“Message Queens”: Aids Protest Literature, the Gay Community and Writing as a Political Act
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/2612-5641/2897Keywords:
AIDS Literature, Protest, Gay Literature, HumorAbstract
The explosion of the AIDS epidemic in the early Eighties, and the subsequent position the gay community found itself in, brought the need for writers to become politically engaged. The protest against the institutions took different forms and activism was interpreted differently from different authors. Larry Kramer was very political and attacked both the government and the gay community, David Feinberg was aggressive but preferred humor as a weapon to protest, while Sarah Schulman chose a purer form of fiction and alongside the epidemic narrated the protests and the process of gentrification in the Village area. All these literary texts, and many more, have contributed to save and shape both gay culture and the gay community.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).