39 - AIDS Literatures

Summary

Understood as a response to trauma, the literature of AIDS may be more akin to war literature or Holocaust literature than to other kinds of gay and lesbian writing. The category of "AIDS literatures" encompasses not only imaginative writing but also performance, activism, and documentary, along with scientific, journalistic, and bureaucratic discourses surrounding the epidemic. This chapter focuses on writing by gay men in the disparate genres of memoir, poetry, drama, and pornography. Poetry, particularly in the form of elegy, offers an occasion for commemorating the dead, and there has been no shortage of occasional lyrics about ailing or deceased individuals by poets of all sexualities, genders, races, and abilities. Activist performance, community theatre, and popular gay discourse surrounding the epidemic all contributed to the literary works that have been canonized as "AIDS Literature". Historians' and critics' ambivalence about pornography is matched by pornography's uncertainty over how to represent safer sex practices without compromising its primary function of arousal.