common front of minorities sought by Act Up–Paris was mainly developed by Philippe Mangeot, one of the organization's most influential activists during the first decade of its existence. Mangeot was an upper-middle-class gay man and HIV-positive. He became a member of Act Up–Paris in 1991 with Jacques Martineau, a fellow student at the École normale supérieure. They were soon joined by a few more (mongay) people from the École normale supérieure whose only connection to the epidemic and homosexuality was their friendship with Mangeot and Martineau. Mangeot and Martineau soon took control of the text-writing team of Act Up–Paris. They collaborated on the composition of the book that the organization published in 1994 as well as articles for *Action*, the organization's monthly newsletter.<fnref n="13" /> Due to his leading role in the text-writing group and his social origins, Mangeot was greatly appreciated by Act Up–Paris's intellectual fringe but was met with skepticism by other activists.

Mangeot failed to be elected as the Act Up–Paris president in 1994 but continued to be very involved in the organization for the subsequent two years. Even though he did not run for election in 1996, he played a key role in assembling the sole slate of candidates that Marc Nectar (from a more modest social background) led to victory in the election of the new president and executive board of Act Up–Paris. Ultimately, Mangeot won the election for president in 1997 and served in that capacity from 1997 to 1999. After his departure, two young women from his inner circle—Emmanuelle Cosse, a law student, and Victoire Patouillard, a political science student—were elected president from 1999 to 2001 and from 2001 to 2003, respectively.

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Act Up–Paris, “Hécatombe,” *Action: La lettre mensuelle d’Act Up–Paris* 1 (1991): 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Act Up–Paris, *Le sida* (Éditions Dagorno, 1994), 19–20.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Act Up–Paris, *Le sida*.</footnote>
By the time he became president, Mangeot was increasingly appreciated by various participants in the fight against AIDS, such as the leaders of other AIDS organizations, researchers, and public officials. His bourgeois ethos and intellectual profile made him a more approachable and estimable person for some, which in turn elevated Act Up–Paris's reputation. Still, these very characteristics continued to arouse hostility, especially among other Act Up–Paris members.
A genuine class war existed within the organization throughout Mangeot's ten-year tenure, albeit with varying intensity. The fight between the intellectual faction, comprising Mangeot and his close allies, and members of the Act Up–Paris access to care / patients' rights subgroup in 1996 was one of the times when this class conflict was most apparent. The access to care / patients' rights group created a press kit outlining the different topics on which the group had worked. However, Mangeot and Act Up–Paris members close to him harshly criticized this work for its poor quality and for portions they felt went against the organization's (left-wing) political stances.
The press kit writers retaliated and denounced Mangeot for calling them “Poujadistes” during a weekly meeting where they were derided. Named after Pierre Poujade, Poujadism was a political and trade union movement that emerged in 1950s France intended to defend small traders and artisans. By extension, the term “Poujadism” has become derogatory and is used to refer to reactionary corporatist political movements. The social class significance of using this derogatory term indicates the social class divisions within Act Up–Paris. As a result of this conflict and following the subsequent annual general assembly in September 1996, at which Nectar was elected president, the members of the access to care / patients' rights group immediately withdrew from the organization.

In general, the social conflict within Act Up–Paris, which had always been a very white organization, if from different classes, led to the disengagement of those who had fewer qualifications and were more socially deprived. Nevertheless, only those members who resigned saw this episode as an instance of class conflict. The others perceived it only as a critique of incompetence. This blindness to class differences precipitated the subsequent conflict of Act Up–Paris with Migrants Against AIDS. The class-based dividing line between white gay men within Act Up–Paris was in contrast to ACT UP–New York, where a division gradually emerged between certain white gays on the one side and women and nonwhites affected by specific problems of discrimination and precarity on the other, leading to the departure of the former to a structure devoted to therapeutic research, the Treatment Action Group.<fnref n="14" />

The Left-leaning political stance of Act Up–Paris was created by this group of grandes écoles students. At the beginning of 1997 they founded the publication Vacarme (though not formally related to Act Up–Paris), which they described as “a reflection at the intersection of political commitment, artistic creation, and research.”<fnref n="15" /> The political climate at the time was unique: Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president of the republic, intended to dissolve the National Assembly after serving for two years. Parliamentary elections were set for 25 May and 1 June. Act Up–Paris’s intellectual wing decided to mobilize the left-wing parties by forging a militant coalition under the slogan “We are the Left.”<fnref n="16" /> A demand for a protest that was signed by numerous

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Deborah B. Gould, *Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS* (University of Chicago Press, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Unknown author, “Vacarme, qu’est-ce que c’est?,” *Vacarme*, 11 October 2006, http://vacarme.org/article295.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Lilian Mathieu, “Act Up ou la tentation du politique: Sur les recompositions de la gauche protestataire de 1997 à 2002,” *Modern and Contemporary France* 15, no. 2 (2007): 153–68.</footnote>
organizations and published in *Libération* on 17 May 1997 was used to organize it. “The official Left won’t win elections without us,” it said at the outset, “since we are the true Left.”<fnref n="17" /> However, not all Act Up–Paris members supported this move; in fact, it was carried out against the recommendation of both its president at that point (Nectar) and the previous one (Christophe Martet). The organization’s left-wing political stance was confirmed after Mangeot was elected, and a health/repression vice presidency was established to advance its demands: “The idea behind this faction is simple: there is . . . incompatibility between repressive policy and public health policy.”<fnref n="18" />

