Year

Author 1992 Adam Mars-Jones

Author description

Title Monopolies of Loss

1988 Adam Mars-Jones; Edmund White

The Darker Proof

1990 Allen Barnett

The Body and Its Dangers

1988 Andrew Holleran

Ground Zero

1989 Christopher Bram Christopher Coe

In Memory of Angel Clare Such Times

1986 Craig G. Harris

African-American

"Cut Off from Among Their People," In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology Les nuits fauves Martin and John

1989 Cyril Collard Dale Peck

1989 David B. Feinberg

Eighty-Sixed

1991 David B. Feinberg

Spontaneous Combustion

1991 David Wojnarowicz

AIDS-activist painter

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

1993 Doug Wilson 1987 Emmanuel Dreuilhe

Labour of Love Corps corps

1991 Essex Hemphill (ed.)

Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men

Fenton Johnson

Scissors, Paper, Rock

1989 Gary Indiana 1993 Gary Indiana 1992 Geoff Ryman

Horse Crazy Gone Tomorrow Was

1988 George Whitmore

Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic

1991 Herv Guibert 1992 Herv Guibert 1992 Herv Guibert 1992 Herv Guibert

Le protocole compassionnel L'homme au chapeau rouge Le paradis Cytomgalovirus: Journal d'hospitalisation A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauv la vie

1990 Herv Guibert

James Robert Baker

Tim and Pete

1993 Jameson Currier

Dancing on the Moon: Short Stories About AIDS

1988 Joel Redon John Irving 1989 John Preston (ed.)

Bloodstream In One Body Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS

1989 John Weir

The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket

1992 Joseph Caldwell

Uncle from Rome

1989 Larry Duplechan 1985 Larry Kramer 1988 Larry Kramer 1992 Larry Kramer

African-American

Tangled Up in Blue The Normal Heart Just Say No The Destiny of Me

1989 Larry Kramer

1990 Michael Cunningham 1989 Michael Klein (ed.)

Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist A Home at the End of the World Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS

1989 Michael Lynch

Toronto-based American These Waves of Dying AIDS-activist and academic. Friends A Matter of Life and Sex

1991 Oscar Moore

1993 Paul A. Sergios 1991 Paul Gervais

One Boy at War Extraordinary People

1991 Paul Monette 1990 Paul Monette 1988 Paul Monette

Halfway Home Afterlife Borrowed Time

1988 Paul Monette

Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog

Paul Rudnick

Jeffrey

1991 Peter McGehee 1992 Peter McGehee 1989 Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Boys Like Us Sweetheart Camere separate

1991 Rachel Hadas

Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop

1987 Randy Shilts 1992 Richard Hall 1988 Robert Ferro

And the Band Played On Fidelities Second Son

1989 Ron Schreiber 1985 Samuel R. Delany

1990 Sarah Schulman 1990 Terrence McNally 1992 Thom Gunn

John African-American science- "The Tale of Plagues and fiction writer Carnivals," Part III of Flight from Nevron People in Trouble Andr's Mother The Man With Night Sweats

Tony Kushner

Angels in America: Millenium Approaches and Perestroika (two parts)

1990 William Finn and James Lapine 1992 William Finn and James Lapine

Falsettoland Falsettos

1985 William M. Hoffman

As Is

Yves Navarre

Ce sont amis que vent emporte Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS

1984 Paul Reed

Facing It

Description Country Reprints his four stories from The Darker Proof and adds five new pieces--largely confirms the point he makes in the book's introduction about the "detachment" of his artistic approach to AIDS. AIDS is a dominant concern in only two of the new stories, and in the one that comes closest to "facing things" about the epidemic, the sometimes very poignant "The Changes of Those Terrible Years," Mars-Jones has the man who turned his home into an AIDS hospice finally close it down. The stories in the pioneering collection The Darker Proof --four by the British writer Adam Mars- UK; USA Jones and three by the American novelist Edmund White--all concern AIDS in some way, yet all seem preoccupied by a fear of getting "more-ish" about the subject. The central characters-three PWAs, four surviving lovers, friends, or caretakers--are highly "defended" and, though some are occasionally "pierced" by their experiences of AIDS, most continue to function with "clenched teeth." The most pointed gay American AIDS fiction of 1990; four of the collection's six stories concern AIDS. Its centerpiece, "The Times As It Knows Us," counterpoints the media's stereotypical depiction of gay men under AIDS with the more complicated behavior of a Fire Island household during a weekend AIDS crisis. Moving tributes to dead or imperiled friends dot Andrew Holleran's essay collection, Ground Zero, but most of the pieces concern Holleran's own "depression" at AIDS and his difficulty in writing about the epidemic as an author whose predominant modes have been doomed romanticism and camp wit. About the surviving lover and friends of a New York filmmaker who died of AIDS. USA Seems to have immersive aims but are also instilled with elements that distance the subject. In the painful death of the narrator's lover, Jasper, as well as in its unusual amount of technical medical information, Such Times seems to want to impress readers with AIDS' "waves of dying," yet the characters' often heartless "pansy bitch" personae give the book a distant and chilly texture.

