Around this time of this picture I was warning Foucault about Aids. When I first told him about the disease he said: “Oh that's perfect Edmund: you American puritans, you’re always inventing diseases. And one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays – how perfect!” Gay rights had been so hard to fight for that Aids felt like a real reversal. It just seemed to be too perfect for him to believe in it. I tried to insist that it was real despite its ideological aspects.
Living in San Francisco in the Seventies he had been promiscuous. He loved the bath houses and all that. I think that might have been where he got infected. But he was very secretive about his illness and the doctors were very secretive about it with him. There used to be a cloak of silence over such things. The doctors were intimidated by Foucault’s anti-medicine stance. They didn’t want to be accused of having a paternalistic or an I’m-better-than-you attitude. He himself wasn’t sure what his illness was until the last few months (he died in 1984). He was horrified at the thought that he might have infected his partner but fortunately he hadn’t.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/5hs2dw/foucaults_views_on_hivaids/
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