Author Steven Thrasher knew about AIDS before he knew about sex.
Although he didn’t come out as gay until he was 20, he recalled learning that Ryan White was excluded from high school in the 1980s for having AIDS. As a child growing up in Oxnard, he watched his parents participate in anti-apartheid protests and learned at a young age about the importance of being involved in social issues.
“There were these non-normative queer ways that I understood from activism and life in Oxnard,” Thrasher said.
Thrasher, 44, currently works as a professor of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Illinois, serving as the inaugural chair of the Daniel H. Renberg Chair in social justice in journalism.
His new book, “The viral underclass: the human cost when inequality and disease collide,” comes out Tuesday and combines memoir and research to create a framework for understanding how viruses disproportionately affect populations, from HIV/AIDS to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I feel like I gravitated towards HIV and AIDS as a way to write about queer life,” Thrasher said.
The work is published through the Celadon Books division of Macmillan Publishers.
Born in Ventura and raised in Oxnard, Thrasher is the son of former Oxnard high school teacher Bill Thrasher. While in high school in the early 1990s, Thrasher helped revive the school newspaper, “The Buzz.” It was his first foray into journalism.
“I wrote about entertainment and news there,” Thrasher recalled. “There was no internet, but we put the paper in InDesign.”
Although Thrasher has always identified himself as a writer, his first professional writing job was on television. He graduated with a degree in film production and dramatic writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his first job out of college was contributing research on “Saturday Night Live” for the “Weekend Update” segment. .
He transitioned into journalism after working on several media projects, including the HBO movie “The Laramie Project,” about Matthew Shepard, and NPR’s StoryCorps show. He was hired by The Village Voice in 2009, where he wrote mostly about prominent LGBTQ issues at the time: gay marriage and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the US military.
During her time at the alternative weekly, she was struck by an interview she did at the Bronx LGBTQ Center, where she learned how homeless LGBTQ residents with HIV, most of whom were people of color, were selling their anti-cancer drugs. HIV on the street for money. The conversation triggered a paradigm shift in Thrasher and the way he viewed LGBTQ issues.
“I had little idea at the time how the HIV epidemic was going, but I knew pretty quickly if you look at how it’s going, you’re looking at all these terrible civil rights issues that have nothing to do with marriage and the military. Thrasher said.
Thrasher was fired from the Village Voice in 2012, weeks after being appointed journalist of the year by the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Journalists. He continued to work as a freelance journalist while enrolled at New York University for his doctorate in American studies, which he completed in 2019.
His Ph.D. thesis, which would later serve as a major part of “The Viral Underclass,” focused on how race intersected with the criminalization of HIV/AIDS, including the story of Michael Johnson, a black man from Missouri who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for not disclosing his HIV status to his sexual partners. johnson was then paroled several years after his sentence.
Thrasher got the title “The Viral Underclass” from the last chapter of his dissertation. While he was preparing his proposal to turn it into a book, the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States.
A conversation with his book agent expanded the proposal to include the impact of COVID-19.
“She said, I don’t want you to write a book on COVID-19, but think about using this ‘viral subclass’ as an analysis to write about what you’ve learned about HIV, economics and criminalization.” of the disease and use that to write about the pandemic,” Thrasher said.
The book is divided into 12 chapters, each focusing on a different social vector that results in uneven viral transmission. The chapters combine research and reporting with personal narratives drawn from the relationships in Thrasher’s life, from her work with Johnson in Missouri to her friend Lorena Borjas, a transgender activist in New York who died of COVID-19 earlier in the year. of the pandemic. The result is a kind of memory that is different from what Thrasher initially anticipated.
“I felt like I wanted to be vulnerable because I hope it allows readers to get into a vulnerable place within themselves,” she said.
The release of Thrasher’s book coincides with another growing viral threat, apepox, and you already see America falling into the same traps he lays out in his book. He is critical of the lack of funding for public health and wellness initiatives, especially compared to the billions the United States has spent on the Russian war in Ukraine.
“Regardless of the nature of any particular virus, as long as a society’s priorities are on those things, it will lead to ill health,” Thrasher said.
“The Viral Underclass” can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Nobles or your local independent bookstore at bookstore.org.
Jeremy Childs is a breaking news and general assignment reporter for the Ventura County Star. He can be reached at 805-437-0208, [email protected]and on Twitter @Jeremy_Childs.