“Stop AIDS Evictions!”: Discrimination, Rent Regulation, and New York City's Housing Crisis (1985–1988)

The early AIDS epidemic in New York City revealed the intersection of two long-term crises impacting gay and lesbian tenants in the city: a critical lack of affordable housing and homophobic discrimination in private and public housing provision. People with AIDS and their family members faced tenant harassment, eviction, and structural homophobia in New York State's rent regulations. This article's microhistory of the eviction of Michael Brown, a rent-regulated tenant in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, highlights how activists brought knowledge acquired in the traditional tenant movement into new gay and lesbian organizations. This collaboration was a result of Chelsea's history as a center of both militant tenant organizing and neighborhood-based gay and lesbian activism. In Chelsea, gay and lesbian residents joined the housing movement as low-income tenants, while also participating in neighborhood activism reflecting their concerns as gay and lesbian residents. Michael Brown's eviction case brought these two local organizing traditions into direct collaboration. This article builds on scholarship revealing the political agency of tenants and recent literature on housing and care during the AIDS epidemic by situating gay and lesbian advocacy for housing during the early AIDS crisis within a long trajectory of New York City tenant activism.