Khelil Bouarrouj

The last decade has seen an explosion of films and books on the AIDS crisis, marking the end of the Second Silence — the amnesia toward the plague years evinced by many LGBTQ+ organizations in the late ‘90s and aughts. (The First Silence was Reagan’s callousness.) The desire to move on from AIDS was understandable — for more than a decade the community had fought a traumatic and exhausting struggle against a death sentence.  The emergence of antiretroviral drugs in 1996 marked both a victory for people with AIDS and an opportunity for activists to leave the past behind and […]