7 - “The Dead Never Die”

Summary

The chapter examines imaginative writing about AIDS in light of improved medical treatments for HIV, suggesting that every example of AIDS literature functions as a time capsule documenting its historical moment. Yet, the literature of AIDS is haunted by unfinished pasts that scramble its temporalities and unfix its historical locations. This chapter introduces and conceptualizes an emerging “literature of PrEP” (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in work by Jericho Brown, Matthew Lopez, Jacques Rancourt, and Sam Sax, showing how developments in biomedicine have inspired diverse literary reflections on the epidemic’s four-decade history. As exemplified by Lopez’s epic play The Inheritance, PrEP literature engages crucial questions concerning what one queer generation inherits from, or owes to, another. The chapter argues that, in contrast to scientific or sociological accounts of HIV/AIDS, literary representation is uniquely effective at capturing the haunted quality of AIDS writing because it can reveal how ostensibly outmoded forms of the past persist in the present.