SOURCE: "The Plague and Its Texts: AIDS and Recent American Fiction," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 73-80.

In the following essay, Jones discusses three novels by gay writers to illustrate how the use of plague as a metaphor for AIDS stigmatizes the victims of the disease.

It need hardly be pointed out that AIDS has become a major theme in literature. It could scarcely be otherwise, for this syndrome has profoundly affected American culture over the past decade. As writers have translated their experiences and their culture's values and reactions into fiction, they have employed a variety of techniques by which to represent the effects of the health crisis in their works. Early examples of what Shaun O'Connell calls "the AIDS literature" came largely from theater and television. Employing rather one-dimensional characters, some sought to evoke sympathy for the "victims" of this "disease" while...