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  • Aids Cluster:Twenty-five Years, 1981-2006
  • David Román (bio)

Introduction

This year, 2006, marks twenty-five years of living with AIDS. In observance of this grim anniversary, the following three essays reflect on AIDS, AIDS activism, and AIDS cultural production in the United States, especially as experienced in the late 1980s. Lucas Hilderbrand, Alex Juhasz, and I each ruminate on our own relationship to these years of devastation and loss, and reflect on how we might critically engage the early archives of AIDS art and activism. The essays, although clustered together, are not meant to be read as a unified voice on the topic. Rather, they are best appreciated as three distinct efforts to prioritize AIDS cultural analysis and criticism within our contemporary moment. Each essay is concerned with the politics of remembrance, and in what is at stake when one begins critically to revisit the past. The essays pay tribute to the diverse and dynamic energies of the AIDS film, video, and activism of an earlier historical moment even as they acknowledge the impossibility of completely addressing the ongoing and global story of AIDS art and activism.

David Román

David Román is professor of English at the University of Southern California, with a joint appointment in USC's Program in American Studies and Ethnicity. He is author of Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts (2005). He is also author of Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS, which won the 1999 ATHE Award for outstanding book in theater studies, and is coeditor of O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, which won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Drama. He served as editor of Theatre Journal, an academic quarterly published by Johns Hopkins University Press, from 1999 to 2003. He is a founding editorial board member of GLQ.

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