Recovery of the Margins: Needle Exchange, Harm Reduction, and LGBT Social Movement History

Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland

In the 1990s, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP created a needle exchange program in New York in the name of a “throwaway class” of drug users, people of color, and homeless people.  Hanhardt explores how this movement incorporated people often excluded by mainstream LGBT activism and reflects on how recovery became a vexed, constitutive term for the politics of harm reduction and for social movement historiography.