Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992
(Doctoral Dissertation by Lisa Garmire, UCSB 1996)
CHAPTER ONE: AIDS NOVELS IN CONTEXT
The obvious consequence of believing that all those who "harbor" the virus will eventually come down with the illness is that those who test positive for it are regarded as people-with-AIDS, who just don't have it... yet. It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence.
- Susan Sontag
1.1 Introduction
As Paula Treichler has noted, the AIDS epidemic "is simultaneously an epidemic of transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification" (32). This was especially true during the first decade of the epidemic, when the lack of literal knowledge about AIDS generated an explosion of the figural meanings of AIDS. Susan Sontag's provocative words, "It was only a matter of time, like any death sentence," describe one of the most powerful ways AIDS was first signified in the United States. Biomedical discourse, the media, and much politically charged rhetoric of the 1980's emphasized a linear and mortal trajectory of AIDS, the effect of which was to collapse the time between diagnosis and death such that an AIDS diagnosis or even an HIV+ test result was represented as a "death sentence." It was within this highly charged context that the early novels about people living with AIDS (what I will call AIDS novels) were written, and a key issue at stake within them is the problem of how to represent the temporality of AIDS.[1] In this dissertation, I will examine the narrative strategies by which the significant AIDS novels I consider both address and resist the apocalyptic significations of time that dominated the rhetoric of AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic in the United States.
1.2 Disease and the Novel
AIDS novels can be linked in part to a larger literary tradition about physical disease. Though much has been written about the relationship between mental illness and literary production, little has been written about the relationship between physical disease and literature.[2] One exception has been the important contribution made by Jeffrey Meyers in Disease and the Novel. In this book, Meyers identifies and describes a particular literary tradition that relates physical disease and artistic production, one that asserts that "The creation of literature is one way of transcending mortality and celebrating human existence, despite the threat of death" (2). He entitles this tradition of linking physical disease with literary production, "Romantic," not to be confused with the British and German Romantics, though he asserts that "The poet-hero whose life and writings most perfectly embody the Romantic idea of the diseased and doomed artist is John Keats...who lived the last year of his life under the constant threat of death" (6). Central to Meyers' conception of a "Romantic tradition" that links literature and disease is the idea of the artist as "an outcast who renounces life in order to create art..." (11). The experience of disease also places the artist in "an existential situation...Man knows he is mortal; disease makes mortality visible and forces the victim to realize what it means to be an isolated being - irreparably condemned to death" (14).
Thus, the key elements of Meyers' Romantic tradition include isolation (the sense of both the distance and the difference of the artist from the healthy), individualism (the sick person's ability to act and think separately from a larger social context), and mortality (the sick person's direct confrontation with the time limits of existence). Also active within this tradition is a particular belief about the relationship between time and art, which asserts that "timeless" art is an important strategy by which to resist the temporal, mortal trajectory of human time. Paradoxically, however, though the sick artist struggles to escape diseased life by privileging an art of timelessness, this desire yet confirms the linear and mortal trajectory of his life.[3]
Though Meyers' articulation of this "Romantic" tradition makes an important contribution to the study of the relationship between disease and the novel, his tradition describes only one possible relationship between them. As he himself notes, Alexander Solzenhitzyn is an important exception to the tradition he describes:
Unlike Tolstoy, Hemingway and Mann, who observed illness objectively, Solzhenitsyn earned his insight through actual experience. He writes in the tradition of Russian realism, of Tolstoy and Chekov, and resolutely renounces the Romantic attitude toward disease. He does not believe the artist is sick or that disease inspires creative genius, aesthetic insight, spiritual knowledge or human dignity. And he does not think that the artist must stand outside society. (16, my emphasis)
Solzhenitzyn's "actual experience" of cancer and of life in a cancer ward influences his representation of the disease in his novel. For him, disease does not figure simply as a literary tool for imagining the philosopher poet contemplating his doom. Rather than focus on isolation, individualism, and mortality, Solzhenitzyn emphasizes the importance of relationships, interpersonal responsibilities and the process of living. Like him, many of the AIDS novelists this dissertation considers, including Paul Monette, David Feinberg and Robert Ferro among others, renounce this "Romantic" attitude toward disease. And, like Solzenhitzyn, they too write from actual experience, but instead of cancer, they live with HIV, ARC or AIDS.
