On the Power of Labels: The Canadian Red Cross Society and the Identification of Groups at High Risk of Developing AIDS

Natalie L. Gravelle

York University (Toronto)

Canada

By the summer of 1983, while blood transfusion services throughout the world excluded members of groups believed to be at higher risk of developing AIDS of donating blood, the Canadian Red Cross Society preferred to ask the leaders of affected communities, notably the gay community and the Haitian community, to encourage their constituents to voluntarily refrain from giving blood for fear of contaminating the Society’s blood supplies. But when the Red Cross issued a press release identifying gay men and individuals of Haitians descent as members of high-risk groups, the humanitarian organization’s response triggered uneven responses in Canadian efforts to contain the threat of transmission through the blood supply.

Community mobilization already underway gave rise to the development of community-based organizations such as the Groupe d’action et de pévention contre le SIDA in Montréal and the AIDS Committee of Toronto, but the ways in which these respective communities responded to the Red Cross’ statement and the ways in which both communities sought to counter stigma and discrimination stemming from being labeled as “high risk” groups played out differently.

About Natalie Gravelle

Natalie is a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Ontario,Canada. She is currently working on her dissertation provisionally titled “Community responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada, 1982-1996.” She wrote her Master’s research paper “From Gonorrhea to the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Canadians and Venereal Disease, 1965-1985” in 2003 at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

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