VIROLOGY

A gay biologist looks at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lenses of queerness and social justice.

NYU microbiology professor Osmundson is a literary essayist—his models and polestars are writers like Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Eula Biss, though he also thoughtfully critiques their work—as well as a cleareyed science writer. His ability to explicate queer theory and epidemiology allows him to make thoughtful connections between the pandemic and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Then as now, he observes, racist responses to outbreaks led to scapegoating, demonization, and needless death; then as now, relationships are redefined by medications and shifting definitions of wellness. The author notes how war metaphors deployed during outbreaks—e.g., likening essential workers or the sick as “heroes”—have long been ethically fraught, giving people license to treat marginalized victims as acceptable losses. “Unexamined Whiteness” in medicine and media tends to make the virus deadlier for minority communities, and capitalism only exacerbates the problem. Osmundson humanizes this dynamic by thoughtfully shifting from his own personal experience—in relationships, at sex clubs, in an activist Covid-19 research group—to the bigger picture of the pandemic. His writing about viruses themselves can be technical, but he adds an emotional valence, approaching them as undiscriminating, common to all human beings. The author writes in various modes, from literary criticism to polemic (Andrew Sullivan comes in for particular scorn) to diarist, the last of which is a potent reminder of the uncertainty and fear that came with the arrival of Covid-19. Throughout, Osmundson exposes how a virus reveals societies’ connections and bigotries. "Where we place our bodies, and with whom, is a biological choice,” he writes, “and a moral and political one.”

A welcome, well-informed, queer-positive study of the blind spots a pandemic reveals.