"The Gay Plague" : A study on the Swedish AIDS epidemic during the 1980-1990s

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Swedish AIDS epidemic waspresented in media, and compare this to how it was portrayed by the affected individual.I focus on the concept of exclusion through ‘we and them’-scenarios, regarding how thevictims of the epidemic were treated by the media and in other contexts.My source material is divided into two parts: a media perspective and an individualperspective. The first perspective consists of press clips from four Swedish newspapersbased in the capitol Stockholm, as well as news features in both TV and radio. Thesecond perspective consists of diaries from one of the many victims of the epidemic.In this case, the media takes the position of an innocent bystander to the disease and itsimpact on society. The media is also an informative actor to the citizens about thedisease, but also as an opinion creator who forms a relation between the reader and thevictims. Articles from the early period warns the public of the impending threat and that‘AIDS affects anyone’, while also demanding that the affected risk groups need tochange their lifestyle in order to protect themselves and others. The later period tends tocriticize the moral panic caused by the early period, due to that the heterosexualmajority was not affected, even though the disease still affected the known risk groups