Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care

Marty Fink, associate professor in Professional Communication, focuses on queer and trans studies in their research and teaching. They investigate archival media, zines, and novels toward supporting Black Lives Matter, HIV activism, and prison abolition. Marty is the author of Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care and was a finalist for the LGBTQ Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary.

About Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care

Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together to take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen families in the present. In unearthing HIV community newsletters, media, zines, porn, literature, and even vampires, Forget Burial bridges early HIV care-giving activisms with contemporary disability movements. In refusing to bury the legacies of long-term survivors and of those we have lost, this book brings early HIV kinships together with ongoing movements for queer and trans body self-determination.