Thinking Biosociality and Queer Sociality Amid the 2022 Mpox Outbreak and Vaccination in the San Francisco Bay Area – Somatosphere

The 2022 Mpox outbreak in the Global North disrupted the temporality of epidemics amid an uncertain recovery from COVID-19. Immediately associated with men who have sex with men, the outbreak interpellated the queer communities into action—for example, through participation in vaccination campaigns—and reactivated the collective memory of HIV/AIDS. This outbreak thus revealed an intricate form of the temporality of epidemics in its formative force on communities and socialities amid the tension between risk, pleasure, and care. Rethinking these socialities from the perspective of time provides a chance to investigate further a theoretical middle ground between biopolitical critique and queer theory, which uncovers the temporal aspect of biopolitics and, by historicizing discourses on forms of socialities after HIV/AIDS, questions the futuristic claim of queer sociality with a biopolitical critique.

I will start by positing experiences of my informants in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place known for its queer communities and HIV/AIDS collective memories, in the historicity of the bio and the queer in existing ethnographies and chronologies, showing the tension between biosociality and queer sociality. The dialogue between biopolitical and queer claims of sociality will contribute to a deeper understanding of the outbreak and benefit both lines of thinking. This analysis expands biopolitical frameworks by incorporating a question of affect and temporality while also rethinking queer futurity by interrogating the relationship between queerness, biopolitics, and the right to life in times of crisis. To understand how different forms of socialities are entangled in the outbreak, I think along with the “thick temporalities” proposed by Bishnupriya Ghosh (2023), further conceptualizing the feelings of the zig-zag time in an outbreak scrolling the queer past and multi-species relations.

The Historicity of the Bio and the Queer: The Vaccine as an Object of “Gay Science”

The weird sense of time kicked in when the Mpox outbreak interpellated queer subjects with collective memories of HIV/AIDS. Julio, a former member of the Shanti Project in his late sixties, and HOOOO?!, the archive keeper of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence much younger than Julio, both perceived the outbreak as “history repeating itself.” As the COVID-19 curve started to flatten, the Mpox suddenly appeared as a new hazard to the revival of everyday life. I met Julio at the Mpox vaccination station next to a gay bathhouse in the afternoon of late summer in 2022. The waiting line for the Mpox vaccination had become shorter than in previous months. The registration form for vaccination asked about one’s identity in terms of sexual behaviors (e.g., men who have sex with men) and whether one considered oneself to “belong to the groups with high risks.” This moment in the process of vaccination reveals the interpellation of gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with men (GBMSM) as risky subjects. As Charles Briggs (2003) analyzes, interpellation is a key process in circulating organized public health materials and information; by interpellation, the subjects in collectivity became subject to the call (Althusser 2001[1971]; Butler 1993). When I wondered how one’s answer could determine one’s eligibility for vaccination here, Julio, then a stranger ahead of me, said hi and asked whether I got vaccinated for influenza. My accent perhaps revealed my unfamiliarity with this place, and Julio, who left Costa Rica for the Bay Area in adolescence, felt the duty to care for a queer newcomer. He later told me that he was HIV-positive. Upon hearing about the Mpox, he went to his physician for vaccination, but the vaccine was unavailable due to shortage. Some vaccination information circulated in the queer circles beyond the physicians’ reach. He felt a strong resemblance between the present and the past: “The reason why I think there was such a large, massive turnout of gay people getting vaccinated…was to avoid that same stigma. That same blame.”

This moment reopens the question of the historicities of the bio and the queer entangled in those events concerning HIV/AIDS activism and events of medico-technological formations. As Steven Epstein (2018) observes, claims of the right to life and discourses of sexual health have given rise to a form of “biosexual citizenship” popularized in the 1990s. The image of a good biosexual citizen, however, stands in opposition to some queer critiques of hetero- and homonormative sociopolitical life (Edelman 2004; Caserio et al. 2006). Tim Dean, for instance, takes the subculture of barebacking, the practice of having intercourse without a condom, as a form of biosociality carrying out relational experiments “by means of a virus” (Dean 2009). Dean’s invocation of biosociality further complicated this biopolitical conception by Rabinow, who imagined this form of social relations emerged in the mapping of risk in biological traits and behaviors (Rabinow 1996). The prevention of risks for the bio organized rights and duties in this line of biopolitical analysis (Rose & Rabinow 2006). However, Dean’s understanding of the subculture of barebacking as biosociality emphasizes the acceptance of risk and an ethics of alterity. What Dean suggests here, I suppose, is actually a form of queer sociality surrounding pleasure. This stands in contrast to the fear of the virus in claims of biocitizenship. Later, when PrEP entered the arena of sexual health, the risk of barebacking became attenuated by new medical technologies. Medical formations have been imbued with affective valences throughout the HIV/AIDS history (Epstein 1999; Race 2017). All these events, as Kane Race indicates, transform the historicity of the bio and the queer. Whereas many queer theorists imagine futurity with pleasure and reparation, the biopolitical critique haunts the picture with scrutiny of the claim of the right to life.

