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Quinn, Edward. "AIDS literature." Writer's Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 17 Apr. 2025. <http://fofweb.infobase.com/wrc/Detail.aspx?iPin=Gfflithem0020>.
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AIDS literature

Definition 
In the relatively brief period since its outbreak in the early 1980s, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) has resulted in the production of a large body of literature. Most of this work has formed the central theme of contemporary gay literature. As the disease achieves the dimension of a worldwide epidemic, however, a small but increasing proportion of AIDS literature is being written by nongays.

Much of the early AIDS literature was angry, direct, and combative, striving to overcome the hostility, superstition, and fear that greeted the disease. While more recent literature has retained this angry tone, it has been tempered by infusions of comedy and the themes of love, compassion, and remembrance.

Among the early accounts of the disease was Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, published in book form in 1984, and later dramatized on public television, and Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart (1985), the first play to bring AIDS to the attention of the general public. The outstanding chronicler of the disease in fiction is Paul Monette, who died of AIDS in 1995. Monette's memoirs Borrowed Time (1988) and Becoming a Man (1992), and his novels Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991), affirm the strengths of homosexual love in the face of death. Monette is also the author of a moving collection of poems celebrating the life of his deceased lover, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988).

In drama, the AIDS crisis forms the center of the most acclaimed American play in many years, Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1989), a two-part drama that touches on a broad range of themes with AIDS playing a central role. Outstanding among nonfiction accounts of the disease is Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On (1987).

Among the nongay literature of AIDS, a notable example is Alice Hoffman's At Risk (1988), the account of an eleven-year-old girl's contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion.

In film, the epidemic has been captured in Longtime Companion (1990) and Philadelphia (1993). In the latter film 53 AIDS-infected people were employed in bit parts; by the end of 1994, 43 of them had died, a gruesome reminder of the close connection between fiction and fact.

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