This moment also highlighted Act Up–Paris’s engagement with “foreigners” in France. Among the laws that “kill” the groups most affected by HIV/AIDS cited in its 1997 World AIDS Day campaign poster was one that Act Up–Paris argued “forces foreigners into a clandestine existence under the perpetual threat of deportation.”<fnref n="19" /> Act Up–Paris’s engagement with “foreigners” did not begin in 1997, though. It had been a feature of its activity from the early 1990s, before the emergence of the “migrant” category in the fight against AIDS in France, and was embraced by various activists of the organizations, both those endorsing and those opposing Mangeot. The organization participated in the formation of the Committee Against the Deportation of the Sick as early as 1991. It founded the interorganizational group Action for the Rights of Foreign Patients in France in 1994, and through this group’s efforts, a law prohibiting the deportation of very ill patients was passed in 1997. Act Up–Paris participated in the movement for undocumented migrants in 1996. It was during this time that Martet, the organization’s president at the time, delivered a resounding address on the topic at the second Sidaction, a television event that was broadcast on all channels. For Michael Bosia, this commitment made the organization part of what he calls the “postcolonial Left” in France.<fnref n="20" /> Act Up–Paris’s dedication to the subject of “foreigners” was not without controversy, however, particularly because the organization’s ranks did not include those who were directly affected and fighting for their rights. On the other hand, this was the stance taken by the collective known as Migrants Against AIDS, which was formed at the same time and to which I will now turn.

## Migrants Against AIDS: Critique and Representation

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb were gradually identified as a new target demographic for the AIDS campaign in France in the second half of the 1990s. Earmarked funding for them became available at the national level, and general anti-AIDS organizations increasingly took up the subject and incorporated it into their activities. Consequently, the term “migrant” became commonplace in campaigns against AIDS. The collective Migrants Against AIDS was founded against this backdrop. Its major goal was to speak out publicly about the AIDS epidemic among migrant populations, particularly those from North Africa.

In France, nonprofit organizations are governed by the Law of 1901 and must be officially declared as such. However, Migrants Against AIDS was unusually established outside any legal

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Act Up–Paris, “Nous sommes la gauche,” *Libération*, 17 May 1997.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Act Up–Paris, *Exercice 1997–1998: Rapport d’activité*, 1998.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Act Up–Paris, “Par le sang. Par le sperme. Par la loi.”</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Michael Bosia, “AIDS and Postcolonial Politics: Acting Up on Science and Immigration in France,” *French Politics, Culture & Society* 27, no. 1 (2009): 69–90.</footnote>
organizational framework and did not request funding. This choice relates to the fact that, at the outset, the group consisted mainly of one person, Reda Sadki, whose actions were intimately linked to his biographical trajectory. Born into the Algerian diaspora in Europe, he studied science and women's studies in the United States from 1988 to 1992.<fnref n="21" /> After a spell in Switzerland, he moved in 1993 to France, where he set out to contribute to the struggles waged by “Third World communities settled in Fortress Europe,” which means that he saw his mobilization as a criticism of French and European immigration regulations. He was struck by the oppression and structural violence affecting immigrant communities and by the weakness of migrant mobilization. Sadki's commitment was therefore built on the anticolonial ideas he developed in the United States and France, which did not initially relate to the AIDS-related stigmatization of migrants in the latter: “What I learned in the United States was about solidarity between communities born out of the history of slavery and colonization.” He even remembered that some of his fellow students in Ohio sometimes went to New York to take part in ACT UP demonstrations, but he saw this as a “white thing.” Once he was in France, the AIDS epidemic appeared to him as a possible object of engagement with “Third World communities.”<fnref n="22" />

Sadki hosted a radio show dedicated to North Africans in France and AIDS for the first time on 30 November 1995. It included an interview with the mother of Nordine Zaïmi, an Algerian gay author who died of AIDS in Paris in 1991 and whose two novels were published posthumously.<fnref n="23" /> According to Sadki, “I started talking about it on the radio in 1995 to give a voice to the few I knew who’ve been skinned alive [écorchés vifs].”<fnref n="24" /> The lack of discussion of how the disease affected migrants led to this campaign. Sadki insisted that the issue of migrants was ignored also by AIDS organizations at the time: “I was not alone in observing that. Despite the thousands of excess contaminations and a wave of deaths among migrants and their children, [AIDS among migrants] was a great taboo among the existing organizations stemming from the gay movement.”<fnref n="25" />

The Migrants Against AIDS collective emerged when the radio program began to be broadcast regularly in 1997, targeting HIV-positive migrants. One event was decisive: in February 1997 Ali B. was deported to Tunisia after having grown up and lived in France for a long time. His deportation order was then suspended because of his HIV status, allowing him to return in March. However, Ali B. faced numerous administrative, social, and medical difficulties.<fnref n="26" /> He then joined Migrants Against AIDS.

The collective mainly relied on communication through its radio show and website because it had no funding and a tiny membership: Reda Sadki and Ali B., alongside a male hospital nurse and a female human rights and pro-Palestine activist. It sought to politicize the subject of AIDS among migrants, especially those of North African origin, because of Sadki's biographical link with this community and the fact that it was largely neglected by AIDS policies. It also worked to change

<footnote n="21">21 Reda Sadki, interview by the author, 29 June 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Nordane Zaïmi, *Le tombeau de la folle* (L'Harmattan, 1995); Zaïmi, *Contes des vies rusées* (L'Harmattan, 1995).</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 Cited in Chloé Juhel, “La vie rêvée des autres,” *Le Courrier de l’Atlas*, 2013, http://papamamanbebe.net/a10598-la-vie-revee-des-autres.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Reda Sadki, “Entretien avec Reda Sadki: Bribes d’histoires des luttes immigrées pour survivre au sida,” Le Mégalodon, 2004, http://lemegalodon.net/a5662-entretien-avec-reda-sadki-bribes-d-histoire.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Laurence Hoffman, “Reda Sadki,” *Guide Têtu+* (2000): 72.</footnote>
public representations of the epidemic in France, especially through actions reminiscent of “zaps” (“hit and-run” actions organized in response to an event or to denounce a specific issue), in a way that was somewhat similar to Act Up–Paris’s actions.