The 2022 Mpox outbreak extended this chronology. It interpellated the fearful, risky subjects; its vaccines were turned into an object of hope, or as Race might put it, an object of the gay science that “manage and flatten the affective intensities, complications and disturbances of sex.” (Race, 2017, 94) Queer people lined up for vaccination, willing to wait for several hours. For Julio, vaccination was an act of defense, a way to prevent the scapegoating during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although he perceived the outbreak as a repeat of the traumatic past, he, like other informants who also witnessed HIV/AIDS, noticed the difference: this time, vaccination was infused with confidence in gay science and the ideological implications under the Trump administration. Dan Savage, whose podcast attracted many of my informants, wrote that the alertness to the outbreak and the commitment to vaccination among gay men saved the U.S. from another pandemic (Park & Savage 2023). These claims of the queer as good biosexual citizens often contrasted the handling of COVID-19 with the queer responses to the Mpox. Jim, one of the informants who listened to Savage’s podcast, said: “I think it [the handling of the Mpox] was very sophisticated. Oh my god. If you think about the COVID response from the most sophisticated, educated perspective, it was instantly the same thing for the gay community. Everybody trusted medicine.” For some, vaccines materialize the gay ethos of commitment to science. This attitude toward vaccination manifests the sense-making of an outbreak by situating it in relation to HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.

Vaccines, just like other objects of gay science, became elements of self-advertising. Many of the profiles on Grindr listed vaccination in self-description as a signal for sexual health. Vaccines became a form of a bodily capital. One informant, Luis, remarked: “it’s just like PrEP, sending a message like: ‘I’m safe, come have sex with me!’” As mentioned before, the discourse of sexual health emerged at a historical moment when biomedical risk, social responsibility, and evidence-based medicine started to converge (Epstein 2018). The capitalization of these objects of gay science arose against this backdrop. It also occurred as a consequence of the interpellation of the risky, queer subjects. Li, a college graduate from China, expressed severe anxiety in the first month of the outbreak. He avoided wearing shorts and sitting on a bus, fearing that the virus on the surface of the seat would infect him and shamefully hinting to others about his promiscuous sexual life. When a heterosexual friend consulted him about vaccinations, he told her that she did not need them. “I thought she was heterosexual and not under such risk, so ‘save it for the community.’”

The contrast between Julio’s expression of care for other queer people and Li’s intention to save the vaccines for the community delineates the tension between the queer and the biosocial. The former was a caring moment for a stranger, and the latter was based on the biopolitical risk calculation. The resituating of Mpox vaccination in a chronology of LGBTQIA+ sexual health seems to emphasize the biopolitical relations in the outbreak and the vaccination campaign. One must wonder: what was queer in the emergent social bonds in another time of epidemic targeting the queer? Is this moment, several decades after the HIV/AIDS, the queer future of the “restructuring sociality (Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2005)? Although the answer is always “not yet,” one could find queer sociality in the practice of care, imbued with affective dynamics uncaptured by the biopolitical critique. Simon, who experienced the severe pain of Mpox infection when queer people in the Bay Area had not become aware of the outbreak, participated in a virtual meeting for the circulating information about the outbreak: “I was telling them, this time people don’t need to be afraid of Mpox like of HIV/AIDS. At least people were not dying of Mpox.” Simon witnessed the deaths of his partners, physicians, and dentists; he lived with the HIV virus. What he tried to enact was a form of care, offering solace for anxiety and other negative feelings hazarding life under epidemics. Care has the potential for repair. There were also experiments on maintaining sexual life amid the crisis: “I think the worst-case outcome that we were facing was: vaccines are not available for a while. My friends and I have to…if we are interested in continuing to go to these play parties, we’re going to need to carve out a clique or a pod, as people did with COVID risk,” said Max, an experienced dominant role, or dom, in BDSM activities. Whereas biopolitical implications became omnipresent, one could still find forms of queer sociality emerging in the quest for care and pleasure.

