hello I just read ur aids fic layout and I was wondering if you had any aids literature recs? u just seem super knowledgeable and I have: research to do
oof yes!! ok so paul monette is my favorite AIDS lit person. pretty much everything he has written is worth reading, but borrowed time: an aids memoir is one of the most heartbreaking and beautiful pieces of writing i’ve ever read. GOD. he also wrote a book of poetry called love alone: eighteen elegies for rog in the year after his partner died. it is like the kind of book that makes you ugly cry while reading because every word feels so frantic and desperate and breathless, like he’s trying to get down everything he remembers before it starts to fade. other poets you might check out: melvin dixon, essex hemphill, thom gunn.
larry kramer’s the normal heart I have not actually read but it often gets recced (and they made a movie of it fairly recently too I think?). his “1,112 and counting” essay is one I frequently assign.
michael cunningham’s the hours is a little more tangentially about AIDS but it’s still a fairly important. i also freaking LOVE alan hollinghurst’s novels, which are mostly about British gay life. the line of beauty and the swimming-pool library are my favorites of his. colm toibin’s blackwater lightship is a delicate, beautiful little novel about a gay Irish man dying of AIDS who is being cared for by his mother, i think (it’s been a while since I read it).
ummm hmm one of the first things I read years ago was randy shilts’s and the band played on. ti’s definitely worth reading but also worth reading what other people have said about it since. shilts sort of.. sensationalizes aspects of the epidemic, especially around the narrative of a “patient zero,” who kind of becomes this evil scapegoat for the epidemic. later shilts kinda backtracked on that and was like oh yeah it wasn’t esp responsible of me as a journalist to tell the story that way. SOOO you know, grain of salt.
if you are doing actual research and want some primary source stuff, you might want to read how to have sex in an epidemic and play fair! which were some of the very early safe sex manuals developed within the lgbtq community, as a direct response to the intense & deeply homophobic fearmongering/sex shaming that was happening in the early days of the epidemic when people didn’t know much about the virus. both documents are super interesting too just as like, a record of how people were talking and thinking about sex! the act up oral history project is also an INCREDIBLE resource – hours and hours of recorded interviews (plus transcripts) with people who survived the epidemic. super moving and super fascinating material, and just an incredible resource to have available online, esp given how little emphasis AIDS receives in your average US history class.
there’s LOTS of good movies about AIDS in the ‘80s too! here are some of my faves.
hands down the most devastating and fascinating thing i’ve watched about the epidemic is the documentary we were here, which is just like.. interviews with five? six? survivors who lived through the height of the epidemic in san francisco. it’s a simple but incredibly powerful piece – they really let the interviewees kinda speak for themselves, without a lot of framing narration, which I think makes it even more effective. of the AIDS documentaries i’ve seen it is prob the one that best conveys the emotional/psychological toll AIDS had on lgbtq communities. I would also recommend United In Anger if you want a documentary that gives more of a sense of general timeline, context, response, etc., focusing on ACT UP and affiliate activist groups. and then if you are craving more detail, How to Survive a Plague gets into more of the nitty gritty of grassroots AIDS activism. I found it a little drier but still worth watching.
other films I liked: longtime companion, as well as two more experimental documentary type films: silverlake life: the view from here and tongues untied (which is a super interesting mixed genre documentary about Black gay male life in the ‘70s and 80s more generally, but has a fair amount of AIDS specific content). i have not seen it myself but we’re still here is (i think?) a follow-up of sorts to we were here, about people who contracted the virus in the 80s/90s and are living with HIV/AIDS today (and i think it is intended kinda to rectify a still very white narrative of the AIDS crisis + AIDS activism – more focus on POC and trans people living with HIV). another very very fascinating documentary that also explores the (continued) impact of AIDS on POC communities is a recent-ish PBS documentary called ENDGAME: AIDS in Black America.