The basis for the 1992 film about an HIV-positive bisexual French filmmaker.

France

Though we learn at the end of the consciously "decentered" Martin and John that Peck's USA various "Martin" and "John" stories are the narrator's way of finding something "to grab on to" after the "real" Martin's death from AIDS, and though some of the scenes of AIDS suffering are harrowing, the actual subject of AIDS does not enter the book until almost halfway through. Moreover, most of the stories do not concern AIDS, though several concern subjects as unnerving in their own terms, such as degenerative illness, child abuse, and homophobic hatred and violence. Illustrates the continuing conflicts in AIDS literature about close "touch" with the subject. A USA problematic attempt to write AIDS comedy, chronicles the adventures of a panicked seronegative New York gay "clone," B. J., and relegates actual AIDS to a secondary character with whom B. J. had a one-night stand and whom he is pressured into helping ("I don't want to touch Bob"). A sequel to Eighty-Sixed. Now B. J. is HIV-positive, and the tensions in writing AIDS comedy are even more acute, with Feinberg alternately collaring the audience with blunt statements of suffering--"The course of the illness left one raw. Nothing was left but tension and anger"--and placating it with arch remarks: "Why couldn't I have leukemia or some other more socially acceptable malady?" The most vehement AIDS writing of 1991, includes "Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell," the blistering essay that sparked opposition from Jesse Helms and the National Endowment for the Arts when it introduced the catalogue of the 1989 New York AIDS art show Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.

A further sequel to Sweetheart by McGehee's lover, Doug Wilson (d. 1992), based on McGehee's notes. Based on Dreuilhe's diary during the preceding three years in New York, this "News from the France Front" is pervaded with martial metaphors that occasionally obscure the specificity of the author's experience of AIDS while attesting to its severity. The most extensive African-American AIDS writing to that point. More than a quarter of the USA book concerns AIDS, from stirring poems by Melvin Dixon, David Frechette (d. 1991), and Craig G. Harris, to unembellished autobiography like "The Scarlet Letter, Revisited" by Walter Rico Burrell (d. 1990), to an interview and poem by Marlon Riggs (d. 1994) about his film Tongues Untied. A collection of linked short stories in the form of a novel, Fenton Johnson also uses traditional USA realism to "name the unspeakable death" of a young gay man with AIDS who returns to his working-class Kentucky family to die and whose story takes up half of the book. AIDS figures occasionally as a writer obsessively pursues a beautiful, manipulative addict. In its last third, documents the AIDS deaths and suicides of several members of an international film crew. Contains one of the most vivid and moving depictions of AIDS in fiction, in the story of the Canada stricken actor Jonathan, one of several figures involved variously with The Wizard of Oz whose lives Ryman intertwines in the novel. Reports on a middle-class white gay male PWA in New York City, a working-class Chicano gay USA male PWA in rural Colorado, and the AIDS service at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, whose patients are overwhelmingly poor, African American or Hispanic, heterosexual IV-drug users. It remains the only detailed portrait of the latter group in AIDS literature so far. Sequel Sequel Sequel Sequel France France France France

This autobiographical novel focuses on a young writer who obsessively confronts the France "calamity" of his disease and at the same time seeks the "salvation" of a miracle vaccine promised by an American friend who never delivers. In sketching AIDS in the narrator's friends as well, the book created an extra stir for its portrait of the philosopher Michel Foucault as the stricken Muzil. In James Robert Baker's outwardly gritty Tim and Pete, an "over the edge" Southern California USA sexual picaresque, violent rage toward reactionary national responses to AIDS (at the end, a gang of drugged-out "postmodern" terrorist gay men with AIDS is on its way to machine-gun the convention of the right-wing "American Values Foundation") is offset by varieties of alienating thoughtlessness, from the terrorists' "moral insanity" to the title pair's popentertainment derivativeness to reliance on contrived plot devices and soap opera romance conventions. At the hearts of most of these "simple," realistic stories are acts of "passionate" care-taking that demonstrate how the lives of gay men under AIDS, their friends, and families "keep interweaving" and that unembarrassedly convey "the unbearable sorrow which had punctured their souls." A young gay man with AIDS returns to his Oregon family. USA USA A diverse collection of stirring essays by gay and lesbian authors.