Moreover, Migrants Against AIDS initially claimed to be the first organization to safeguard the “memory of those people who died of the disease and were forgotten,” meaning “HIV-positive people of North African and sub-Saharan African origin.”<fnref n="27" /> As a result, one of the primary motivations behind its activity was to bring back and preserve the memory of those migrants who lost their lives because of AIDS: “There is a collective history, unknown, handed over in silence. We need to start by acknowledging what has occurred beyond the statistics: the injustice of this sickness is to blame for the anguish and suffering of our families, but it is also the source of our resistance to it.”<fnref n="28" />

The organization's goal was to advance HIV-positive migrants' fight for recognition and to foster political conversation around their plight. This goal supported the establishment of a political analysis of AIDS that was similar to the one done by Act Up–Paris and that demonstrated that migrants were affected by the pandemic due to their social, historical, and political circumstances. Migrants Against AIDS mobilized multiple historical references that had been previously unconnected to AIDS in public debates. They referred to the history and memory of slavery, colonization, and forced migration, in contrast to Act Up–Paris's historical sequence, which concentrated on the deportation of gay men to Nazi camps. “We survived slavery. We survived colonization. We survived forced migration. We will survive AIDS,” mentioned a poster at the first gathering of North African and African families to survive AIDS on 22 May 2002 in Paris. Elsewhere, the term *harkis* was used in a text titled “From Token Arabs to AIDS *Harkis*,” which was evidence of the use of terminology left over from the Algerian War. Algerians known as *harkis* enlisted in the French military during this conflict. Sadki used this term to designate migrants employed by “classic [mainstream] organizations” (in his terminology) fighting AIDS, “migrants . . . who have become specialists in migration and AIDS and who claim to speak on our behalf.”<fnref n="29" />

Migrants Against AIDS sought to shed light on both the current AIDS epidemic and the AIDS pandemic of the past, but more so on the former. It unleashed a dispute over the problem of epidemiological statistics at the end of the 1990s that would make the collective famous in France's fight against AIDS.<fnref n="30" /> Migrants Against AIDS accused the AIDS epidemiological monitoring authorities of keeping silent about the plight of migrants and residents of the *banlieue* (poor suburbs in large cities). More specifically, they criticized the surveillance system's shortcomings for only including the variable of nationality in the AIDS case report form rather than other information that would provide a more complete picture of the epidemic among migrants and people of migrant background, such as the country of birth or origin. In addition, Migrants Against

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Sandrine Musso, “Les Suds du Nord: Mobilisations de personnes originaires du Maghreb face à l’épidémie de sida en France,” in *Les Suds face au sida: Quand la société civile se mobilise*, ed. Fred Eboko, Frédéric Bourdier, and Christophe Broqua (IRD éditions, 2011), 258.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Sadki, “Entretien avec Reda Sadki.”</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Reda Sadki, “Des beurs de service aux harkis du sida,” 2004, quoted in Musso, *Sida et minorités postcoloniales*, 372.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Musso, *Sida et minorités postcoloniales*; Sandrine Musso, “Faire preuve par l’épidémiologie: Lectures ‘indigènes’ des chiffres du sida en France,” *Quaderni* 68 (2008–9): 71–82; Musso, “Les Suds du Nord.”</footnote>
AIDS lambasted the authorities for refusing to publicly share information about AIDS among foreign nationals, particularly sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans, under the guise of preventing their stigmatization: "The excuse of the risk of stigmatization has consistently been put to us, and this false debate should no longer be an issue. Because we purportedly don't want to stigmatize them, people have died and will continue to die."<fnref n="31" /> This problem relates more broadly to the bias against "ethnic statistics" in France, which stems from the fact that republican universalism refuses in principle to differentiate between individuals based on skin color, which actually serves to further instantiate racial inequality.

When official data on AIDS cases were presented at a meeting of the Regional AIDS Information and Prevention Center held in late 1998, Sadki rejected the argument of the risk of stigmatization, which he felt only served to justify inaction: "Starting tomorrow, we'll publish a press release to disseminate these facts. Communities from Africa and North Africa are at the forefront [of the epidemic]. Let's remove the stigmatization anxiety that justifies the inaction of government agencies and AIDS NGOs. The figures exist, we have them, where's the money?"<fnref n="32" />

The authors of the study at the National Institute for Health Monitoring, from which the numbers that Sadki mentioned were derived, were working on a report at the start of 1999. Sadki and other Migrants Against AIDS members invaded the institute's offices on 22 April 1999, demanding the data. They handed out a flyer with the slogan, "These data belong to us!"<fnref n="33" /> The group planned a news conference after the report's release. In addition to disseminating the study's findings, the collective's goal was to provide a critique and an interpretation that would differ from those provided by the institute's report. This report viewed the high rate of HIV infection among sub-Saharan Africans as an "imported pathology," meaning that it stemmed from those migrants' countries of origin.<fnref n="34" /> The same text also attributed the high rate of HIV infection among North Africans to drug use and to a "clash between the parental culture trans mitted and the loss of traditional values linked to migration."<fnref n="35" /> Migrants Against AIDS challenged this interpretation. In the case of migrants from North Africa with AIDS, their countries of origin had a low HIV prevalence. Thus, their seropositivity did not permit the same interpretation as the one the authorities used for sub-Saharan Africans: "There has always been a barrier for North Africans. An effort is made to deny the existence of Arabs with AIDS, even though France is the only country in the world where an Arab minority has been severely affected by the disease. Yet why? Because of the difficulty in referring to an 'imported pathology' here and the overwhelmingly French nature of the injustice faced."<fnref n="36" /> The collective accused the institute of being racist and culturalist because the institute attributed the exposure to HIV to cultural aspects linked to the migrants' origin rather than social injustice affecting migrants from North Africa residing in France.<fnref n="37" />

