‘Remember Their Names’: Gay Men’s HIV and AIDS Death Notices, 1984–96

Abstract

When the HIV and AIDS epidemic began to decimate gay male populations in the 1980s and 1990s, the expression of grief by friends of the deceased was inhibited by the social stigma attached to both the virus and their sexualities. This article tells how the grieving gay community used death notices and obituaries published in the fortnightly Sydney Star Observer to make the community’s grieving a shared public emotion and an assertion of the value of the lives lost to HIV and AIDS. Based on interviews with men who read and/or placed the notices, this article not only conveys the emotional and political impact of the epidemic on the survivors; it argues that the death notices and obituaries were part of a wider cultural struggle over Australians’ norms of grieving and of sexuality.