Join us for After the “Straight State”: Sexuality and Social Reform During California’s HIV/AIDS Crisis. British Historian 
Stephen Colbrook will explore the careers of California’s gay-activists- turned-policymakers and their role in queering the state bureaucracy during the 1980s when AIDS ravaged urban areas throughout the USA. During this decade several California state legislators began employing gay policymakers for their expertise and community connections in an attempt to deal with the pandemic.
Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is writing a doctoral dissertation on American policy-making on HIV/AIDS. This project focuses on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and Illinois.