ABSTRACT
This article interrogates the representation of AIDS-related deaths of gay men in Young Adult (YA) literature. As Eric Tribunella argues, traumatic loss is integral to the ideological work of narratives for young readers; death is often a catalyst for heteronormative maturation in an adolescent subject. The first YA novels about the AIDS-related deaths of gay men focused on securing the heterosexual development of an adolescent onlooker amidst an attacked masculinity, rather than memorialising queer loss. New YA novels about those deaths – examples of AIDS Crisis Revisitation, a term used by Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr to describe a renewed cultural investment in the start of the crisis – move from a pedagogy of heterosexualisation to a politics of memorialisation. By using queer melancholia theory to interpret the changing role of traumatic loss across these representations of the AIDS-related deaths of gay men, this article examines the changing signification of queer grief in the maturation narratives that typify YA literature.
