‘What a skewed sense of values’: Discussing PreP in the British press

Abstract

In this article I examine the public discussion of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the UK and investigate how this treatment and its key beneficiaries were framed by the British press between 2012 and 2016. Drawing upon an archive of articles published in national newspapers, I identify the discursive transformation that PrEP underwent during this period, as it moved from being a ‘wonder drug’ that benefited the health of the general population, to a ‘promiscuity pill’ that threatened the lives of the most vulnerable. I illustrate how this transformation was accompanied by a shift in the representation of gay men – who were almost universally positioned as the future beneficiaries of PrEP in the UK. Utilizing critical discourse analysis methods, I explore how gay men went from being ‘upstanding citizens’ to ‘dangerous outsiders’, and how the British press mapped older stereotypes of the diseased gay male body onto newer homonormative representations of the ‘good gay’ and the ‘evil queer’. This analysis reveals the precarious status gay men occupy in ‘post-equalities’ Britain – a status that requires adherence to a particular code of sexual and moral conduct, and the disavowal of long-term health inequalities.