Steven Thrasher Centers HIV and Former Student in Cambridge Union Debate

Professor Steven Thrasher, PhD, of Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH) discussed health disparities and how the United States failed one of his students who was living HIV at a Cambridge Union debate on October 31. 

Founded in 1815, the Cambridge Union is a debating society associated with the University of Cambridge. External speakers and undergraduate students debate topics in front of union members and guests throughout the academic year. Thrasher was invited to participate in the debate titled, “This House Welcomes the Decline of America.” 

In the following Q&A, Thrasher speaks about preparing his argument, his experience participating in the Union’s unique form of participatory debate, and why he centered the life of a former student who recently passed away. 

Photo by Ami Khawaja, Cambridge Union photographer.

The Cambridge Union has a long history of inviting university students, public intellectuals, and politicians to debate. Can you speak more about how the Cambridge Union debates work? 

I first become aware of the Cambridge Union because of the film I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin. The film shows this very famous debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley from 1965. I had seen I Am Not Your Negro many times, and I've taught it, but it wasn't until I was preparing for my debate that I watched the Baldwin-Bukley debate in its entirety. That was the first debate that was televised, but the Union was founded in 1815, so it's more than 200 years old. 

The night of my debate, there were three speakers on both sides. We had two guest speakers and a student arguing for the proposition. And there were three guests arguing against the proposition. These debates are really like democracy in action. The room holds several hundred people. Everyone in the room votes on the proposition, including Union members and guests. It's extremely participatory. 

I grew up thinking parliamentary procedure was about being very stilted and orderly. The debate was much more like Prime Minister's Questions, which is in the UK Parliament when the Prime Minister goes before the House of Commons and answers questions that anyone can shout out at them. At the Union debate, this happens too. Anyone can interrupt you while you're making your speech. Each speaker made a 10-minute speech, and anyone could interrupt and ask for a point of information or ask a question. You can take them or toss them aside as the speaker, but we're encouraged to take a couple. Students can also make floor speeches of up to two minutes between the guest speakers. It's this very participatory way of group learning and debating different ideas. 

After the debate, everyone present votes on the proposition by leaving the room through doors marked “Ayes,”  “Noes” or “Abstain.” 

The debates are a long running tradition at Cambridge and a career highlight for many scholars. How did you come to participate in this particular debate? 

I was invited to speak by a student who is part of the Union who read my book The Viral Underclass and nominated me. They sent me this extremely detailed and beautiful letter inviting me, both saying that the proposition was “this house welcomes the decline of America” and that the proposition did not mean the destruction of America or the violent end of America, but the decline of American hegemony and the decline of America as the sole superpower in a multipolar world.  

I was asked to argue for the proposition and to speak from my expertise as an LGBTQ scholar and scholar of race about the health disparities in America that I write about in The Viral Underclass. However, they said I was free to talk about whatever I wanted, but that students would really value learning from my perspective on health disparities in America.  

I first met the other speakers for the proposition the night of the debate at a ceremony where we all signed a poster for the event and these leather books that have been signed for 209 years. Then they served us a very formal dinner, which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't been nervous. Mary Kaldor, a history-making professor as one of the first women involved in security studies, was also speaking for the proposition. She planned to speak about the War on Terror and make an international relations argument. The student Tilly Middlehurst wanted to speak about the multipolar reality and to respond to the opposition’s arguments. And I knew that I was going to have a very emotional argument, so we decided that Professor Kaldor would go first, Tilly would go second, and that I would go last. 

As you prepared for the debate, how did you decide what you wanted to talk about? Did you know you wanted to bring in a personal story? 

I knew from the invitation that I wanted to talk about health disparities, and I knew that I wanted to talk about queer and trans people in some way, because I always find talking about people in the margins gives the best way to understand a society. There’s a quote from the Combahee River Collective, which was a group of Black lesbian women: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”  

I've long analogized in my writing and thinking about AIDS along the same lines. If there were a world without AIDS, what would that look like? It would be a very beautiful world. In the United States, it would mean eradicating all of the things that still make people become HIV positive. It would mean that everyone had the food, shelter, and security that they needed to leave lives of dignity. So, I knew that I wanted to talk about AIDS in some way.  