Senses of Time in an Outbreak: Thick Temporalities of the Queer and the Bio

The conception of queer sociality also sheds light on another dimension less discussed in the biopolitical thinking of sexual health, that is, the entanglements of multiple temporalities. As Bishnupriya Ghosh (2023) delicately depicts, zoonotic epidemics have woven a web of non-linear temporalities, intertwining the social and the biological relations. This “thick temporality” exhibits the complicated relations between species, outbreaks, sciences, and media, as one may notice the past pattern of an outbreak in the present one: “The present seems all too slow and simultaneously vanishing under the weight of epidemic pasts and pandemic futures” (Ghosh, 2023, 201).

Thick temporality explains the striking moment when I found confusion about time: in early 2023, I asked some informants when the outbreak was. They said that they started hearing about it in the late spring of 2021—one year prior to the outbreak. “Time was weird during the pandemic.” Syed, a student in his twenties, located the outbreak in the spring of 2021: “It feels like…it was a long time ago. In my mind, at least.” This confusion about time marks a question of the perception of time in an outbreak in outbreaks.

Senses of time stirred up resentment and other negative feelings. Speaking of COVID, Julio said: “You know, because I went through the AIDS epidemic, you know, it wasn’t something new to me. Personally, I was very resentful for a while. Because, you know, they kind of dealt with it actually…pretty fast in this country with the vaccines and all that. Well, I kept remembering the AIDS epidemic. Well, it took ten years for them to start, for the government to start acting on AIDS.”

When Simon, who got infected with Mpox, knew that there was only one laboratory in Sacramento for Mpox testing in California, he regarded it as the government’s “lack of concern for our community.” However, if we juxtapose Julio’s and Simon’s resentment, one can note a sharp contrast: the government and institutions acted on the Mpox outbreak much quicker than COVID-19, but people, as in the case of Simon, might still fear that there was no action. This suspicion or paranoia, as Heather Love (2010) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) discuss, can be traced back to the antihomophobic affects and mentalities since HIV/AIDS activism. Negative affects sedimented in the queer history left a trace in their senses of time.

Besides the queer sense of the thick temporality of outbreak, for some of my informants, there was also an emerging sense biological relations between human, animals, and viruses in the perception of epidemics. Lasco (2022) indicates that “monkeypox” is a misnomer, as its carriers are mostly rodents. The “monkey” in the name confused many. Kevin, a Black man in his sixties who worked in a gay sauna decades ago, asked: “What, is somebody going around fucking monkeys?” Inter-species relations complicate the senses of time, origin, and consequences, but one can only vaguely perceive them from a distance.

The mode of making sense of viral relations also pertained to the perception of the weird time—one informant, Quincy, thought Mpox “is a subvariant COVID thing” after talking about the Arcurus subvariant. He regarded Mpox as the “main” subvariant for 2022 but less current for 2023. The reason why he chose not to get vaccinated for Mpox was because he thought the COVID shot already protected him to some extent:

Risk perceptions did not only involve an ethos of commitment to medicine—the sense of time was more fundamental. The experience of getting “shot after shot” for (zoonotic) disease prevention gave rise to a repetitive sense of temporality. Outbreak after outbreak, the perception of viral relations was constantly reconfigured.

All these experiences of time manifested the thick temporalities shaped by the entanglements of the queer and the bio’s senses of times. As shown above, making sense of time pertains to emotions of traumatic memories and the affectivity toward a virus wandering in multi-species relations. The conception of thick temporality provides a framework accommodating the queer and the bio socialities: the affective bonds and the risk calculation are constantly transformed and re-articulated, pressing one to consider the historical and geographical specificity of this outbreak (Brown, 2022). To understand “an outbreak in outbreaks,” which may be common and frequent in the following years, it would be essential to focus on different entanglements and their influences on local responses.

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