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The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America is a YA nonfiction book about the history of the AIDS crisis in the USA that is out this week from Knopf Books for Young Readers. Below, co-author David Levithan discusses how queer memory is a form of resistance.
At a time when politicians are trying to pull our stories off shelves, at a time when our humanity is questioned, tested, and argued, it is paramount that we tie queer memory to queer history, that we as individuals tell our collective story. This is, ultimately, a form of resistance, defying those who would want to erase us. And it is a form of strategic survival, as we remember and thwart the tactics of those who would prefer us dead.
Thereâs nothing intrinsically âqueerâ about HIVâitâs just a dangerous virus. But LGBTQ+ people were targeted and ostracized because of our association with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Honoring our stories and experiences as a community is a profoundly moral thing to do.
Even our recent history threatens to disappear if we do not tell and retell it. When Gabriel Duckels and I interviewed people about their experiences with HIV/AIDS for The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America, there was a constant refrain, particularly from people in their sixties and seventies talking about the 1980s and 1990s: We cannot forget what was done to us. And we cannot forget the ways we fought back. Because we need those tactics todayâas well as that sense of being a community with a common goal.
Queer collective memory must counterbalance American collective memory. American history has been written by unreliable narrators, and American collective memory is astonishing in its desire to forget harms and wrongs. When we talk to younger readers, readers who werenât born in the 1980s or 1990s, we state it plainly: âAt the height of the AIDS pandemic, over half a million Americans died, roughly the same number who died in World War II. This was because of a government that didnât care about finding a treatment or a cure until they were forced by activism to do so.â We also point out that we still donât have a cure, and that the current government is the first in decades to dramatically cut funding for health care and medical research for HIV/AIDS.
SILENCE = DEATH was not just a slogan; it was a fact. The only way to honor those who died and those who fought is to remember what happened and to keep up the fight. It is not enough for our history to exist on a shelf or in an archive. We must speak it, over and over again.
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4 days ago
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