Charlie O'Malley (@charlesomalley.bsky.social)

Often, these epilogues flowed sensibly from the text of the books, and many struck us as understandable stabs at timeliness, at relevance, for scholars in a small, oft-overlooked field. Yet several of my classmates and I feared that, as a trend, the phenomenon of “the AIDS epilogue” risked relegating the study of AIDS to a literal afterthought—isolated, shorn of context, emblematic of the broader marginalization of the study of sexually transmitted infections. Worse, it risked reducing AIDS to the position of mere metaphor, a situation that (as the critic Susan Sontag famously argued) contributes to stigmatization, which itself can have real-world medical consequences. https://newrepublic.com/maz/article/188318/tragedy-ryan-white