Homosexuels chrétiens au temps du sida. Expérience de l’épidémie et ressources militantes et spirituelles au sein de l’association David et Jonathan (1982-1997)

During the 1980s and 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic profoundly transformed the homosexual movement in France. Within it, the David et Jonathan association (D&J), founded in 1972, occupied a unique position as a space for reconciliation between homosexual experience and Christian faith. Drawing on the association’s archives and on a survey conducted in 1990–1991 by sociologist Michael Pollak, this article examines how Christian gay men experienced the epidemic and developed militant and spiritual responses to the disease at the end of the twentieth century. While the members of D&J shared—like other homosexual experiences—a common experience of AIDS marked by fear, prevention, and grief, their Christian background gave rise to a distinctive spiritualization of the crisis. The associative framework played a central role: by providing a collective space for speech and action, D&J enabled its members to access specific activist resources drawn both from traditions of Christian commitment and from homosexual networks. This associative sociability fostered the appropriation of activist knowledge and the implementation of targeted initiatives. Through this study, the HIV/AIDS epidemic appears as a pivotal moment in the redefinition of the relationships between faith, sexuality, and activism, revealing how, in the face of the ambiguity and limits of ecclesiastical responses, D&J became a place for the reinvention of religious, activist and solidarity practices.