The advent of HIV/ AIDS is the moment that captures the real energies made possible by the outpouring of the carnal pleasures that Stonewall unleashed. Stonewall was queer sexual liberation, alongside heterosexual liberation, but HIV/ AIDS was citizen-making; the distinction is important. HIV/ AIDS worked to produce a very particular and specific queer subjecthood. It was a subject who was sick and diseased in a fashion different from how homosexuality as illness had been previously conceived (even though in some people’s view one illness led to the other) in the “eventful moment” of AIDS. Thus, it is in the realm of sickness and death that a very specific queer subjecthood comes into being. This queer subject also becomes a rights-seeking subject. It is my argument, then, that Stonewall was not the central route through which a modern queer citizenship took hold. Rather it was in the initial impetus/ moment of AIDS in which a “proto-queer citizen” was forced to react and respond to the “stealing” of his carnal pleasures that rights talk and citizen-making became a queer project of self-hood and thus state citizenship.
—Rinaldo Walcott, “Queer Returns”