For about six weeks leading up to the debate, I thought a lot about this 10-minute speech because I knew that it was going to be among the most important that I’ve ever given. During that time, I found out that a student of mine from the first class that I ever taught had died. His name was Andrés.  

A former student of yours featured prominently in your debate speech. Who is Andrés, and why did you want to tell his story? 

Andrés had come in and out of my life over the years. Sometimes we would be in touch a lot, certainly in the first year of COVID we were. But I had not heard from him in some time, and I found out through other students that he had died of a drug overdose a few months ago.  That quickly emerged in my mind as the story I wanted to tell in my speech. When I watched past speeches, most people were very policy oriented. In my own research, I do write about policy. But I often like to ground it as a journalist and as a queer scholar in the experiences of people who are experiencing whatever policy is being talked about. 

Andrés was in the first class ever taught, a class about the history of police violence, while I was a grad student at NYU in 2017. As a first-time professor with my own class, I had these very structured lessons planned down to the minute. Andrés was a student who would completely just upset all my plans. He was brilliant. He was a very good debater. He'd been a high school debater, and he was extremely argumentative. He was gay, and he was extremely defensive of trans students, extremely defensive of oppressed people. And he really taught me how to be a teacher. He taught me a couple of things about NYU students that I didn't know, including how many students were doing sex work and how that really related to the amount of debt they take on.  

As I watched James Baldwin’s Cambridge Union speech again while preparing for the debate, I realized how much Baldwin talked about his own family and his nieces and nephews. I knew that I wanted to ground my speech talking about Andrés and an experience I had never written or talked about publicly until now. 

One day when Andrés was really acting out, I kept him after class. He told me that he was HIV positive and that I was the first adult he had told. He hadn't told his parents. He had talked to some friends. I felt this real responsibility as a queer person in his life to try to help him. And that really taught me so much about myself and myself as a teacher. I don't have kids, but I took seriously the responsibility that I might be in this person's life so he can come to a queer person in a way that he can't go to other people in his family. Andrés didn't want to begin treatment because he was on his parents’ insurance plan, and he was really worried that they might find out that he was HIV positive through a bill or lab testing statement. So he was forgoing treatment. I helped get him into care,  which required a very creative solution because he fell into this loophole of technically having insurance, but needing to get into programs that covered the uninsured so that his parents would not be alerted. We did find a good organization that that was willing to help him. 

Photo by Ami Khawaja, Cambridge Union photographer.

Can you speak to why young people, and LGBTQ young people especially, may be vulnerable to the way health insurance is provided in the US? 

In the United States, young people 18 to 26 whose parents have health insurance plans are able to stay insured on those plans. But doing that creates this very strange power dynamic because you have to ask mom and dad for this thing that’s particularly difficult when talking about issues of sex and gender. If you're a trans person who wants hormones, or if you're HIV positive and need HIV meds, or if you need abortion, these things may require your parents’ permission. And this puts queer young people in a really dangerous position. So many queer people and trans people begin to understand themselves in those years. They go away to college, they start to understand their identity, and they're standing on their own feet. They're in community with others, but they're also under parental control for this basic human right to health care.  

The proposition of the evening was, “This House Welcomes the Decline of America.” What does that statement— the decline of America— mean to you in the context of the Cambridge Union debate? 

From the invitation I received and by looking at how the Union argued based on previous debates, I interpreted the argument to mean the decline of America’s influence in a multipolar world. 

In the debate, I said that if Black gay men in the United States were a country, we would have the highest rate of AIDS on anywhere on Earth. That part of American life should decline. We should not have a country where only people with access to health insurance can thrive. The people who are most likely to become HIV positive and to develop AIDS are people who are incarcerated and people who are homeless. That part of America should decline. A country where people don't have access to housing and that locks up more people than anywhere else should decline. We have all of these conditions inside of our country that leave a huge portion of our population at risk for HIV and AIDS, for COVID, and for other infectious diseases. And that's something I think we should welcome the decline of. 

I interpret a "decline in America" to include a decline in homophobia, a decline in cis-hetero supremacy, a decline in transphobia, a decline in pinkwashing. When I was writing my speech, I was imagining a world where homophobia and transphobia do not exist. I was imagining an America where trans and queer people shape a national agenda that is fair to everyone and that centers other queer trans and queer people not just in the United States, but around the world.