<footnote n="31">³¹ Sadki, "Entretien avec Reda Sadki."</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Reda Sadki in CRIPS, "Sida et migrants: Une épidémie cachée? 33e rencontre du CRIPS," *Lettre d'information du CRIPS* 49 (1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Musso, "Les Suds du Nord," 260.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Savignoni et al., *Situation du sida*, 15; Act Up–Paris, *Le sida*.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Savignoni et al., *Situation du sida*, 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Sadki, "Entretien avec Reda Sadki."</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Musso, "Les Suds du Nord," 260.</footnote>
As I shall demonstrate in the next section, Migrants Against AIDS also targeted Act Up-Paris as part of its campaign against the "classic organizations" when the latter was experiencing some major unrest.

## A Turbulent Relationship

The first meeting between Act Up-Paris and Migrants Against AIDS took place in early 1997 around the deportation of Ali B.<fnref n="38" /> In particular, relations developed between Sadki and one of the straight members of Act Up-Paris, Pierre (pseudonym), involved in the foreigners subgroup. Sadki then attended the Twelfth International AIDS Conference in Geneva in 1998.<fnref n="39" /> He met with some Act Up-Paris activists who were also present. A few months later, there was a more formal gathering. Act Up-Paris, Migrants Against AIDS, and the person in charge of the migrants' program at the General Health Department met on 18 November 1998. According to a report from Act Up-Paris, "First of all, we finally had a formal meeting with Reda [Sadki] from Migrants Against AIDS. He is working extremely hard (Internet, radio, information gathering, etc.). His 'obsession' is the migrant community's self-organization against AIDS. With powerful AIDS organizations like Arcat-sida, AIDES, and others, he can be quite vicious."<fnref n="40" />

The interaction between Migrants Against AIDS and Act Up-Paris extended to deliberations within the latter. Migrants Against AIDS's action was appreciated by Pierre, an activist working on Act Up-Paris's foreigners subgroup. He particularly admired a poster that Migrants Against AIDS designed alongside the Federation of Tunisians for Citizenship on Both Shores (Fédération des Tunisiens pour une citoyenneté des deux rives), which was initially a Tunisian immigrant workers' organization and gradually became more broadly dedicated to issues of citizenship, equality, and solidarity. Entitled "AIDS Recedes / AIDS Advances," the poster displayed a data curve with the following captions: "In one year, the number of AIDS sufferers has fallen by 36 percent . . . but the number of migrant victims has increased by 10 percent." It also mentioned "Legal documents for everyone. Healthcare for all." In the second half of 1998, Pierre began a project to execute a "political epidemiology" intending to reveal data on AIDS that he believed remained hidden from the public. In January 1999 a relevant article written by Pierre appeared in *Action*.<fnref n="41" /> In the following months, some of the group's leaders made several attempts to continue working on this issue, but without much success. Most of the group's activists remained unmotivated to participate in this initiative because at the time the number of tasks to accomplish far exceeded what activists could realistically undertake. However, texts that Act Up-Paris published continued to cite Migrants Against AIDS as an example in some conversations: "Reda (Migrants Against AIDS) has a special perspective on epidemiology that we should adopt. In his view, the data is already available; we only need to request its publication. However, everyone is aware that foreigners are more severely afflicted. Comparing the numbers to the financial resources allotted in the budget is fascinating. He has no particular interest in

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Amina Shabou, "Populations mobiles, vulnérabilité et droits de l'Homme," *ANRS / Le journal du sida / Transcriptase*, special issue, "XIIe conférence internationale sur le sida" (1998): 21-23.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Act Up-Paris, minutes of the health/repression faction meeting of 18 November 1998.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Act Up-Paris, "Épidémie cachée, malades ignorés," *Action: La lettre mensuelle d'Act Up-Paris* 58 (1999): 4-5.</footnote>
epidemiology. He makes use of it to criticize the government.”<fnref n="42" /> Pierre not only admired Migrants Against AIDS, however, but also feared their activity. He emphasized the significance of continuing to work on this issue “for tactical reasons” during a new discussion of the epidemiology subgroup at the weekly meeting on 9 February 1999. He stated that it was particularly important to combat the notion that the epidemic was under control: “Doing epidemiology may mean learning that we are out of date and that, for example, Migrants Against AIDS will overtake us on the left.”<fnref n="43" />

Despite such suspicion, the interaction between the two groups intensified in the winter of 1999. Sadki started attending Act Up–Paris meetings regularly and became the group's prized ally on the subject of “foreigners.” The latter term was still used within the ranks of Act Up–Paris to emphasize their legal and social status, even though “migrants” was becoming more popular in AIDS organizations. Sadki, for instance, attended the Act Up–Paris weekly meeting, which included the guest Bernard Kouchner, the French minister of health, on 12 January 1999 and raised a few questions. According to the minutes of the health/repression faction meeting on 20 January 1999, a joint action of Act Up–Paris with the Immigration and Banlieue Movement (a French organization founded in 1995 to denounce institutional racism and, in particular, police violence against immigrants, many of whom lived in the *banlieue*) and Migrants Against AIDS was planned in response to the “house arrest” issue. Another important indication of the link between the two organizations was the publication of a four-page article by Migrants Against AIDS in the January 1999 issue of Act Up–Paris’s newsletter, *Action* (no. 58).<fnref n="44" /> Migrants Against AIDS also published an article on universal health coverage in *Vacarme* magazine (no. 8).<fnref n="45" /> Introduced in France in 2000, universal health coverage facilitated access to health care and reimbursement of health care costs for anyone residing in France on a stable and regular basis and not already covered by a compulsory health insurance scheme.<fnref n="46" />

