Tending the Fire: Exploring AIDS Writing of the Last Ten Years

There are countless testimonies, books, poetry collections, plays, visual works and films from queer people amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, surviving in the midst of so much death. Many of these works have far outlived their creators. But even well past the height of the epidemic, queer people continue to wrestle with how AIDS shapes queer lives, and how queer lives shape AIDS.

Just to name a few titles over the last 10 years: David France’s 2017 history How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS; Pamela Sneed’s 2020 poetic memoir Funeral Diva; Danez Smith’s 2020 poetry collection Homie; Transgender Studies Quarterly’s 2020 issue Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS; Sarah Schulman’s 2021 oral history Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s 2021 anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis; Ernesto Mestre-Reed’s historical novel Sacrificio; John Weir’s 2023 short story collection Your Nostalgia is Killing Me; Rasheed Newson’s 2023 novel My Government Means to Kill Me and many, many more.

(Straight authors have also shown an interest in queer people’s—chiefly urban gay men’s—experiences of the AIDS crisis. Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 historical fiction novel The Great Believers, certainly comes to mind, as does Hanya Yanagihara’s 2023 novel To Paradise. Both novels were met with widespread praise and attention not always afforded to their queer counterparts.)

Over time, I realized the only way I could find some truth was by abandoning fact altogether.

Indeed, there have been over 100 books published on HIV/AIDS since 2020, coinciding with the start of the COVID pandemic. This breadth of work likely is not a direct result of the pandemic, but it certainly spurred on a wider revisiting of the AIDS epidemic, from both medical and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the U.S. government’s response to COVID mirrored the frequently negligent response to AIDS, and, as a result, marginalized communities often suffered the greatest losses.

As I write, the Trump administration has slashed global health spending, with especially deep cuts to international HIV/AIDS programs. The domestic budget is similarly precarious. In Florida, activists rallied this spring to protect treatment access for low-income residents, and successfully pressured lawmakers into funding HIV care through June 2026. But the long-term threat to critical HIV/AIDS programming remains.

These cuts, paired with continued legislative and federal animosity towards people most often associated with HIV/AIDS—gay people, trans people, people of color—make it easy to see why stories about AIDS have felt so urgent over the last 10 years.

But, more widely, there is also a passing of the torch. With each year, more of the queer elders who witnessed, organized, survived and fought like hell during the height of the epidemic in the 80s and 90s will die. The generation of queer people who came after—if such a thing as “after” the AIDS crisis exists—are now aging themselves or coming of age. And, as such, these “next-gen” writers are finding ways to talk about their own experiences with HIV/AIDS, wrangle with the advent of PrEP, consider how to adapt hard-earned lessons from AIDS activists to our current world, celebrate and memorialize loved ones, research, remember, and recontextualize our histories and communities. In other words: this contemporary writing helps to tend the fire of queer, generational memory.

Some of these recent works center firsthand experiences living with HIV/AIDS in a time of PrEP and U=U; poet Danez Smith explores the intersections of queerness, Blackness and HIV in their work. Others write about loving those with HIV/AIDS. Steven Reigns’ 2025 poetry collection Outliving Michael honors his friend and mentor Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000. Meanwhile, in her 2024 memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art Keiko Lane recounts her experiences and relationships as a teenager in direct-action queer organizing spaces in the early 90s. Both Reigns and Lane were, in one way or another, urged by their loved ones to tell their stories.

Outliving Michael opens with a hand-written note from Church:

I have 2 subjects
for you
to write about
me, of course
and me!

Meanwhile in Blood Loss, Lane recalls mixed feeling over similar assignment from the novelist Steven Corbin, who died of AIDS in 1995:

“That’s the answer, Babygirl. We tell the story. Relentlessly. You have to. You have to find yours.”
“Why are you so fixated on me telling it?”
“Because you were meant to survive.”
“Because I’m negative?”
“Because you’re negative. Because you’re the next generation. And something else I can’t name yet. You just are.” Steven finished the last of his tea. […] “We make our names appear. Each other’s names. We’ll remember together. And those of us who survived will remember for those who don’t.”

But what of those, as Corbin mentions, who don’t remember?

How to write about something you can feel but didn’t see? How to put into words a grief and anger over people you want to love—people who should have been your family, your friends, your teachers and mentors—but can’t ever meet? It’s like trying to capture a ghost with your bare hands. Or describe a portrait with nothing but an outline.

When I began writing about the AIDS crisis, I often wrote in circles; the work felt cliched, apologetic, unrealistic. Over time, I realized the only way I could find some truth was by abandoning fact altogether. I took inspiration from sci-fi and speculative fiction and began to imagine a universe organized—very literally—around the generational absence I felt but struggled to depict.

Of course, the speculative, the surreal, the fantastic has always lent itself to intense, often other-wordly experiences of grief and upheaval. (Again and again while writing this I am reminded of Ursula Le Guin words in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction: “At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.”) In AIDS literature, Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America is the obvious example. More recent works in this tradition include Andrea Lawlor’s 2017 novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and Maxe Crandall’s 2020 poetry/performance novel The Nancy Reagan Collection.

As AIDS literature continues to expand, I suspect the speculative, the fantastic—everything we loosely term as the “impossible”—will be exactly what’s needed to make shared, queer legacies possible across generations.

So unbound by realism, speculation became my portal. In my poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, out this month with YesYes Books, I wrote an alternative history, one where the Space Race never ended, but instead coincided with, and intensified because of, the AIDS crisis. In response to both, the United States forcibly exiled all gay men to the moon. In doing so, the government got its dearest wish—the disappearing of people living with AIDS, hand-in-hand with a more-than-global imperialism. I was aware of the irony of creating a world somewhat worse than our own. But, mostly, I frame this exile as a sly, unexpected escape for a generation of gay men, and as a great sadness for the family they leave behind.

Likewise, Natalie Adler’s novel Waiting on a Friend—also out this month—uses the supernatural to bridge the gap between generational memory and AIDS literature. Adler’s protagonist is a young queer woman with the ability to see ghosts. And, because she is living in New York City’s East Village in 1984, many of the ghosts she sees are young gay men and other people affected by AIDS.

Strikingly, both DEAD BOYS IN SPACE and Waiting on a Friend uses the dance floor as a site of generational reunification.

Adler writes:

I looked out onto the dance floor and saw that it was filled with ghosts, laughing and kissing and groping one another, moving around the living like a cool breeze. I blinked and they vanished; I shut my eyes for longer and there they were again, enjoying themselves. […] The living didn’t see them, but they all danced together.

And in my poem “The center of the universe is a small-town gay bar,” I write:

The bar was packed on a Wednesday and the stretched down
the road I was wearing tights for winter it was snowing outside
inside I was sweating through the nylon the black of my dress
which dykes and old queens dolls and young young men were
hitching up as they slipped past I didn’t mind there were so many
waists and hands and fabrics they all blend together […]
for now it is enough
to sweat into each other’s mouths surrounded on all sides by strangers
and the coming day

The dance floor seems to ask: who should be here, and how do we make them stay? In doing so dancing, much like writing, becomes an act of generational integration and re-membering.

As AIDS literature continues to expand, I suspect the speculative, the fantastic—everything we loosely term as the “impossible”—will be exactly what’s needed to make shared, queer legacies possible across generations.