Loss and after in US AIDS Literature

In a nuanced and richly textured analysis of US literary responses to AIDS since the 1980s, Monica Pearl argues that AIDS literature—printed in the United States and Britain—offered a space for US gay men to talk to each other as a community. While she surveys the early 1980s responses to AIDS in her introduction, she largely concentrates on AIDS literature after 1988, when a more extensive AIDS literature, including novels, began to emerge.

Throughout the six chapters of AIDS Literature and Gay Identity, Pearl draws on psychoanalytic literary theory, specifically theories of melancholia and mourning, while foregrounding how and why US AIDS literature further elaborated the affective losses expressed in the gay “coming out” stories of the 1950s. For Pearl, the “ambivalence [in AIDS literature] is what allows and produces the literature itself” (15). In tandem with this approach, she demonstrates that AIDS literature expanded on the preoccupations of the earlier coming-out story and that this is reflected in the emergence of two genres of AIDS literature: gay realist fiction and queer hybrid texts (where the latter challenge the conventions of gay realist fiction and literary genres). She then analyzes the role of the ACT UP Oral History Project in providing a space for AIDS activists’ histories to be archived and shared and the emergence of conversations among AIDS activists in social media forums such as Facebook. For Pearl, the use of social media is a continuation of earlier conversations initiated by AIDS activists, gay novels, and queer hybrid texts.

A central thesis in the book’s final chapters is that the dominant preoccupations in AIDS literature change after 1995 when HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) becomes available in global North contexts, since HAART changes perceptions of HIV from a death sentence to a manageable chronic condition. She argues that the emergence of HAART constitutes a “treatment threshold” after which marriage becomes a much stronger recurring theme in gay novels (1). What is most interesting about the thematic focus on marriage, she notes, is that it was prefigured in earlier 1980s AIDS literature, such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart.

Though overall the book is skillfully crafted and pays particular attention to the shifting concerns of US AIDS literature, it lacks discussion of AIDS literature or art outside the United States. Thus, even though Pearl deftly utilizes ideas from psychoanalytic literary theory, her suggestion that AIDS literature facilitated the gay male community’s access to “universal” narratives limits the idea of AIDS literature to a US trajectory. Pearl’s main example of a universal narrative is the “universal expressions of loss” (36). Clearly this choice reflects Pearl’s expertise in US AIDS literature as well as the fact that AIDS literature, for many people, is US literature. However, the idea of “universal” narratives is based on a troubling premise. For example, Pearl closes her book by referencing Benedict Anderson’s (1983) analysis of the role of print cultures in instilling nationalism by creating an “imagined political community” in European contexts beginning in the late eighteenth century. However, scholars such as Partha Chatterjee in “Whose Imagined Community?” (1994) have critiqued the Eurocentric bias underpinning Anderson’s conception of both the role of print capitalism in forging community and nationalism as a “universal” process.¹ Thus in making reference to Anderson sans Chatterjee’s critiques, Pearl sidesteps the act that Anderson’s theory reinscribes Eurocentric approaches to print capitalism and nationalism.

Notwithstanding the above critique, this is an articulate and illuminating study of a literature that, in Pearl’s own words, is immensely poignant. This book will interest anyone who wants to get a sense of how to frame the sheer diversity of US AIDS literature, as well as those who want to know more about how the genres of US AIDS literature are intimately tied to cultural politics.

Lastly, Pearl’s particular blend of chronological and thematic analysis works well as an analytical framework that is responsive to how AIDS literature in...