However, conflicts soon emerged. While Sadki was scheduled to present the universal health coverage issue at a weekly meeting of Act Up–Paris, a disagreement caused friction between Migrants Against AIDS and other AIDS campaigning groups on the issue of universal health coverage. Gérard (pseudonym), a member of Act Up–Paris’s foreigners subgroup, attended a meeting of the Collective for Truly Universal Health Coverage (a coalition of organizations working on universal health coverage, including Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS) in the middle of February 1999. He suggested adding a few changes to the press release that was being discussed at the time. Sadki’s response to this request was strong; he determined that Migrants Against AIDS would withdraw from the Collective for Truly Universal Health Coverage because he believed the government’s proposed universal health coverage was unworkable in its current form. The Act Up–Paris coordination committee’s next meeting featured a statement from Gérard expressing his concern about Migrants Against AIDS leaving the collective: “A serious situation, given Migrants Against AIDS is our only ally [within the collective] on the issue of AIDS

<footnote n="42">⁴² Act Up–Paris, minutes of the health/repression faction meeting of 3 February 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Author's field notes, 9 February 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Migrants contre le sida, *Migrants contre le VIH/sida* 8 (1998), inserted in *Action* no. 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Migrants contre le sida, “CMU: Chronique d’une austérité annoncée,” *Vacarme* 8 (1999): 32–34.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Caroline Izambert, “Soigner les étrangers? L’état et les associations pour la couverture maladie des pauvres et des étrangers en France des années 1980 à nos jours” (PhD diss., EHESS / Université de recherche Paris sciences et lettres, 2018).</footnote>
and public health.”<fnref n="47" /> A period of intense conflict between Migrants Against AIDS and several other parties (organizations and others), notably Act Up–Paris, that had appeared to be affiliated with Migrants Against AIDS was brought on by this disagreement.

There was another case of friction between the two groups: in 1999 Migrants Against AIDS took on the Centre médical du Moulin Joly, part of the French Red Cross, which was accused by the collective of mistreating Ali B. Migrants Against AIDS suggested that Act Up–Paris take part in a protest action, but the latter refused. Following a second occupation of the center by the collective, Sadki received a heavy ten-month suspended prison sentence and a 10,000-euro fine. He did not receive any support from Act Up–Paris. Instead, lawyer Henri Leclerc, known for having been president of the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l'Homme), chose to defend Sadki and helped get him acquitted.<fnref n="48" />

As a result, Migrants Against AIDS became increasingly hesitant to collaborate with Act Up–Paris from 1999. Its members criticized Act Up–Paris for taking a leading role in the fight against AIDS, that is, for partly defining its orientations due to its higher level of public legitimacy and easier access to resources such as finance and the media. This condition raised the ire of Migrants Against AIDS, which aimed to challenge the hegemony of middle- and upper-class white men, the majority of whom were gay men, in the AIDS movement, including Act Up–Paris: “With this idea that white, educated, established gay men were best placed to define priorities and needs, there was no basis for an alliance with people like us.”<fnref n="49" />

A testament to the deteriorating relationship between the two organizations was Mangeot's talk at the "Sociology of Homosexualities" seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris on 19 May 1999 (which I attended). The seminar was convened by Françoise Gaspard (a feminist sociologist and left-wing politician) and Didier Éribon (a well-known author in humanities and gay and lesbian studies). The fact that Mangeot had access to this elite space, which was typically only open to academics and other researchers, showed that he was held in high esteem in the intellectual community. Mangeot decided to deliver a talk about the current ongoing crisis within Act Up–Paris. A key point he made was the latter’s relationship to Migrants Against AIDS. Mangeot said he appreciated Migrants Against AIDS’s claim that racism explained the prevalence of AIDS among migrants. He found this thesis similar to Act Up–Paris’s argument that the spread of this epidemic among gay men should be imputed to social and political reasons. Nevertheless, he added that he found Sadki’s aggressive criticism of “classic organizations,” including Act Up–Paris, highly irritating. He elaborated further that Sadki had invited him to a meal: “I was summoned by Reda [Sadki].” During this meal, Sadki allegedly asserted the following: “Recognize that AIDS has changed sides”; “Hand over [the movement], leave the space”; and “Queers are confiscating the fight against AIDS.” This was a purported stance that Mangeot considered to resemble the rhetoric of the Far Right, which at the time was criticizing gay men for using the AIDS issue to advance their cause. Referring to his “utopian” project for a common front for minorities, he admitted that realizing such an alliance, which may

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Act Up–Paris, minutes of the coordination committee meeting, 19 February 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Sadki, interview.</footnote>
have existed between Act Up–Paris and unemployed workers’ organizations, had never really worked with migrants.<fnref n="50" />

For his part, Sadki describes the meal as the last opportunity for dialogue with Mangeot, who subsequently refused to collaborate: “I remember him letting Pierre know that he would have nothing more to do with me, that he would do everything to isolate me and prevent me from progressing.”<fnref n="51" /> According to Sadki, Mangeot “understood at the time that there was a bone that he was not going to be able to bend. [Sadki] would not submit to [Mangeot’s] idea that gay men would be the avant-garde of all minorities,” and Sadki “challenged [Mangeot] intellectually, right down to his philosophical foundations.”

