A “peste gay”: imprensa aracajuana e os primeiros casos da AIDS no Brasil

Abstract

It is believed that the HIV virus has already been circulating slowly in Africa since the 19th century, arriving later in the United States, specifically in the 1970s. But it is only in the 1980s that a “strange” disease became public, for which no one knew neither the cause nor the cure, and which was devastating for the infected people, who, coincidentally, were mostly homosexuals. From then on, the “gay plague” began to circulate in the social imagery and in population's life. In Brazil, the cases only began to be reported after 1983. By focusing on speech, we are soon transported to the press, a powerful tool. This article focuses on the city of Aracaju, capital of Sergipe, and how it reported the “plague” to its population at the first cases of the disease in the country until 1987, by analyzing the newspapers Gazeta de Sergipe and Jornal da Cidade