Though Meyers notes that Solzhenitzyn is an exception to the tradition he traces, it is beyond the scope of his project to consider what alternative relationship between disease and art Solzhenitzyn's novel might express. This dissertation will contribute to enlarging the understanding of the relationships between disease and the novel by considering how AIDS novelists write about their disease. A crucial distinction must be made, however, between different kinds of diseases, because different diseases carry different cultural interpretations.[4] Unlike cancer, AIDS is contagious, and, during the first decade of the epidemic, it appeared to be spreading exponentially through an entire community rather than sporadically affecting isolated individuals. Quests for explaining the origin of the virus, the rates of spread, the projected lifetime after an HIV+ diagnosis, and the latest mortality figures led to an increased emphasis on linear history and the propagation of apocalyptic rhetoric about AIDS as "plague."[5] The rhetoric of AIDS became increasingly tied to a language of time. To better understand the significance in the AIDS novels of the narrative strategies for depicting time, we need to understand the tremendous power that the language of apocalypse has had on the American imagination.
1.3 AIDS and Apocalyptic Rhetoric
The vision of Apocalypse has played a crucial role in the literary and cultural imaginations of the Judeo-Christian West. As Frank Kermode has written, "We project ourselves - a small, humble elect, perhaps - past thhe End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle" (8). In the United States, the cultural importance of the apocalyptic imagination can be traced from as far back as the founding of the Puritan colonies to the more recent time of the nuclear age. In his Introduction to In a Dark Time, Joseph Dewey provides a thorough description of the attributes that are manifested in apocalyptic thinking:
a belief in the incessant linearity of history; an unashamed sense of cosmic scale; a sobering belief that history is best understood as a cooperative structure of beginning, middle, and end; the strong possibility of a fast-approaching end; a general dissatisfaction with the moral life of the present culture; a strong awareness of contemporary crisis that draws a definite line between good and evil; an inherently dramatic approach to history that is as riveting as any drama rushing toward a shuddering climax. (12)
Dewey's analysis of the apocalyptic temper of the nuclear age goes no further than 1985. Indeed, the mid to later 1980's saw a distinct bracketing of the nuclear age, with Gorbachav, glastnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and ultimately the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. AIDS replaced nuclear war as the global threat and became the latest site for apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States, as Richard Dellamora has observed in Apocalyptic Overtures, "By 1990, an array of apocalyptic narratives had been inscribed in mystified, homophobic representations of AIDS in the mass media" (6).
Though AIDS novels invoke the apocalyptic representations of AIDS, many of them also seek to resist the dangerously mythic power of apocalyptic thinking. Kermode has drawn a useful distinction between myth and fiction. He writes, "myth operates within diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures" (39). With myth, the past, the present, and most importantly, the future are predetermined. Fictions, on the other hand, "are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change" (39). Because fictions emphasize the process of "finding things out," they privilege time in the present. Kermode's distinction between "myth" and "fictions" is a useful one for understanding some of the key issues involved in the novels about AIDS. Like the fictions Kermode describes, many of the AIDS novels we will consider insist on the possibilities available in the present. Biomedical discourse, not to mention that of the media and the Right Wing, has generated an AIDS myth, the "facts," which imposes a linear, temporal trajectory on AIDS and which focuses on the "inevitable" future of an AIDS diagnosis, such that AIDS=death. Many of the AIDS novels resist the mythic power of this temporal representation of AIDS, often by emphasizing the possiblities available in the present time or by envisioning alternative futures to the mortal End imposed by medical diagnosis.
The AIDS novels, however, cannot wholly extricate themselves from the medical "myths." Indeed, Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, for example, is wholly dependent on the medical "facts" about AIDS for its structure, even though this dependency is not mere submission. Ultimately, all of the AIDS novels address the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AIDS, though they develop differing strategies for alternatively conceptualizing the time of AIDS. The stakes involved in resisting the apocalyptic rhetoric of AIDS are greatly intensified in those AIDS novels that describe the experiences of gay men, because homosexuality has traditionally been so often equated with apocalypse. As Dellamora notes, "The threat sodomy was traditionally taken to pose to both the secular and the religious orders suggests that the association of sex between men with end times is embedded in the political unconscious of Christian societies" (3).