The novel does have a person with AIDS as a main character; and in the "blank generation" Eddie, who even in his illness cannot stop living "in quotes" from movies and television, it gives a painful picture of a life wasted in reactive irony. Yet, though some breaks from flipness occur, the book often stays stuck in distancing irony itself through its cool third-person narrator and other "blocked" characters who live in their own "as if" ways. A visiting American opera singer becomes entangled with several Italians, including a transvestite prostitute threatened by AIDS, and is finally able to grieve for his American exlover who died of the disease. An HIV-positive gay man, his bisexual ex-lover, and his ex-lover's wife deal with the effects of AIDS on their relationships in 1985 Los Angeles. USA

USA A delirious skewering of the Reagan and Koch administrations in which government inaction on USA AIDS is one of several targets. After a successful off-Broadway run, continued the story of Ned Weeks from The Normal Heart, with Ned now an AIDS patient at the National Institutes of Health having flashback conversations with his younger self and family. An historically valuable, Cassandra-like "collected diatribes" about AIDS from 1981 to 1988, plus an essay paralleling gay oppression under AIDS with the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Incorporates a person with AIDS in its final sections. Includes work by gay and heterosexual poets, people with AIDS, and loved ones and caretakers. Among its many notable contributions are work by groups that have been underrepresented in AIDS literature: a gay African-American writer--Melvin Dixon (d. 1992)-and several lesbian authors, including Marilyn Hacker and Adrienne Rich. The anthology includes a rare portrait of woman-to-woman AIDS, Carol Ebbecke's "Good Timing," and the moving "Memoir" by Honor Moore and "White Balloon" by Maureen Seaton. USA USA

USA

In recounting the harrowing AIDS deaths of Hugo and most of his friends, Moore assaults the British tolerance of "solitary suffering" with AIDS as well as the general British "embarrassment" at "too much" expressiveness. Yet Moore seems implicated in the same universe himself (and risks distancing readers) in featuring as his protagonist an emotionally constricted sex- and drug-addicted "nice" boy ("Hugo enjoyed appearing detached"), reacting against his suburban and Cambridge milieus by plunging "into low-man's land." Includes the author's experiences as a PWA in what is chiefly a report about AIDS treatments and the alternative AIDS-drug underground. A novel in the form of linked short stories about two dissimilar homosexual brothers and their family. The narrator and his lover return to Boston to be with his older brother and his lover as his brother dies of AIDS and then face the emotional aftermath back in their expatriate home in Italy. A gay male PWA and his heterosexual brother reconcile. USA About three gay male "AIDS widowers" in Los Angeles. USA Charts the suffering and death of Monette's lover Roger Horwitz from AIDS in 1985-1986, USA encompassing at the same time the struggles of affected friends and of the concerned gay community nationwide.

Charts the suffering and death of Monette's lover Roger Horwitz from AIDS in 1985-1986, encompassing at the same time the struggles of affected friends and of the concerned gay community nationwide. The supreme work of immersive AIDS writing so far. It thrusts the horrors of AIDS in the reader's face. Monette embodies his and Rog's harrowing experience in an equally harrowing style, relentlessly withdrawing secure ground from under the reader's feet by a constant shifting of reference, focus, and tone and by stripping each poem of the traditionally stabilizing markers of stanza breaks, punctuation, and end-stopped lines.

USA

Several other 1993 works reflect in differing ways the current national tension about USA "speaking" and "touching" AIDS. The most blatantly counter-immersive is Paul Rudnick's highly praised play Jeffrey, where occasional spirited testimony about AIDS is engulfed by burlesque or camp humor ("It's still our party," says Darius's ghost). The audience is ultimately allowed the self-exonerating experience of feeling it is encountering AIDS while actually being largely diverted from it. Jeffrey's commercial and critical success indicates how powerful the need to evade AIDS remains in our society. Semicomic, semisorrowful novel tracing a group of gay male Toronto friends during the epidemic. Sequel to Boys Like Us. A novel of "deep and sacred mourning" that reviews the love affair of the young Leo and Thomas and traces the quest of the intensely self-examining and chronically "separate" Leo to "become available" to experience again after Thomas's death from AIDS.

