The Best Buy Theater at Northrop seats just 168 people, tucked on the fourth floor of a building that has anchored the University of Minnesota campus since 1929. On the evening of October 8, 2026, that intimate room will host the opening night of a new lecture series — and a homecoming of sorts. Dr. René Esparza, who earned his PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2017, returns to present from his book, From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS, published by the University of North Carolina Press in October 2025.
The event is the first in the College of Liberal Arts' new Making Minnesota series. A reception begins at 5 p.m. in the Northrop Gallery; the program starts at 6 p.m. in the theater. It is free and open to the public, though registration is required. After Esparza's presentation, Dr. Elliott Powell of the Department of American Studies will join him for a conversation, concluding with audience questions.
The book itself is a deliberate act of geographic correction. Most histories of the American AIDS epidemic begin in San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles. Esparza shifts the lens to Minneapolis and St. Paul, arguing that the Twin Cities are not a footnote to that history but a case study in how the crisis reshaped the urban Midwest. His central claim is bracing: that real estate — who could buy, rent, live where, and with whom — is essential to understanding how AIDS unfolded in the United States.
In a 2021 interview with Washington University in St. Louis, where he is now an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, Esparza described the book's argument in plain terms. The driving force behind racial disparities in the epidemic, he said, was never the supposed deviant behavior of LGBT people or people of color, but "the unequal living conditions in which these populations have been historically confined, conditions that become embodied as ill health and vulnerability to disease." Residential segregation, in other words, was a pre-existing condition — one that made some communities far more vulnerable to HIV than others.
The book's title captures the political bargain at its center. During the height of the epidemic, Esparza argues, white gay activists and politicians in the Midwest pursued social acceptance by assimilating to regional norms — a strategy scholars call homonormativity. Respectability, monogamy, and the couple-centered household became the price of admission to mainstream Midwestern life. That bargain, he contends, diluted the radical edges of LGBTQ activism, severed ties with communities of color, and helped clear the way for the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.
AIDS provided the pretext. As Esparza documents in the book, the epidemic intensified criminalization of people already deemed sexually deviant — sex workers, "promiscuous" gay men, and transgender women — and of the venues where casual, anonymous encounters took place: bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks. Cleaning the city of land uses that undermined gentrification could be framed as a public health measure. The most marginalized residents bore the brunt of the resulting surveillance and displacement.
Esparza's research draws on archival records, oral histories, and urban studies spanning the 1970s through the 1990s. The Twin Cities offer unusually rich material for that work. Minneapolis was home to a dense cluster of gay bars, bathhouses, and cruising grounds, many of them concentrated in and around Loring Park, just west of downtown. The neighborhood's fate across those decades — from a queer enclave to some of the most sought-after real estate in the city — is precisely the kind of transformation Esparza's book sets out to explain.
His argument also cuts against a common assumption about the epidemic's geography. AIDS is often remembered as a coastal catastrophe that arrived late and lightly in the middle of the country. Esparza's work suggests the opposite: that Midwestern cities had their own distinct epidemic, shaped by their own distinct politics of race, space, and respectability, and that the consequences are still legible in who gets to live where today.
The choice of moderator fits the subject. Elliott H. Powell is an associate professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, affiliated with the School of Music, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. His first book, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. The pairing promises a conversation that moves between the history of public health and the cultural politics of race and sexuality.
The event's sponsor list reads as a small map of the constituencies the book addresses: the departments of American Studies, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and History, alongside Minnesota Leather Pride, the Pride Alumni Network, Sex Workers Outreach Project, and UMN Pride @ Work. That roster — academic departments standing beside leather community organizations and sex worker advocacy groups — is itself a statement about who counts as part of this history.
Northrop, the venue, carries its own layer of meaning. Dedicated in 1929, the auditorium was for decades one of the largest performance halls in the region, seating nearly 4,850 people. It closed for more than three years of construction and reopened in April 2014 with a radically rebuilt interior: three balconies where there had been one, a capacity reduced to about 2,700, and seats pulled closer to the stage. The Best Buy Theater, with its 168 seats and its lobby connected to the Northrop Gallery, is a product of that renovation — a small, flexible room built for lectures and panel discussions rather than spectacle.
That scale suits the occasion. This is not a stadium event but a reading and a conversation, the kind of program where an audience can press a historian on the details. And the details are the point. Esparza's book asks readers to see the AIDS epidemic not only as a medical event but as an episode in the history of American real estate — a story about who was allowed to stay in the city and who was moved along.
For anyone who has watched the Twin Cities change over the past several decades, the argument lands close to home. The neighborhoods that queer people once made their own are now among the most expensive in the region. The question Esparza poses is how much of that transformation was written into the response to a plague — and how much of it we are still living with.
The program begins at 6 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, 2026, at Northrop's Best Buy Theater, 84 Church St. SE, Minneapolis. A reception precedes it at 5 p.m. in the Northrop Gallery. Admission is free, but registration is required.