At the same time, Pierre also provided a fairly pessimistic appraisal of the possibility of a coalition involving Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS, claiming that “our interorganizational relationships are currently at a low ebb.”<fnref n="52" /> Pierre identified the “crisis” in connection with Migrants Against AIDS as one of the interorganizational interactions that had deteriorated: “Migrants Against AIDS, which has recently entered the fight against AIDS, is quite interesting, but it acts in a way that resembles homo phobia in many respects. Its rhetoric is close to that of the Far Right, articulating statements along the lines of ‘The queers have captured the epidemic; we’re going to take it back from them because it belongs to us.’”<fnref n="53" /> In an interview with Musso conducted around the same time, Pierre attributed the disagreement between the two groups to divergent views on Act Up–Paris’s call for an alliance of “minorities”: “It’s not a direct statement, but he expressed it during our conversations: ‘No, there is no alliance between minorities; there is a war between minorities, we are in a competition between minorities.’”<fnref n="54" />

## Sexual Orientation, Race, and the Class Struggle

The category that Migrants Against AIDS most often argued against was the “classic organizations stemming from the gay movement.” Sadki spoke of an “extremist fringe of the gay movement” that, having long been oppressed, was dominating other minorities, taking control of AIDS organizations and associated resources.<fnref n="55" /> However, Sadki did not establish a straightforward contrast between gay men and migrants. He clarified in one of his interventions that he referred explicitly to “white” gay men: “If the political history of our struggles to survive AIDS remains little known, it is because it is the hidden face of the ‘fight against AIDS’ led by public health authorities and the classic organizations stemming from the mobilization of ‘white’ gay men in the face of the epidemic.”<fnref n="56" /> He went further, arguing that “white gay men” had access to interlocutors in institutions and positions of power: “The ability to live and treat oneself with

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Lilian Mathieu, “Éléments pour une analyse des coalitions contestataires: La lutte contre le sida et le mouvement des chômeurs, de ‘Nous sommes la gauche’ à l’Occupation,” *Revue française de science politique* 59, no. 1 (2009): 77–96.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Pierre, interview with the author, 20 May 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Pierre, interview with Sandrine Musso, 1999, reported in Musso, *Sida et minorités postcoloniales*, 368.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Reda Sadki and Jamal El Baouch, “Deux décennies de combats pour survivre au sida,” *Hommes & migrations* 1239 (2002): 112.</footnote>
dignity, then as now, is largely based on one's standing and social influence in French society. As soon as the epidemic started, 'white' gay males had access to the highest political echelons, but this was obviously not the situation for us. Such a strategy of lobbying the powerful will not help us; at best (!) it will result in the establishment of a small elite of organizations and physicians who will live off the suffering of AIDS-affected migrants."<fnref n="57" /> Sadki believed it was important to draw attention to the social injustices that existed between "white gay men" and migrants because he viewed the former as members of the dominant class. To understand the situation of gay men within their own identity group, this reading of race and class was applied as follows: "In the United States, it was the white gay mafia who held the AIDS money, so Latino and black gay men mobilized against them."<fnref n="58" />

Thus, Sadki avoided schematically opposing gay men against migrants by pointing out that some gay men were, in fact, migrants who were clearly more impacted than “whites”: “I firmly believe that HIV prevalence among gay men from North Africa is far higher than that of gay men of European descent. . . . We discuss LGBT people on the one side and migration on the other. This is absurd from a preventative standpoint and results from the stifling epidemiological classifications that currently prevail. But it also results from the stigma against discussing power disparities among gay men.”<fnref n="59" />

Although it was known that gay men and migrants were the two trans mission groups in France that were the most affected, nothing was done at the time about the intersection between these two groups in terms of either research or action. Sadki's approach, which consisted of challenging the boundaries of categories or thinking about the articulation between different social characteristics, was pioneering. It was ahead of the future development of intersectional approaches in France, as popularized and practiced from the late 2000s onward, initially through the translation of classic Black feminist texts.<fnref n="60" /> Sadki had become familiar with some of this literature during his studies in the United States.<fnref n="61" />

Migrants Against AIDS also used such an intersectional analysis about the coloniality that they claimed underpinned “white” gay mobilizations in what today would be called the Global North. Act Up–Paris activists in France were protesting under the banner “Give us back our lovers” following the Queen Boat incident in Egypt in 2001, during which “gay” men were detained, despite their denial that they were gay while in custody. This prompted a commentator to whom Migrants Against AIDS had given voice in an internet article commenting on the involvement of gay organizations in Europe and the United States in this trial to say: “Egyptian gays are not the property of white gay men.”<fnref n="62" /> Act Up–Paris attempted to adopt a logic of transnational solidarity but failed to provide further consideration to the opinions and interests of the people involved. Its attitude resembled the non-Western queer appropriation that white gay subjects developed, especially in the UK, by lambasting particularly the religious beliefs of queer people in the Global

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Sadki and El Baouch, “Deux décennies,” 115.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Notes from field notebook by Sandrine Musso, June 1999, reported in Musso, *Sida et minorités postcoloniales*, 366.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Sadki, “Entretien avec Reda Sadki.”</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Elsa Dorlin, ed., *Black Feminism: Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975–2000* (L’Harmattan, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Migrants contre le sida, “Kamal T. Fizazi: Les gays égyptiens ne sont pas la propriété des homosexuels blancs,” Le Mégalodon, 13 November 2001, http://lemegalodon.net/a3592-kamal-t-fizazi-les-gays-egyptiens-ne-sont.html.</footnote>
South.<fnref n="63" /> It is worth noting that Act Up–Paris’s use of slogans that referred to nonwhite gay men as “their lovers” to allude to their plight was not original, as shown by the title of an editorial, “Rights for Our Undocumented Lovers.”<fnref n="64" /> The way LGBT mobilizations in the 1970s addressed the subject of “Arabs” in France was reflected in this language, which had roots in this more distant past.<fnref n="65" /> In the 1970s gay activists, while professing to be antiracist, were fetishizing and appropriating the figures of nonwhites who practiced same-sex relationships.

