3.13 - Gothic, AIDS and Sexuality, 1981–Present

Summary

This chapter considers the ways in which Gothic as a mode interacts with queer history generally and with the history of AIDS and queer communities more specifically within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts. This chapter examines the elision of the histories of Gothic, AIDS and queer sexuality in four texts that marked different stages of the evolution of the AIDS discourse. The first half of the chapter focuses on individual and collective community trauma in the first decade of the AIDS pandemic as represented in Tony Scott’s 1983 arthouse vampire film The Hunger and Todd Haynes’s 1991 seminal New Queer Cinema triptych, Poison. The second half of this chapter considers the ongoing haunting from the first decade of AIDS trauma in the face of a devastating disease and the initial scapegoating of the queer community as the site of contagion. These hauntings are depicted in John Greyson’s 1993 AIDS musical satire, Zero Patience and Lilly and Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski’s 2015–18 trans-genre television show, Sense8.