Every Generation Has Its War: Representations of Gay Men with AIDS and Their Parents in the United States, 1983–1993

Abstract

This article explores how the relationship between gay men with AIDS and their parents was imagined and represented in both gay and more mainstream literary and visual sources. While some observers of AIDS in late twentieth-century America have suggested that gay men looked to peer caring networks as an alternative kinship strategy, I argue here that the disease also overlapped the social lives, experiences, and cultures of gay men and their heterosexual parents. Portraits of this relationship suggest a mutual generational longing for the family and the basic acts of care and nurturance that it seemed to embody.