As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And in the recent burst of clinical attention being paid to the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients, good intentions abound. But while this long‐overdue interest in LGBT health care aims to highlight important gaps and bring into relief serious issues in health care delivery for LGBT persons, such work can inadvertently reinforce both the marginalization of sexual minorities and the cultural norms related to sexuality, (...) gender identity, and the conventional family. To ensure that positive outcomes for LGBT patients are inextricably paired with those noble intentions, we advocate for a new, queer bioethics—a methodology of scholastic, bioethical, and critical scrutiny that not only addresses the needs of LGBT persons in health care settings but also considers the perspectives, histories, and feelings of such parties. (shrink)

This article considers the late 19th-century medical invention of the category of the homosexual in relation to homosexuality’s moment of deliverance from medicine in the 1970s, when it was removed as a category of mental aberration in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). With the rise of the AIDS pandemic in gay communities in the early 1980s, I argue that homosexuals were forcibly returned to the medical sphere, a process I call “the painful reunion.” Reading a collection of queer narratives (...) across the 20th century, I show that historical and contemporaneous medical events prompted the mobilization of seropositive and queer artists at century’s end to rehabilitate, revise, and offend the historiography of queer illness. Collectively, my conclusions redefine our understandings of queer theory and queer politics as distinctively 1990s projects invested in the present to ones that purposefully aim to challenge the past. (shrink)

The clinic is a loaded space for LGBTQI persons. Historically a site of pathology and culturally a site of stigma, the contemporary clinic for queer patient populations and their loved ones is an ethically fraught space. This paper, which introduces the featured articles of this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry on “Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity,” begins by offering an analysis of scrutiny itself. How do we scrutinize? When is it apt for us to scrutinize? And what (...) are the benefits and perils of clinical and bioethical scrutiny? Bearing in mind these questions, the second half of this paper introduces the feature articles in this special issue in response to such forms of scrutiny. How, why, when, and in what ways to sensitively scrutinize LGBTQI persons in the clinic are the aims of this piece. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 19-21, July 2012.

In this commentary on a clinical ethics case pertaining to a same-sex couple that does not have explicit surrogate decision-making or hospital-visitation rights (in the face of objections from the family-of-origin of one of the queer partners), the authors invoke contemporary legal and policy standards on LGBTQ health care in the United States and abroad. Given this historical moment in which some clinical rights are guaranteed for LGBTQ families whilst others are in transition, the authors advocate for the implementation of (...) clinical ethics mediation as the soundest and most humane form of resolution in matters where there is a dispute between family members about an incapacitated loved one. They argue that clinical ethics mediation is an ideal alternative solution because it works toward consensus about outcome, even where consensus about values is not achievable. (shrink)

Beginning with a rumination on the AIDS-inspired poetry of Thom Gunn, this article by the guest editors introduces the special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities titled “Queer in the Clinic.” After providing an overview of the historical legacy and contemporary dilemmas of LGBTQ persons in biomedical practice, the authors describe the rationale of the issue and the contributions included.

Thirty-four states criminalize HIV in some way, whether by mandating disclosure of one’s HIV status to all sexual partners or by deeming the saliva of HIV-positive persons a “deadly weapon.” In this paper, we argue that HIV-specific criminal laws are rooted in historical prejudice against HIV-positive persons as a class. While purporting to promote public health goals, these laws instead legally sanction discrimination against a class of persons.

:Many teaching hospitals in the United States were founded on philanthropic principles and aimed to aid the urban poor and underserved. However, as times have changed, there has been a divide created between the urban poor and teaching hospitals. There is a plethora of reasons why this is the case. This paper will specifically focus on the histories of ten hospitals and medical schools and the effect that white flight, segregation, elitism, and marginalization had on healthcare institutions all over the (...) United States. It will call for a reexamination of the values of Ivy League and Ivy Plus teaching hospitals and medical schools and for them to take an intentional look into their communities. (shrink)

"I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."Reduced to its most basic task, bioethics is about choices. What is the ethical or unethical decision at a particular biomedical moment? What is most just or unjust for a disabled or infirmed loved one? What feels like the morally right or wrong decision in a healthcare moment? "Should we or shouldn't we" at a medical impasse?Understandably, the question of choice has found an especially prominent and ethically contentious place (...) in disability discourses. Are disabled lives, disabled identities, and disabled bodies themselves best understood as "chosen"? As terminological variations on this theme, disability scholar Simi Linton has asked in the past... (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 9, Page 1-2, September 2011.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 34-36, October 2012.

Given the resurgence of scientific studies on the etiology of homosexuality in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, this article considers the effects these studies had on contemporaneous queer filmmakers. By using the subject of criminality as a way to talk about homosexual causality, queer films of the 1990s illustrate that contemporary scientific studies on homosexuality were historically and politically situated in relation to cultural anxieties about other forms of deviance. This article focuses on films that dissect the hetero-normative tendency (...) to amalgamate forms of deviance in order to distinguish between the diseased and the healthy. Such products of New Queer Cinema highlight this amalgamation of criminality and homosexuality in order to challenge demands by the LGBT community of the 1980s and 1990s for “more positive images” in film. This article argues that queer filmmakers have manipulated the image of the queer criminal to usurp the medical tendency to biologize and pathologize the notion of queer transgression. In such a way, queer films that enthusiastically dramatize the queer outlaw perpetuate myths about homosexuality in order to dissect and discredit them. (shrink)