LGBTQIA+ History Month 2023: Bruce Voeller (1934 – 1994)
To celebrate LGBTQIA+ History Month 2023, we are showcasing profiles for some of the incredible microbiologists and virologists from history who were part of the LGBTQIA+ community. It is important for this community to claim their past, celebrate their present and create their future.
Bruce Voeller was an American biologist and researcher in the field of AIDS. He suspected he was gay throughout his school years, although when he told this to the family minister he was told to ‘put it out of his head’. He graduated in 1956 from Reed College, Oregon, and secured a 5 year fellowship at The Rockefeller Institute, earning a PhD in biology in 1961. In 1966, he became the youngest person to hold an associate professor role at the institute.
Voeller was at the forefront of the fight against AIDS. In the early 1980s, the syndrome was known by various names, including GRID – gay-related immune deficiency. It was Voeller who coined the term ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’, arguing that the term GRIDD was both stigmatising and inaccurate. He also helped found the Mariposa Education and Research foundation, which conducted wide-scale studies on the effectiveness of different condoms and spermicides in preventing the spread of AIDS and other STIs. He persuaded the CDC to aid in his investigations into chief spermicide ingredients such as nonoxynol-9 in inactivating HIV, and published many papers on biomedical and behavioural approaches to combatting AIDS.
Voeller was also an incredibly prominent gay rights activist. He became president of the New York Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an organisation which played a key role in having the first bill introduced which would have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation – the very first gay rights bills introduced anywhere in the country. Voeller left the GAA in 1973 and founded the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force), the first gay rights group to meet at the White House to discuss policy relating to gay and lesbian rights. The task force also fought for the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, greatly reducing stigma and paving the way for further legal reform.
Having vowed to come out before his 30th birthday, Voeller came out as gay aged 29, causing his wife Katja to divorce him. The couple had three children together, and Voeller fought all the way to the Supreme Court to obtain visitation rights for his children. The case was considered a landmark decision in establishing legal rights for gay and lesbian parents. Voeller died of AIDS-related illness in 1994 and is survived by his life partner Richard Lucik. In 2019 he was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honour as one of the inaugural 50 American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” within the Stonewall National Monument in the Stonewall Inn.