1.4 AIDS as the "Gay Plague"
Much of the recent work done in the study of sexuality, including aspects of the newly emerging field of queer studies, has noted the cultural tendency to yoke male homosexuality with death. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a classic source for the analysis of male-male desire and, as Jeff Nunokawa writes, "Wilde's novelization of the homosexual male subject casts this most common sentence as the gay signature, concentrating fatality in the figure of a male homosexual identity, as the figure of male homosexual identity" (316). Other theorists have claimed that the desire to link male homosexuality with death is a fearful response to imagining homosexual practices. In his disturbing essay, "Is the Rectum a Grave?," Leo Bersani puts it quite vividly, when he writes of the horror of imagining "The infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman" (212). He argues that the intolerableness of imagining male anal intercourse stems from certain prevailing notions about sexual intercourse in patriarchal Western society: "To be penetrated is to abdicate power...It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other" (217, my emphasis).
If we consider the ramifications of Bersani's point, then the very "naturalness" of heterosexuality assigns an "unnatural" designation to homosexuality, and, through a similar oppositional logic, where heterosexual intercourse traditionally is viewed as life-affirming and procreative, homosexual intercourse then is perceived as deathly destructive. In its pursuit to explain "Nature," science has historically reflected these sexual binarisms, and homosexuality was medicalized as an illness until the 1970's.[6] To a large extent, the gay rights movement in the United States and Western Europe involved combatting images of isolated, doomed homosexuals like Dorian Gray and creating communities of highly visible, typically white, urban gays, who celebrated life, freedom, sexuality and success, and who sought to make homosexuality a publically recognized, acceptable lifestyle.
Part of the tragedy of AIDS in the early 1980's was its ominous emergence in the United States as a "gay plague," which threatened to undo a decade of trying to demedicalize and legitimate male homosexuality. In fact, AIDS was initially known in the medical journals not as "AIDS" but as something that specifically targeted gays, GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder). In 1982, the CDC officially changed the name to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), when it first outlined a surveillance case definition, which was modified again in 1983, and then much later in 1987, to include a larger number of diseases that affected individuals other than homosexuals.[7] It wasn't until January 1, 1993, however, more than a full decade since tracking of the epidemic began, that the CDC added a clinical condition that specifically affected women with AIDS.[8] Until this expanded definition was implemented, many people, including many women, were invisible to medicine, the insurance industry and all of the other health-related organizations that operate under the mandate of the CDC.[9] Additionally, with Clinton's election to the presidency in 1992, and with more media attention paid to heterosexual AIDS, public perceptions about AIDS have begun to change. During the first decade of AIDS in the United States, however, the bulk of public perception, exacerbated by media representations of figures like Rock Hudson and Liberace as well as by the slow moving public policy of the Reagan years, imagined AIDS not only as a modern day apocalyptic plague but as a homosexual one in particular.
To talk about the first decade of AIDS in the United States is to inevitably confront the yoking of homosexuality with disease and apocalyptic rhetoric. Because so little was initially known about it (and even today, because we as yet have no cure, no "magic bullet"),[10] AIDS constitutes a site over which multiple discourses and rhetoric vie for the power to alleviate fear of the unknown. In her reading of Camus' The Plague, Treichler explains the dynamic in the novel whereby scientific "facts" combine with people's fears to make plague more imaginable and thus more manageable:
The townspeople of Oran in The Plague experience relief when the plague bacillus is identified: the odd happenings - the dying rats, the mysterious human illnesses - are caused by something that has originated elsewhere, something external, something "objective," something medicine can name, even if not cure. The tension between self and not-self becomes important as we try to understand the particular role of viruses and origin stories in AIDS. (47)
With AIDS, the "general population" was contrasted to the "high risk groups," and because public perception viewed AIDS as the "gay disease," the "not-self" became figured as the homosexual.