Italy

A rare 1991 volume including forty-five poems by the eight members of a poetry workshop the author ran at New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis from 1989 to 1991. It features particularly skillful work by Charles Barber ("Thirteen Things About a Catheter"), Glenn Philip Kramer ("Pantoum for Dark Mornings"), Glenn Besco ("Vernon Weidner Visits in a Dream"), and Dan Conner ("Retinitis"). An impassioned chronicle of the widespread national inaction about AIDS between 1980 and 1985, gave added momentum to AIDS literature. Collection which has four AIDS-related stories ("The Jilting of Tim Weatherall," "The Cannibals," USA "Manhattan Transfer," and "Being a Baroness"). Signals the force of counter-immersiveness in AIDS literature as well. The most distinguished American AIDS novel to that point. Ferro occasionally deflects the reader's attention from the moving love story of two men with AIDS, Mark and Bill, with Mark's family tensions and his camp correspondence with his friend Matthew (who finally seems planning to deflect himself from earth itself, enlisting in a group of gay space travelers). Poems chronicling the sickness and death from AIDS of the author's lover; Delany intertwines reflections about the mounting AIDS crisis in New York between 1982 and USA 1984 (including a rare depiction of AIDS among street people) with a narrative about a similar plague in his fantasy realm. An East Village lesbian and her bisexual lover negotiate their relationship against a background of AIDS activism. Movingly documented a surviving lover's mourning and his rapprochement with his dead lover's mother. A third of Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats (1992) concerns AIDS, with especially noteworthy, rending elegies for lost friends (for example, "Lament," "The J Car").

Won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for best play (both parts), but more time is needed to USA tell whether the praise lavished on it reflects its merit or chiefly critics' guilt at having overlooked earlier AIDS art. In the stories of Prior, Louis, Joe, Belize, and Roy Cohn, Angels in America has brought AIDS and American gay male life before more mainstream viewers than any other work of AIDS writing. Yet the play also regularly shifts focus to another subject, heterosexual women (whom it ironically makes Mormons, one of the most homophobic religions), and also relies heavily on spectacle and a supernatural context (which it then ultimately tries to frame ambiguously). Each of these elements implies an audience (and world) that doesn't want to "touch" AIDS too frontally, plainly, or entirely, and, no matter what Kushner's intention, gives the play an evasive dimension. Musical, enjoyed a successful off-Broadway run, brought the characters from their earlier March of the Falsettos (1981) into the age of AIDS and its painful losses. Winning the Tony Award for best book of a musical, William Finn and James Lapine united their earlier March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland into Falsettos and made Whizzer's AIDS death even more wrenching by juxtaposition to the lovers' original romance. "Spoke" the emergency of AIDS to audiences that had typically seen no artistic demonstration of it before. Hoffman combined the poignant tale of a person with AIDS and his lover with fuguelike choruses of other affected people. USA

France The first anthology devoted entirely to African-American AIDS writing, follows the sample in USA the earlier Brother to Brother in maintaining that literature's testifying, "kicking and screaming" tradition, with a range of outspoken materials covering interviews, personal essays, fiction, and some vivid poems: for example, Marvin K. White's "Last Rights," Rodney McCoy, Jr.'s "Confessions of an HIV Health Educator," Harold McNeil Robinson's "The Vale of Kashmir," and B. Michael Hunter's "Untitled News." Other selected works of AIDS literature also deserve mention: ; Also of note are the first gay American AIDS novel Night Sweat (1984) by Robert Chesley (d. 1990), the first American AIDS play (published in his 1990 collection, Hard Plays, Stiff Parts) the last three volumes of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series, Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987), and Sure of You (1989), where AIDS becomes an ever more prominent subject; the four to six stories about AIDS in each of the Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction collections (1986, 1988, 1990, 1992). Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex (1987), three one-acts; the moving AIDS-related poems that dot Mark Doty's books, Turtle, Swan (1987), Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991), and the National Book Critics' Circle Award-winning My Alexandria (1993); Christopher Davis's Valley of the Shadow (1988), about a wealthy young New York man and his ex-lover as they die from AIDS; Richard Greenberg's play Eastern Standard (1988), Zero Positive (1988) by Harry Kondoleon which features a gay man with AIDS among its main characters; (d. 1994), which mixes AIDS among homosexual and heterosexual New Yorkers with other subjects (published in M. Elizabeth Osborn's 1990 anthology, The Way We Live Now: American Plays & the AIDS Crisis).

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