Gay Men and the AIDS Crisis in British & American Film and Television

There has been much academic research into HIV/AIDS and its representation on screen, but no studies have presented a chronological analysis that focuses on different eras of AIDS media, from the crisis itself to contemporary memorialisation of it.

This book investigates the representational evolution of gay men and AIDS in the US and the UK. The aim of this work is to explain how representation within these contexts has had a consistent relationship with notions of mainstream, whether it be through their widespread audience reception or through their adoption of popular, familiar modes of cinema. Each chapter chronologically moves through different categories of AIDS cinema/television; ‘gay AIDS melodramas’ of the 1980s and 1990s; ‘gay/queer AIDS melodramas’ of the 1980s; anti-normative, New Queer Cinema AIDS texts of the 1990s; and contemporary ‘radical mainstream’ AIDS texts (2018-2021). I make the case for an expanded definition of mainstream, away from assumptions of heteronormativity.

This book is particularly important within the contemporary field of queer cinema/televisual studies as it stresses the importance of drawing upon history to understand the present, an era of greater mainstream visibility.