Memory Pill / Amnesia Pill: PrEP, AIDS Generations and Gay Sexual Imaginaries

Abstract

In the years since PrEP became widely available, the reduction and even removal of HIV anxiety has been widely reported among gay men as a side-effect. Public discourse about this aspect of PrEP, the promise of “sex without fear”, has often been framed in generational terms, with PrEP users describing their experiences in relation to previous generations of gay men. In this thesis I explore gay men’s experiences of PrEP to illuminate generational narratives of gay life and the histories of AIDS, through qualitative interviews with PrEP users in Australia and drawing on cultural scholarship on AIDS memory. The interviews focused on gay and queer men born during 1981 and 1996, a generational cohort for whom gay subject formation was significantly shaped by dominant cultural narratives negatively associating homosexuality and AIDS, producing HIV anxiety. I argue that by drawing attention to experiences of HIV anxiety and AIDS nostalgia, PrEP simultaneously functions as both a “memory pill” and an “amnesia pill”. It evokes memory by contextualising gay men’s sexual experiences within the histories of HIV and allowing them to participate in pre-AIDS gay sexual imaginaries enabled by anxiety-free sex. Paradoxically, PrEP also facilitates a kind of AIDS amnesia by removing HIV anxiety, which I frame as a generationally specific effect of gay subject formation during the AIDS crisis. PrEP’s memory/amnesia paradox allows us to understand this cohort of gay men as an “in-between generation”: too young for their experiences of the AIDS crisis to have been mediated by gay communities, but too old to have been formed as gay subjects after the height of the AIDS crisis in Australia.