There have only been four monographs solely on AIDS literature. Two focus on AIDS autobiography and biography, another considers memoir. The most recent book on AIDS literature, Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS considers a variety of genres such as obituary, eulogy and epistle and elegy. Thus far, there has not been an exploration of the “archival turn” in responses to AIDS. This panel of three 18 minute papers offers a redress as the participants situate, critique, and contextualize how a variety of genres respond to the disease through explorations of the archive and the operation of memory.
Carey will start by examining a life-writing public humanities project for women infected with AIDS. AIDS has been predominantly positioned as a “gay disease” in US discourse and the activist response to AIDS has likewise been highlighted as a critical means of queer solidarity. Intravenous drugs users have been continuously elided, despite their central place in the historical and contemporary ramifications of AIDS. This paper examines the life-writing of women who use intravenous drugs in the project I’m Still Surviving: A Women’s History of HIV. This interdisciplinary, multimedia project collects the stories of women—focusing on women of color and poor women—living with HIV across multiple channels: a short film, a pop-up exhibition, and three books featuring transcribed oral histories. Carey analyzes how the collaborative narrators engage with the shame, stigma, and pain of their drug use, arguing that, in narrating these often overlooked and dismissed experiences, the narrators ambivalently, and somewhat paradoxically, theorize AIDS as an essential part of their survival.
O’Connell will then turn to consider a fictionalized form of life writing and recording in two Appalachian novels: Kentucky novelist Fenton Johnson’s Scissors, Paper, Rock and The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels. Both novels are preoccupied with issues of truth and memory, with protagonists who tell their own stories, educating younger family members about the epidemic and the lives it has already claimed. However, Brian in The Prettiest Star not only tells but also records his story, as well as the stories of his friends and his community. The shift between these novels from telling to recording reveals an evolving vision not of the virus itself but rather of voice and the archival record. This paper will also incorporate scholarship on archives, about “the struggle to record and preserve” LGBTQ history that has been described by Ann Cvetkovich. This archival turn will link recent home-grown archives of the queer community with Brian’s archival project to “read the names of the dead. Don’t forget. Say their names.”
Finally, Bell will conclude with an exploration of how memories operate outside and beyond the archive. Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed champion a gay male politics and aesthetics of remembering, arguing, “Memory is an act of resistance,” and they go on to examine acts of memory that combine the fabulous and the factual: “[M]emories are not retrievals of an archived past but something more imaginative and more driven by present needs.” Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance dramatizes such an imaginative memorial act in its prologue, a meta-theatrical framing device in which a young writer invokes the spirit of E.M. Forster to aid in the construction of a play about a generation of gay men born since the AIDS crisis began. In the face of the generational trauma of AIDS, which sundered connections between older and younger gay men, The Inheritance retrospectively constructs an elaborate network of kinship that extends across more than a century of modern gay male experience. This paper regards the play’s fabrication of a gay male ancestry comprised of sexual encounters, literary society, and storytelling as a correction to the traumatized repression of the pre-AIDS past.
The temptation to historicize and archive the AIDS era is strong, particularly in the shadow of the recent Covid-19 pandemic and in the light of recent pharmaceutical developments such as antiretrovirals and PrEP. By putting these approaches to the archive into conversation this panel will consider the ways in which the epidemic is both recorded and then recovered by a variety of genres and examine how these works resist the temptation to historicize an ongoing crisis by using the past to address the “present needs.”