The literalization of AIDS into a "gay plague," as a spreading and infectious homosexual epidemic, has had material consequences.[11] As Lee Edelman points out,
it is, after all, the citation of the pressing literality of the epidemic with its allegedly "literal" identification of homosexuality and disease, that fuels the homophobic responses to AIDS and demands that we renounce what are blithely dismissed as figural embellishments upon the "real," material necessities of human survival - embellishments such as civil rights and equal protection under the law. (316)
The gay community came under attack for the very thing it had fought so hard to legitimate, namely its sexuality, and yet again, but now with horrific "evidence," this sexuality was yoked to a ghastly death. An example of this resurrected yoking of homosexuality with death can be seen in Randy Shilts' tremendously popular novelization of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Shilts attributes the spread of AIDS to a single, suicidally murderous homosexual, which reinforces homophobic stereotyping of gay men. As Nunokawa notes, "The story of [Gaetan] Dugas singlehandedly infecting an entire community with HIV serves to narrate his status, in Shilts' novelization, as a reflection of that community" (313).[12]
Important for our discussion is the way that homophobic attitudes toward homosexuality have influenced and reinforced assumptions about the mortal trajectory of AIDS. In a cogent articulation of this point, Nunokawa writes,
if the notion that gay men are subject to extinction encourages the continued homosexualization of AIDS it may also help to account for the continued resistance to the idea that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is not uniformly fatal, the persistent failure to perceive HIV-related infections as things that people live with, as well as die from. AIDS is a gay disease, and it means death, because AIDS has been made the most recent chapter in our culture's history of the gay male, a history which sometimes reads like a book of funerals. (312, my emphasis)
Though HIV infection does not yield immediate death, indeed it is something people "live with," because of its association with homosexuality, AIDS continues to be seen as fatal, that "it means death."
1.5 Cultural Narratives and Plotting AIDS
To link AIDS with male homosexuality, plague and death is to describe a particular cultural narrative about AIDS, one which James Jones has described as, "one of the most potent American cultural narratives about AIDS - and the one with the most dangerous implications for affecting attitudes towards those with AIDS - [which] is that AIDS is a 'plague'" (74). One of the dangerous implications of this cultural narratives is that it imposes what we could call an AIDS plot on the life of a person diagnosed with HIV, ARC or AIDS. To borrow from Peter Brooks, a succinct definition for "plot" is "...the principal ordering force of those meanings we try to wrest from human temporality" (xi). Thus, to describe the plot of a novel is to describe the temporal ordering of its events. The principal ordering force of an AIDS plot is that AIDS means death, or the end of human temporality; in other words, AIDS robs a person of life, of time. Because this AIDS plot plays such an integral part of the cultural narratives about AIDS, any novelist who attempts to write about AIDS must address it. Indeed, many writers have found themselves asking, as Adam Mars-Jones has, "How do you tell a fresh story when the structure [plot] is set?" (1) Though many of the AIDS novels succumb to the AIDS plot, there are also those novels that question its authority. Many of these are by novelists who themselves live with AIDS, to whom challenging the AIDS plot is of mortal concern. Their efforts are courageous, as Treichler notes, "To challenge biomedical authority - whose meanings are part of powerful and deeply entrenched social and historical codes - has required considerable tenacity and courage from people dependent in the AIDS crisis upon science and medicine for protection, care, and the possibility of cure" (40).
1.6 The AIDS Novels of the First Decade
Artistic responses to the experience of the epidemic were initially slow in coming. As others have noted about horrendous historical experiences, such as nuclear war and the Holocaust, writers usually need time to assimilate their experiences, and only later do they have the emotional endurance and strength to express that experience in novels.[13] Indeed, with AIDS, the earliest artistic expressions about people living with AIDS (PLWAs) took the forms of plays, poetry, and short stories. Many of the plays sought to raise public consciousness and promote activism about the government's slow response to the epidemic. An important early figure was Larry Kramer, a gay activist and one of the founders of both the Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP, who wrote a series of plays, including The Normal Heart, which were intended to express his rage at governmental inaction and to incite his audiences to become engaged in fighting the epidemic. Many of the poems, short stories and memoirs acted as testimonies, remembering figures who had died and speaking of the tremendous tragedies and changes AIDS has wrought on gay life. Susan Sontag's short experimental piece, "The Way We Live Now," appeared in The New Yorker in 1986, and introduced the experience of AIDS to the literary imaginations of a wide, general audience.
