ABSTRACT
Pandemics always demand a sacrifice. The sacrifice can take place rhetorically, ritually or in a space we might more easily recognise as reality. For ten consecutive weeks during the first COVID-19 lockdown, the UK witnessed a public outpouring, as millions of people took to the streets in a display of support for those ‘on the frontline.’ This chapter seeks to investigate the phenomenon as a site of sacrifice, where the absence or presence of a body can turn an act of potential mourning into something more murderous. Summoning the spectres of HIV past, it explores how the spirit of the early AIDS era was lost in a time when the essential became expendable and death itself had been quarantined.
