Controlling sickness: The political economy of gay men's health care

TL;DRAbstract

This study presents basic empirical sociological research on gay men's health care in the United States, described in its social institutional context. A typology of gay men's relations with their physicians has been constructed historically by the synergistic development of sodomy laws and medical ideology, and its subsequent challenge by the gay liberation movement. When the patient's sexuality is treated as a sickness, the patient is "pathologized." Patients may also be "gay" or "hidden", depending on whether the patient's sexual preference is or is not known to his physician. In the past gay men have received much of their medical treatment without identifying themselves to their physicians, and so medical discourse about gay men ignores many of their everyday health concerns. The emergence of visible gay male patients originated in the treatment of conditions which implied that the patient had had sexual relations with another man. A health care research model of gay men as a mino

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