AIDS melodrama now: Queer tears in It’s a Sin and Pose

Abstract

This short article compares the British TV show It’s a Sin and the American TV show Pose as landmark new examples of AIDS melodrama – a genre of tear-jerking, mass-market AIDS narrative which has renewed popularity due to contemporary investment in the queer histories of AIDS in the United Kingdom and the United States. While both shows deploy melodramatic aesthetics to stage the grief, virtue, and injustices endured by queer people living with HIV/AIDS in London and New York City prior to the arrival of antiretroviral medication, I argue that the squeezed budget and truncated format of It’s a Sin – reduced from a longer series, to eight episodes, to five episodes – means that each episode builds towards the climax of the dead gay male body in anachronistic, contradictory ways. By contrast, I find that the lush excess of Pose transcends realism to dodge stereotypes of Black suffering and construct a queer history of AIDS in New York that is not reliant on the white gay male imaginary; a variation of what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation. This short article thus aims to show that the cultural politics of melodrama remain central to the representation of AIDS history, and that AIDS melodrama can be a radical as well as reductive or ambivalent genre.

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“…Nevertheless, it is another blockbuster production produced in the 2020s that turns back to the past and thus fails to reflect current biomedical and social conditions of the virus, feeding instead on melancholia and nostalgia. When comparing Pose (Murphy et al, 2019) to It's a Sin (Davies and Shindler, 2021), Gabriel Duckels (2022) suggests that both are landmark examples of a new kind of AIDS melodrama, a genre of tear-jerking, mass-market AIDS narratives that have found renewed popularity due to investment in productions of queer stories of AIDS in the United Kingdom and the United States. According to the author, "if melodrama is associated with nostalgia for a time 'before' -a fantasy of a home always already lost -then the pre-antiretroviral, pre-PrEP, pre-gentrification, and pre-Internet settings of It's a Sin (Davies and Shindler, 2021) and Pose (Murphy et al, 2019) function as romantic spaces of innocence and embodiment."…”

“…This heteronormative pattern is repeated in many of the films and series already analyzed. As Gabriel Duckels (2022) observes with reference to It's a Sin (Davies and Shindler, 2021):…”

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“…To use Dion Kagan's (2018) term, IAS contributes to an increasing archive of 'AIDS retrovision' media: that is, media that revisits AIDS crisis histories to remember the lives of those lost to HIV/AIDS and the political impact of the ongoing HIV crisis. Specifically, IAS has been framed as a melodramatic AIDS history whose imagined audiences is primarily heterosexual and HIV-negative (Duckels 2022). IAS emerged amidst an ongoing wave of popular AIDS retrovisions.…”

“…preceding British media. Additionally, IAS is the first British AIDS retrovision to have any international success, no less in North America where AIDS retrovisions predominate, especially thanks to its use of melodramatic imagery (Duckels 2022). Yet it is precisely this media legacy that positions the melodramatic narrative of It's a Sin above the previous documentaries, even when IAS builds upon those media.…”