However, Migrants Against AIDS limited itself to this criticism and did not aim to speak for gay men of color. Instead, its members focused on heterosexual families, couples, and procreation. From 2000 it redefined the demographic it represented and targeted with the slogan “from poor immigration and the *banlieue*,” moving beyond the general term “migrant,” which the organization condemned: “They call us migrants to deny the permanence of our settlement.”<fnref n="66" /> It changed the name of its website and radio program to *Surviving AIDS* in the same year. The group arranged a gathering of North African and African families in Paris in 2002 as one of its well-known actions. To “make the voices and demands of the families concerned heard,” in 2003 it established the Family AIDS Survival Committee, which acquired legal status under the 1901 law and became a real collective movement that started receiving subsidies in 2005. In contrast to the idea of the queer “family of choice” that Act Up–Paris had advanced, Migrants Against AIDS advocated family solidarity in the sense of traditional kinship and the heterosexual model. Every year since 2003 it has planned an annual lovers’ festival for those living with HIV. The issue of serodiscordant couples wishing to have children was addressed in its meetings the following year, and the organization undertook major work on medically assisted reproduction with HIV. Sadki intentionally kept his personal life private, but he acknowledged that these familial situations had impacted him: “I was in love with a woman who was affected [by AIDS], and our child owed his excellent health to tritherapies. My own family members, as well as a young woman who had recently gotten married in Algeria, have all passed away. It then became very intimate. I suddenly discovered myself in the center of everything. I will not consent to these people’s fate being predetermined.”<fnref n="67" />

In the end, the Family AIDS Survival Committee moved away from a purely migrant identity to embrace all working-class “families.” As stated on its website in connection with the 2006 committee board elections, “If the committee is truly multicommunitarian—unlike other organizations fighting AIDS that are increasingly compartmentalized by ethnic and/or sexual-orientation divides—this reflects the epidemic in the *banlieue*.”<fnref n="68" /> As evidenced by a discussion between Sadki and Bruno Spire, president of AIDES, in 2009, the collective maintained its

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauquir, and Esra Erdem, “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexual Discourse in the ‘War on Terror,’” in *Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality*, ed. Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake (Raw Nerve Books, 2008), 71–95.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Act Up–Paris, “Des droits pour nos amant(e)s sans papiers,” *L’Humanité*, 20 March 2000, http://www.humanite.fr/des-droits-pour-nos-amantes-sans-papiers-par-act-paris-224227.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Todd Shepard, *Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979* (University of Chicago Press, 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Sadki, “Des beurs de service.”</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Cited in Juhel, “La vie rêvée des autres.”</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Musso, *Sida et minorités postcoloniales*, 370.</footnote>
distinction from the “classic organizations” in this way, particularly by making up for their inability
to consider the heterosexual and familial dimensions of the epidemic.<fnref n="69" />

The conflict between Migrants Against AIDS and Act Up–Paris was based on a differing
interpretation of the reality of the epidemic. While both organizations referred to a political
etiology of AIDS in their own unique ways, they had quite different ideas about what constituted
“minorities” in general. The Act Up–Paris rhetoric was based on an “equivalence” of the positions
held by the various groups affected by the disease, which shared a minority (or minoritized) social
status, an experience of stigmatization, and a history of independent struggles: gay men, drug
users, incarcerated people, sex workers, foreigners, disabled individuals, and so on. A “common
denominator”—the “minority”—was used to interpret the outbreak. Act Up–Paris stated that
“no member of Act Up imagines any other point of view on the AIDS issue than that of the most
affected minorities” when discussing how the epidemic should be viewed from a minority
perspective.<fnref n="70" /> Sadki, for his part, stressed a topic largely ignored in the Act Up–Paris analysis: the
issue of social class, which had divided its ranks but which it had failed to consider:

Certain interlocutors who also claim to be radical in the face of AIDS and who would
like us to forget social classes and all become “minorities,” each bearing his or her
own unique oppression as a gay man, migrant, and so on, frequently sidestep
questions about the contradictions between the individuals who make up a
movement. This is foolish, harmful, and naive. The proponents of this plan believe
they are at the forefront of the fight against AIDS and that they have invented and
understood everything, but in reality, they have simply appropriated “first-person
politics” from the feminist movement and direct action from social movements run
by and for the underprivileged. We [Migrants Against AIDS] come from
underprivileged migrants. The monthly income of the HIV-positive person we know,
whether they are French or migrants, is less than 3,500 francs [about $550]. The
middle-class white gay men’s epidemic did not exist before ours. The epidemic
affected them and us simultaneously.<fnref n="71" />

The conflict between Migrants Against AIDS and Act Up–Paris is summed up in this quotation.
Sadki argued against the idea that “white gay men” were the first to be affected by AIDS. He
counterargued that the AIDS experiences of “white gay men” were prioritized in France over
those of the underprivileged and nonwhite people. Second, he claimed that, rather than
accurately reflecting the reality of the disease, the overrepresentation of gay men in the
mobilizations and in the public perception of the epidemic was linked to a form of privilege: as
members of the middle class, “white gay men” were able to participate and shape the official
history of the epidemic. Furthermore, Sadki denied that direct action was specific to Act Up–Paris
and counterposed that such protest patterns had more to do with struggles against colonialism:

