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. |