Pronouns: He/him
Title: Assistant
Professor, Bioethics and Health Humanities
Twitter: @StephenMolldrem
Email: stmolldr@utmb.edu
Can you describe your LGBTQ+ health equity work? My work related to LGBTQ health equity has primarily centered on federal sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data policy in the US. I mainly focus on understanding
how SOGI data has been incorporated into US clinical, research, and public health information technology infrastructures since the 2010s. Since 2015, I have also conducted qualitative policy analysis, ethnographic research, and qualitative interview
studies of HIV data infrastructures and their operators, LGBTQ health activists, HIV/AIDS practitioners, and HIV/AIDS activists in the US. I also collaborate with stakeholder groups in LGBTQ health and HIV/AIDS, helping to inform federal policy development
related to SOGI data and HIV public health policy. It is difficult for me to disentangle my work in LGBTQ health with my work in HIV/AIDS. This is partly because the ways that public health data about people living with HIV and LGBTQ people are generated
and used in the US have both been radically transformed over the last decade or so, largely as the result of changes in the country’s health information technology policy frameworks. Shared concerns around data justice are one reason that struggles
for equity for people living with HIV and sexual and gender minorities will remain inextricably linked for the foreseeable future.
What does celebrating Pride, at this moment, mean to you? I feel very ambivalent about Pride in the US, which has transformed from a set of community-based events put on by grassroots LGBTQ activists starting in the 1970s to a complex
series of activities that take place every year across society-at-large, concentrated in June, often with a lot of corporate sponsorship and visibility. Many brands and large firms now treat June as a month to turn their logos rainbow-colored in showings
of shallow solidarity. This phenomenon is sometimes called “rainbow capitalism.” I certainly recognize the importance of proactively including LGBTQ people in economic affairs as a way of resisting discrimination and promoting inclusion.
However, I am concerned that this kind of consumerism is becoming the primary focus of Pride, potentially de-emphasizing the many deep-rooted economic inequalities that are experienced by LGBTQ people, which are effects of both capitalism and cisheteronormative
structures of dispossession that prevent LGBTQ thriving. I am personally most inspired by gay liberation activists of the early 1970s who fought for gay and lesbian communities from a left-wing perspective in the immediate wake of the Stonewall riots,
AIDS activists of the 1980s and 90s who used performative activism and direct action to transform biomedical research, and queer activists of the 1990s who played central roles in resisting the gentrification of LGBTQ urban territories and pushed
back against an increasingly mainstream gay and lesbian movement. These tendencies in LGBTQ politics advocated for forms of social and economic transformation that most mainstream contemporary Pride discourses do not place at the center of their projects.
With that said, I am encouraged by grassroots efforts to reclaim Pride as a grassroots event and to resist the presence of police at Pride, which are demands that have emerged forcefully over the last several years. So, for me at this moment, Pride
mainly means continuing to fight against the many forms of state violence, economic dispossession, and social sanction that are perpetuated against LGBTQ people and people living with HIV. We are currently seeing a lot of this in Texas and other states
in the form of regressive state-level policies and pieces of legislation that target sexual and gender minorities. Celebrating Pride ought to mean centering and uplifting forms of resistance and struggle in our collective efforts to improve the situation
of LGBTQ people in contemporary society.