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Aids in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction

Aids in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction

Based on reflections made as part of activities of the project developed by me along with Professor Italo Morriconi at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, entitled Body and History in contemporary literature and culture: the writing of AIDS (critical reading and documentary researches), and having as its start point a comparative study on gay literature - more specifically, the writing of AIDS - I have decided to start a research about what seemed to be an important issue in the understanding of the homosexual literary production in the post-Stonewall era: the reference, in North American LGTB literature, of its most impressive contemporary mark, the AIDS epidemic.

This project evolves around the writing of AIDS in homoerotic texts. For “writing of AIDS” it is understood the effects that the emergence of the epidemic had over the homosexual community, as well as the impact of this presence in literature. It is undeniable the fact that the appearance of AIDS is responsible for an alteration in the process through which the homosexual is absorbed by the heterosexual community, and by the homosexual community itself. Such alteration inflicted a new perception of the self, one that transformed the gay and lesbian literature in a irreversible way. The gay universe, then, is forever touched by AIDS, its birth, personification and presence.

Since 1980, when AIDS appeared in America, it has changed from an unspeakable secret to an acknowledged and “written” reality. In the Reagan years it caused a change in the direction of gay and lesbian poetry and fiction. An amazing amount of AIDS literature has emerged since, specially considering the short span of the epidemic, and in the United States the majority of this literature has been gay. This reflects the destruction in the gay community caused by the disease, as well as a gap between the sub division of the gay literature: the male and the female writing.

Although the lesbian community have not been as struck as their gay brothers by the AIDS pandemic, they have suffered their losses. And although lesbians are involved with AIDS related causes - having also experienced some of the social backlash from the epidemic- they have, strangely, written very little about it. Bonnie Zimmerman suggests that this has much to say about the general mood of the community today; lesbians are more inclined...

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