Many of these early artistic expressions sought to challenge cultural narratives about AIDS, including the authority of biomedicine, which, when it assigns an AIDS diagnosis, plots time in an apocalyptically mortal way, emphasizing the impending End. Though people have continued living upwards of twelve years after an AIDS diagnosis, the common perception continues that, in Sontag's words, "It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence." These artists also addressed the feelings of apocalyptic doom, which were exacerbated for gay men living with AIDS whose homosexuality had been already metaphorized in apocalyptic terms. Indeed, early on, it seemed as if the Christian Moral Majority had God on its side, bringing the Apocalypse and striking down the accursed.[14]
Because AIDS initially decimated large numbers of gay men within the gay communities of New York and San Francisco, not only did HIV+ gay men have to deal with feelings about their own possible mortality, but often were simultaneously trying to cope with the myriad of losses of loved ones and friends. At work in many of the artistic responses to AIDS is the implicit affirmation of an idea cogently expressed by ACT UP's slogan, SILENCE=DEATH. The act of remembering and putting that remembrance into language and art helps keep memories alive.[15] Where AIDS novels differ, at times quite significantly, from the other literary expressions about AIDS is in their creation of narrative spaces that involve a prolonged confrontation with the problem of representing the time of AIDS. In response to the question of how novels differ from short stories, for example, the author David Leavitt has explained that short stories are like affairs - passionate, dramatic, but brief, whereas novels are more like marriages and like life - long and intricate, intimate, relationships.[16] As we will see in our exploration of the novels about AIDS, to describe living with AIDS in the lengthy narrative form of a novel leads invitably to a confrontation with and negotiation of the AIDS plot that has been generated by biomedical discourses, media representations of AIDS and public perception.
Though Dorothy Bryant's A Day in San Francisco was the first novel to make reference to a mysterious new epidemic affecting gay men, it wasn't until 1984, with the publication of Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: A Novel of AIDS, that the first novel appeared which sought to describe the experience of living with AIDS. By 1987, a good number of novels that dealt with AIDS as a central theme began to appear, though none of the novels about gay people living with AIDS received much mainstream public attention. It was also about this time that AIDS began to be perceived as more of a threat to "the general population." Indeed, the first popularly received novel about AIDS was Alice Hoffman's At Risk, which appeared in 1988, and which tells the story of a suburban, white, heterosexual family and the suffering they experience as their daughter Amanda dies of AIDS, which she contracted nonsexually, "innocently," through a blood transfusion.
[17] The AIDS novels of the first decade fall into two large, general categories - novels about gay PLWAs, which are mainly written by men, and novels about children PLWAs, which are almost entirely written by women.[18] During this decade, there were remarkably few novels about women living with AIDS.[19] The 1990's have seen some modifications in the cultural narratives about AIDS. Since Clinton's election in 1992, public discussion about AIDS-related issues has greatly increased, including, for example, the debates about permitting gays in the military, as well as the circulation around the country of the mainstream, award-winning movie, Philadelphia, which addresses homophobia and the fear of AIDS.
1.7 Plotting the Dissertation
Having now placed the AIDS novels in context, in Chapter Two, establishes the apocalyptic narrative paradigm that the majority of the AIDS novels follow. Appearing during the height of the apocalyptic and homophobic rhetoric about AIDS, the earliest AIDS novel, Paul Reed's Facing It, provides a good example of this narrative paradigm, or AIDS plot, which represents AIDS as a linear temporality and which focuses on the future and the assumption that AIDS=death. Chapter Two assesses how Reed's novel engages the problematic contradictions between biomedical discourse and the protagonist's, Andy's, experience of his illness, and this chapter analyzes how the novel ultimately succumbs to the apocalyptic AIDS plot. In order to both illustrate this paradigm and substantiate my claim of its pervasiveness, this chapter draws extensively from the comprehensive bibliography of the AIDS novels published during the first decade of the epidemic. Chapter Three addresses one set of narrative strategies used to resist the apocalyptic representation of AIDS time, namely the use of memory. In David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion apocalypse is resisted by casting the temporal trajectory of the narrative toward the past, with a refusal to look forward into the future. Chapter Four assesses the critical achievement of one of the most important of the AIDS novelists, Paul Monette, and his narrative strategy in Afterlife and Halfway Home of insisting on the importance of the temporality of the present. Chapter Five considerd representative AIDS novels written by women, including M. E. Kerr's Night Kites and Alice Hoffman's At Risk. In this chapter, I also bring my discussion of the AIDS novels into the second decade of the epidemic, and I address the concern of the lack of novels that describe the experiences of women, particularly women of color, and AIDS.
[1]. Not all novels about AIDS are by people living with AIDS (PLWAs), however, as I will discuss, those novels written by PLWAs develop significantly different relationships to AIDS than AIDS novels by other people.