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Reda Sadki and Bruno Spire, “Dialogue entre Bruno Spire et Reda Sadki: Les associations issues du mouvement homosexuel ont-elles entendu les préoccupations des couples hétérosexuels et des familles vivant avec le VIH?,” Papa maman bébé, 14 January 2009, http://www.papamamanbebe.net/a8792-dialogue-entre-bruno-spire-et-reda-sadki-le.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Act Up–Paris, *Le sida* (Éditions Dagorno, 1994), 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Sadki, “Entretien avec Reda Sadki.”</footnote>
"None of them seem to be aware of where their methods come from. They all think it was Larry Kramer who invented it in New York."<fnref n="72" />

Sadki offered a thorough criticism of the Act Up–Paris analyses developed by Mangeot and the Act Up–Paris members close to him. Above all, Sadki disagreed with the avant-garde stature that Act Up–Paris implicitly assumed because it sought to educate other minorities about the necessity for unity under a flag “white gay men” had created. The independence of the battles fought by advocates for patients from other social groups was in jeopardy: “The main issue remains that we must organize and structure our political autonomy and our demands.”<fnref n="73" /> In this vein, Sadki believed that poverty was the issue that needed to be at the center of AIDS strategies before the issues of community and identity.

Conclusion

This article explores the complex relationship between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS. It shows that while they had many elements in common in terms of their analysis of the AIDS epidemic and their protest patterns, their relationship increasingly deteriorated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The two organizations mobilized a theory of the political etiology of AIDS. There were certain similarities in their modes of action. Nevertheless, a conflict between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS arose from their different conceptualizations of race, which was at the epicenter of the ways in which the two organizations politicized the AIDS epidemic. Whereas the former had not thought about how race related to other social features, the latter placed a premium on its intersection with social class. Because Act Up–Paris was predominantly composed of white middle- and upper-class gay men, it was structurally privileged compared to a group representing poor people of color. Its stance resembled what Patrice Pinell has argued: “AIDS is the first significant epidemic that did not make the issues brought on by poverty a central subject. The problem is there, but it is transversally relegated to the epidemiological logic of categorizing people into distinct ‘risk groups.’ The way the AIDS movement defines its strategic orientations illustrates this subordination.”<fnref n="74" /> Sadki recommended articulating several dimensions to think about the predicament of persons living with HIV long before the intersectional approach became well known in France. Migrants Against AIDS developed a conceptual framework that aimed to combine sexual orientation, health status, race, and class. This conflict had a transnational dimension in two ways. The first relates to the complex way in which Migrants Against AIDS approached postcolonial migration to France. Migrants Against AIDS collaborated with organizations that aimed to be active in both France and North Africa, such as the Federation of Tunisians for Citizenship on Both Shores. Simultaneously, however, the former argued that the people of color that they aimed to represent were settled citizens in France and part of a multicultural community, thus insiders of the French nation. Therefore, while seeking to extend to the countries of origin of those migrants or of their parents, Migrants Against AIDS did not treat their activism as transnational in the sense of representing people who were

<footnote n="72">⁷² Sadki, interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Sadki, “Des beurs de service.”</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Patrice Pinell, “Mobilisation associative et pauvreté,” in *38ème session de la Commission de la population et du développement de l’ONU, New York, 4 au 8 avril 2005—Sida et pauvreté* (Ministère de l’emploi, de la cohésion sociale et du logement / Ministère des affaires étrangères, 2005), 99.</footnote>
"foreigners" in France. Moreover, evidence of cross-border transfers of ideas was more straightforward when discerning how the impact of Sadki's trajectory within the Algerian diaspora, as well as his stay in the United States, where he became familiar with intersectional feminist literature, influenced how Migrants Against AIDS formulated notions of race. Thus, the conflict between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS stood at the forefront of intersecting influences, real or perceived, from both the Global North and the Global South.

Equally decisive has been the principle of republican universalism in France. The expectation for minorities to keep quiet about their particular experiences is sometimes countered by their collective action. From this point of view, sexual and postcolonial minorities have had diametrically opposed histories in France, as manifested in the growing acceptance of homosexuality in public debate, on the one hand, and the demonization and repression of immigrants, particularly undocumented ones, on the other. The label of "communitarianism" is another sign of the differential treatment of those minorities in France. During the 1990s the condemnation of homosexual communitarianism was at its strongest, but it disappeared with the extension of equal rights to gay men and lesbian women. Conversely, immigrants and Muslims have gradually become the preferred targets of the anticommitarianism discourse in France. The conflict between Act Up–Paris and Migrants Against AIDS should, therefore, be situated within the context of this varying treatment of minorities in France.

## Acknowledgments

In loving memory of Sandrine Musso (1973–2021).

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as Nikolaos Papadogiannis and Somak Biswas for their invaluable help throughout the writing of the article. Thanks also to Sharon Calandra for editing the article in English.

## About the Author

Christophe Broqua is a socio-anthropologist, research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique–CNRS), member of the Institute of African Worlds (Institut des mondes africains–IMAF), Aubervilliers, France. From 1994 to 2003, he devoted his research to AIDS activism and gay politics in France and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, particularly within the organization Act Up. Since 2003, he has conducted a long-term investigation of the social and political forms of homosexuality and the fight against HIV/AIDS in three French-speaking West African countries (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal). He has notably published *Agir pour ne pas mourir! Act Up, les homosexuels et le sida* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2006), translated into English as *Action = Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France* (Temple University Press, 2020). He has edited or co-edited several books and journal articles, including *Se mobiliser contre le sida en Afrique : sous la santé globale, les luttes associatives* (L'Harmattan, 2018) and “Toward an Interactionist Theory of Contentious Politics: The Case of Sexual and Reproductive Rights Movements,” *Social Movement Studies* 19, no. 1 (2020).