Policy, Ritual, Purity: Gays and Mandatory AIDS Testing

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Abstract
For Robert W. Switzer“[T]here is not a good word to be said for anybody's behavior in this whole mess.”—Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart Well after Brown v. the Board of Education, Jackson, Mississippi, maintained racially segregated public swimming pools, claiming that only through segregation could violence and social chaos be avoided there. The federal courts saw through this stratagem, noting that it was a variant of the heckler's veto thinly masking racial animus. But did Jackson integrate its pools? No. The city council voted instead to close them all. This time out, the courts were not so wise.In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the pool closings. The Court was snookered by the surface similarity of the policy's treatment of blacks and whites—neither could, after all, use the swimming pools. The practice appeared to treat similar cases similarly. And indeed the pool-closing statute did not refer in any way to blacks.

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