Domestic contexts for response to global HIV/AIDS in France: Perception, media role and civil society

France showed incremental increases in foreign aid for human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) with the slope being steeper than Japan but being gentler than the United States in the 1980s. The intermediacy in the behavioral pattern was conditioned by domestic social and cultural determinants that constituted the understanding and the view of the impacts and the implications of the epidemic among the public and the policymakers. The newly emerged epidemic was distinctively framed and understood as 'gay disease', 'social phenomenon' and 'national cause'. The research traces the process in which such determinants as the number of HIV-infected, role of the media and activism of civil society organizations shaped the perception of HIV/AIDS as something that needed to be publicly discussed and immediately responded at the national level.