HIV/AIDS Books

The following list contains print media related to the HIV/AIDS global pandemic. It is largely composed of English and French language books about social and cultural aspects of the pandemic, given the skills and limitations of the researcher and the English-driven publication focus on the majority of HIV/AIDS cultural research.

I welcome reading suggestions from other languages to help compile a rigorous and more complete list about HIV/AIDS in print media. The sections below are broken down into fiction, non-fiction, and academic texts. Entries in each section appear in alphabetical order by the primary author’s surname.

Fiction Texts

  • Feinberg, David. (1990). Eighty-Sixed. New York, NY: Penguin.
  • Feinberg, David. (1992). Spontaneous Combustion. New York, NY: Penguin.
  • Monette, Paul. (1988). Borrowed Time. New York, NY: Harcourt.
  • Schulman, Sarah. (1992). People in Trouble. New York, NY: Penguin.

Non-Fiction Texts

  • Callen, Michael. (1987). Surviving and Thriving with AIDS: Hints for the Newly Diagnosed. New York: People with AIDS Coalition.
  • France, David. (2017). How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS. New York: Picador.
  • Garfield, Simon. (1994). The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS. London, UK: Faber & Faber.
  • Jarman, Derek. (1993). At Your Own Risk. London, UK: Vintage.
  • Kramer, Larry. (1989). Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist. New York, NY: Serpent’s Press.
  • Murphy, Timothy. (1993). Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Shilts, Randy. (1987). And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Academic Texts

  • Aggleton, Peter. (1990). AIDS: Individual, Cultural and Policy Dimensions. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Aggleton, Peter. (1991). AIDS: Responses, Interventions and Care. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Aggleton, Peter. (1992). AIDS: Rights, Risk, and Reason. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
  • Aggleton, Peter. (1993). AIDS: Facing the Second Decade. New York, NY: Falmer Press.
  • Altman, Dennis. (1986). AIDS in the Mind of America. New York, NY: Doubleday.
  • Arriola, Aimar Olabarria. (2020). Animals, Touch, and Books: Surface Matters in the HIV/AIDS Archive. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London.
  • Broqua, Christophe. (2020). Action=Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
  • Carter, Erica, and Simon Watney. (1989). Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics. New York, NY: Serpent’s Tail.
  • Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Reed. (2012). If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Connell, R.W., et al. (1993). Sustaining Safe Sex: Gay Communities Respond to AIDS. London, UK: Routledge.
  • Crimp, Douglas. (1988). AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Crimp, Douglas. (2002). Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Cvetkovich, Anne. (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Doyal, Lesley, et al. (1994). AIDS: Setting a Feminist Agenda. New York: Routledge.
  • Engelmann, Lukas. (2018). Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Epstein, Steven. (1996). Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Fee, Elizabeth, and Daniel Fox. (1992). AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Freeman, Elizabeth. (2010). Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Gould, Deborah. (2009). Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Hallas, Roger. (2009). Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Juhasz, Alexandra. (1995). AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Kagan, Dion. (2018). Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post Crisis’. London, UK: I.B. Tauris.
  • King, Edward. (1994). Safety in Numbers: Safer Sex and Gay Men. London, UK: Routledge.
  • Kippax, Susan, et al. (1993). Sustaining Safe Sex. New York: Taylor & Francis.
  • McKay, Richard. (2017). Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Murphy, Timothy. (1993). Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  • Patton, Cindy. (1985). Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS. Boston, MA: South End Press.
  • Patton, Cindy. (1991). Inventing AIDS. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Patton, Cindy. (2002). Globalizing AIDS. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Race, Kane. (2009). Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Schulman, Sarah. (2012). The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Schulman, Sarah. (2021). Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. New York: Macmillan.
  • Singer, Linda. (1993). Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Sontag, Susan. (1989). AIDS and its Metaphors. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Sturken, Marita. (1997). Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Treichler, Paula. (1999). How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Watney, Simon. (1987). Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. London: Methuen.
  • Yingling, Thomas. (1997). AIDS and the National Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.