[2]. A good representative example of the work on the relationship between mental illness and art is Sander Gilman's Disease and Representation, in which he works from aspects of psychoanalytic theory to explain the connections between mental disease and artistic production. Allan Brandt's No Magic Bullet provides a good historical assessment of the role sexual disease has played in U.S. social and public policy, however, his study does not extend to the relationship between disease and literary production.
[3]. I use the term "his" purposefully here, because Meyers' book concentrates on male authors and their relationship to the Romantic tradition he traces.
[4]. In her book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag illustrates how AIDS and cancer are represented differently, that cancer is usually described in spatial terms, whereas temporal terms are used to describe AIDS.
[5]. Both Linda Singer in Erotic Welfare and James Jones in "The Plague and its Texts" write about the cultural logic of infection, which is exacerbated in the case of AIDS by the public perception of it as a "gay plague."
[6]. Though the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 heralded the beginning of the gay rights movement, it wasn't until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association, and until 1975 that the American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. My source for this is Wilfrid Koponen's Embracing Gay Identity.
[7]. Treichler's article, "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse," gives a thorough historical overview of the changing ways AIDS was signified in the United States in the early to mid 1980's.
[8]. In particular, the CDC now includes invasive cervical cancer as an opportunistic infection indicative of AIDS.
[9]. There were several important consequences of the fact that heterosexuals, particularly IV drug users and poor women of color, were invisible to the medical industry at this time; these included an underreporting of deaths due to AIDS and the much shorter life-span of women living with AIDS. This invisibility is also reflected in the lack of literature about their experiences with AIDS.
[10]. Once more knowledge is gathered about AIDS and a vaccine or cure has been developed, the apocalyptic aspects of AIDS rhetoric may change. However, as Brandt argues in No Magic Bullet, as long as sexually transmitted diseases are culturally viewed as sinful, "there can be no magic bullet" (202), and I doubt that homosexuality any time soon will be declassified as a "sin" by the world's major religions.
[11]. Not all AIDS theorists have agreed that the metaphor of AIDS as "gay plague" best describes the societal responses to AIDS. Thomas Yingling, for example, argues that "...AIDS shares more, finally, with genocide than with plague...it is the power of others to inflict dying that continues to shape the history of AIDS: the benign neglect of government agencies makes the epidemic a passive-agressive act on the part of national society (the institutionalization of power as indifference)" (306). His point is well-taken, however, the metaphor that continues to dominate the cultural narratives about AIDS is that of "plague."
[12]. Shilts' 600+ page book is actually more complex than Nunokawa gives it credit for. Indeed, Shilts' portrayal of homosexuality oscillates widely in the course of his lengthy book, such that one walks away from it with a sense that Shilts' feelings about homosexuality are ambiguously conflicted.
[14]. Jerry Falwell, for example, said during a television interview in 1983, "'When you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind'" (Shilts 347).
[15]. In his article, "Testimony," Timothy Murphy talks at length about the important role testimonial writing plays in helping gay men cope with the experience of the AIDS epidemic. The Names Quilt Project is another example of keeping memories alive. As long as it continues to be viewed, the people whose lives it represents are not silenced, not forgotten, not simply dead.
[17]. Much has been made of the differences in public perception and rhetoric about PLWAs who contract AIDS by accident versus those who acquire it through their own, intentional actions (for example, an "innocent" blood transfusion versus shooting drugs or having sex).
[18]. Almost all of the novels about AIDS have been written by white people and most center on the experiences of white, middle to upper-middle class characters, though as in Paul Monette's Afterlife, there have been some references to the experience of other cultural groups living with AIDS. This trend has begun to change in the second decade of the epidemic, with AIDS novels appearing from gay writers of color, like E. Lynn Harris and Steven Corbin.
[19]. Though there are a good number of novels written by women about the effect of AIDS on gay PLWAs and their loved ones, I have found only three novels written in the first decade that discuss the experiences of women living with AIDS. In Alejandro Morales' The Rag Doll Plagues, one portion of the novel depicts a hemophiliac woman's suffering from AIDS, which she contracts through a blood transfusion. Alfred Ingegno's Shared Legacy depicts a woman's experience of having contracted HIV sexually. The only female novelist to address this topic is Sharon Mayes in her novel, Immune. There continues to be a lack of novels that describe the experiences of women with AIDS, and I have yet to find even one novel that extensively describes the experiences of a woman of color living with HIV.
Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992"
(UCSB English Department Doctoral Dissertation 1996, Lisa Garmire)