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The IUP Journal of American Literature
`From the Paralysis of Fear to the Response of Solidarity': Mapping the Literary AIDS in America
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AIDS remains a socially pressing problem in America as in the rest of the world. According to a survey by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published in 2009, an estimated 1.1 million people are living with HIV in the US. This paper attempts to establish a specific literary trajectory of AIDS as constituted through genres such as essays, novels, memoirs, short stories, and poems, among others. Further the paper seeks to elaborate how these artistic statements are related, how they articulate an alternative vision about AIDS, and finally, how these texts depict the trials and tribulations of People with AIDS (PWAs). Keeping this as the backdrop, the present paper provides an overview of the following texts: Paul Reed's Facing It: A Novel of AIDS (1984), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), Samuel R Delany's The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985), Susan Sontag's experimental short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986), Paul Monette's Borrowed Time (1988), Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika (1993), Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days from Now (1994), Charlotte Watson Sherman's Touch (1995), Edmund White's The Married Man (2000), and Marvelyn Brown's The Naked Truth: Young Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive (2008), among others.

 
 
 

A report published by Avert, an international HIV and AIDS charity organization based in the UK, estimates that more than half a million people in America are living with AIDS and another half a million have already died of AIDS. Given the magnitude of the spread of the disease, it is not surprising that the artistic communities have responded to the crisis "from very public big-name benefits to very private works of anger and eloquence, despair and hope," as Baker has observed (1994, p. 14). While it is challenging to compile all the artistic responses to the epidemic, given the transnational character and the sheer plentitude of responses, this paper seeks to document the major literary responses to AIDS, drawing instances from American literature. In so doing, this essay attempts to establish a specific historical trajectory of AIDS as constituted through linguistic constructions.

The first decade of AIDS epidemic, especially the initial years of the outbreak, witnessed such sentimental, irrational, punitive, fantastic, and polemical response that it far exceeded the threats posed by the illness. Homosexual men, the incidental victims of AIDS since the recognized beginning of the epidemic, were misidentified as the originators of AIDS to the extent that the syndrome was (mis)named with an unfortunate acronym Gays Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). This was further augmented by the way science and popular culture, especially the media, tenuously but steadily defined AIDS as a gay plague. If the media, through its reckless representations, held homosexuals responsible for the outbreak of the disease, the Ronald Reagan administration, as well as most state and city governments, with its conservative and retributive moralism was equally ill-informed and negligent of the crisis.

 
 
 

American Literature Journal, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, American Literature, Gays Related Immune Deficiency, GRID, Mythical Neveryon, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, Ethnic Minorities, Biomedicalization, Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, HAART, Biographical Memoir.