Pandemic Publications: On AIDS, COVID, and Books

This post is part of “Community Knowledge Practices,” a guest-edited portfolio by Theodore Kerr that documents conversations that reshape historical narratives by leveling the playing field between scholars, community members, and knowledge bearers. Read more about the portfolio here.

Pandemic Publications: On AIDS, COVID, and Books

by Matteo Pfahler

On October 3rd, 2023, twenty-five authors representing a list of over eighty HIV/AIDS-related books released between 2020 and 2023 gathered for the online event Pandemics + Books: Publishing HIV/AIDS in the Early COVID Era. It was organized by scholars Theodore (ted) Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz for Circa, the Queer Histories Festival presented by One Institute. In attendance were writers from across the US and other countries including Canada and the U.K., members of the public, and students from Kerr’s AIDS-related class at The New School (including me). Though the focus of this panel was hyperspecific, its existence speaks to something profound happening in the publishing world, and the general public’s understanding of pandemics.

Since the start of the COVID pandemic, HIV/AIDS scholarship has seen a wellspring of new literature. These books are more diverse in form, content and authorship than many of their popular predecessors. According to Kerr, much of the HIV/AIDS media created since the 2010s is “largely rooted in AIDS of the past,” and focuses on ACT UP and other examples of early activism. Kerr notes that these kinds of HIV/AIDS books are often “the books that garner excitement and praise,” and as the crisis continues, appetite increases for a diversity of stories across time.

Recent interest in HIV/AIDS can be attributed in part to the increased public attention to and curiosity about pandemics. Ryan Smith, manager of Dog Eared Books in San Francisco and my former employer, believes that HIV/AIDS book sales increased during COVID, “especially in the first year or so.” San Francisco’s own COVID response was so effective in part because of public health systems put in place during the early AIDS crisis; it makes sense that its residents drew connections between the two crises. Or, as Smith speculates, “maybe it helped folks contextualize the new one by thinking about previous epidemics.”

Books about other epidemics, like the bubonic plague and the 1918 flu, sold intensely at the start of COVID “but that only lasted for the first half year or so and then the public’s appetite for that sort of stuff dried up,” according to Smith. He told me that Dog Eared still sells “books about the AIDS epidemic, but all the other books about historical epidemics and such are unsellable. I get the impression that [people] just don’t want to think about COVID anymore.”

HIV/AIDS books are shelved in the "LGBT+" section, while COVID books have their own, hastily carved-out section entitled “Disease & History.” Long after lockdown and mask mandates were lifted I noticed customers’ frustration with books about COVID, which were perceived as “opportunistic” or “too soon” given that COVID was (is) ongoing or too recently traumatizing. HIV/AIDS books, however, were not dismissed even though their subjects are also ongoing pandemics.

The "Pandemics + Books" list compiled by Kerr, updated since the event, now includes eighty-four titles and counting released in the last four years. It spans genres, from poetry to theory to memoir to YA. Some of the books discussed during the event have to do with the past, and many look toward the future. Perspectives represented are varied and exciting, including racial justice, Indigenous, feminist, and global lenses, and topics covered include art, science, sex, activism, and grief.

Over the course of the night, nearly thirty authors and editors spoke about their books, research, personal experiences with HIV/AIDS, and the publishing world. Some read out academic blurbs about their research and advocacy while others read poems straight from their books. Every half hour, there were a few minutes of silence taken to reflect and shake off the various intense feelings brought on by so much heavy material. I thought such an event would feel like a memorial, that all we would talk about was the past. Instead, the tone was characterized more by joy and connection than it was by despondency or hand-wringing. There was none of the anticipated stuffy academic gatekeeping; rather, authors and spectators dialogued in the Zoom chat, and colleagues complimented each other’s work.

I asked—which I was nervous to do since so many authors I admire were on the panel—how to make room for grief during the writing process. So many panelists were quick to respond: Ricky Tucker, author of And the Category Is: Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community recommended meditation as a strategy. Other participants left advice, words of concurrence and book recommendations. Finally, biophysicist and writer Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between, wrote in the chat that “viruses are neither living nor dead, so they’re perfect for the in between in anger/grief/joy. Viruses are literally molecular memories that pass between people.”

What does it mean to write something into history when that history is still in the making? “Pandemics + Books” made it clear that there is not one, or even a few, authoritative voices authoring HIV/AIDS history. During our correspondence about the event Kerr reminded me that the book list began with just fifty titles, and now contains over seventy, because “as I learn about books I have been adding them.” This abundance of material and interest is not going unnoticed. Just weeks ago, at the bookstore I currently work at in Williamsburg, a representative from ACT UP came in to discuss partnering to stock HIV/AIDS-related titles.

“Pandemics + Books” drew on this abundance to ensure HIV/AIDS is not dismissed as an already-passed, single point on a timeline. It made space for memorialization and grief while not becoming wholly absorbed in those things. We all took deep (albeit silent) breaths together in our Zoom room, that strange byproduct of one kind of mass sickness and death that enabled us—credentialed and uncredentialed, scholar and student, across generations and geography—to try to understand and write another.

Teo Pfahler is a writer and bookseller from San Francisco's Mission District. A junior in college, most of his work is self-published in zines. Pfahler writes about movies, trans life, sadomasochism, queercore, and surfing in his biannual publication Belongings as well as the once-in-a-blue moon Homo Mafia Coastal Elite. He studies nonfiction writing at The New School.