WINTER
2024
Giorgos Sampatakakis

Re-presenting the dead: A comment on the HIV/AIDS literature in Greece.

Alexis Bistikas, Τhe Clearing, 1994. Still from the movie.

For me, writing about HIV/AIDS is an acceptance of failure. In 2021, I wrote a book about theatre and the cultural trauma of HIV/AIDS in Greece, realising some years later that I failed. I failed to tell a full-blown story. I failed to collect all the right pieces of evidence. I failed to control the melodrama of history, believing that failure is a starting point. The landmark texts and artefacts of the art of AIDS in Greece are invisible or were erased from public memory (by relatives who either refuse to republish them or forbid us to name the unnameable), despite the cultural penetration of the public sphere through endangered appearances, that was always the achievement of queer and AIDS literature during the crisis. This fact is what makes Dimitris Papanikolaou’s research project “AIDS: A Political Archive”1 a ground-breaking and enlightening endeavour, which will represent and document the agonistic identity and the cultural history of HIV/AIDS: restoring the lack of endurance is imperative in as much as the “trauma of AIDS – a trauma that has yet to be defined or understood […] – has produced a gentrification of the mind for gay people”.2

In a tradition of denial, a relatively unknown Greek playwright, whose erotic psychological dramas strive between the old-fashioned melodrama of the closeted Greek and homoliberal normalisation, defined his liberationism in a very characteristic comment: “For God’s sake, let’s see plays with normal gay couples, relationships, and passions, without necessarily including drugs, AIDS, cruising, suicides, and characters that are only thinking of sex. These scenarios do not even concern the gay community, and that must be made understood to the Greek society.”3 Still, this is not a very surprising statement. In the chapter, “Battles over the Gay Past: De-generation and the Queerness of Memory”, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed argue that “gay neocons in the 1990s promised that by making a complete break with a ‘diseased’ past of narcissistic and recklessly immature pleasures that supposedly led to AIDS, gay men could achieve a maturity cast as normalcy that would safeguard health and reserve them a place at the table of political negotiations”.4

The Greek HIV/AIDS archive is about people we have known and who have raised their voices against precarity – people who I personally consider the greatest generation in a struggle against unspeakable cruelty and suffering.

Amphi, issue 20, Spring 1986.

  

Unarchived lives: the AIDS literature/art in Greece

The gay liberation movement in Greece started in the 1970s. AKOE, i.e., Liberation Movement of Greek Homosexuals, founded in 1978, was the first openly gay organisation in Greece and produced the first Greek gay publication, the journal Amphi (in Greek amphi meaning of both kinds and sides). AKOE, in my view, was organised, perhaps excessively, around the agenda of a workers’ movement interested in the suppressed social subject, sometimes treating the legacy of Greek gay art as the product of a cultural intelligentsia indifferent towards social struggles. AKOE often failed to instrumentalise this cultural capital for its own sake and defence, even if most writers and artists refrained from social fights.

The first reference to AIDS in the Amphi (nos 12–13, 1982, p. 83) was a political manifesto against stigma and social condemnation well informed by the activist discourses from abroad:

“Once again, the self-invited ‘guards of morality’ were ridiculed. […] Lack of basic medical evidence, ignorance, and homophobia spread a medieval dusk in the misguidance of the audience. Preachers and constipated moralists rushed to name the Kaposi’s sarcoma […] a God-sent curse for homosexuals.”

Four years later, the impact and picture of the illness in Greece were drawn clearer: “It is true that AIDS has caused several serious social problems, complex and often devastating problems that put the homosexual community and us as individuals through a rough ordeal” (Amphi, no. 20, 1986, p. 16). AKOE heralded this historical moment as “a chance for homosexuals to come close to one another” (ibid) and begin to form a social and emotional community. Paola Revenioti’s more popular magazine, To Kraximo/The Pillory5 (no. 6, 1986, p. 7), addressed a call to make love freely “but with consonant caution. FUCK OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST,6 as the song says, and which in front of this new ideological threat becomes more timely than ever.”

In 1987, the director Alexis Bistikas wrote the devastating piece “The Red Stains on Your Skin” (Odos Panos, no. 33, pp. 88–89), reporting from London where an emotional community of solidarity and self-presentation was proudly formed:

“While he was on the seesaw alone, a man appeared, a sight for sore eyes. He approached Billy and grabbed him tight, and just before he got scared, he looked deep into his eyes and said: ‘I’m like you. My name is Argyris, the Hot Bug-Catcher. My mum was a phychic and my dad a smithy. Meeting you on the cryground, all alone on the seesaw, was pure destiny. Your terror will scare away my terror, and together we can be brave’ […] Billy, the rebel bug-catcher, caught his breath and asked: ‘So, you’re saying we can dip our syringes in the same blood orange? And let new infections become our colorful children? […] ‘Yes,’ replied Argyris, the Hot Bug-Catcher, and they became blood brothers with an expiration date as they went down the slide.”

Βistikas has proudly returned to the theme of cottaging and cruising in his short film, The Clearing (1993), shot at Hampstead Heath with Derek Jarman portraying the smiling blues of fortunate encounters in the open air. At the end of the movie, a young man is playing the saxophone behind a tree as Jarman spots him under the melancholic melodies of the Greek gay composer Manos Hadjidakis.

Sander Gilman considered the visualisation of AIDS through clinical photographs as a continuous encounter with uncertainty and an “indeterminable universe” of illness that required control, boundaries, and the construction of a stable difference between health and disease.7 The photograph of the severely ill Greek fashion designer Billy Bo at the Tachydromos magazine in January 1987 was not clinical, but it served as a vehicle to achieve the first popular visualisation of Greek AIDS and also as an initial understanding about the assumed social nature of the disease. The notion of AIDS as a homosexual disease or as a disease implicated in promiscuous homosexual lifestyles disallowed its characterisation as a viral disease divorced from social prevalence (readers of the magazine still remembered Billy Bo’s photographs with beautiful male “friends” from lavish parties in Mykonos and internationally, printed in lifestyle columns). And if we agree with Roland Barthes that the punctum in a photograph is the cut, the little hole in the image, and the “element that rises from the scene”,8 this image also calls for the viewer’s engagement and stops the photograph from simply being inert in our gaze. The actual punctum cut in Billy Bo’s apocalyptic photograph involves the presence of the photographed subject in its forthcoming absence, an element that lies at the very heart of any photographed event. Such photographs are not only long-lasting epiphanies of the dead victims but can also be regarded as meta-photographs, essentially commenting on the nature of photography itself and the aura of death. Nevertheless, Crimp argues – and his argument broadly reflects ACT UP’s criticism of that time – that these pictures presented a phobic way of displaying a patient with AIDS as they removed the social and political context, isolated the patient, and thus reiterated an all-well-too-known image of AIDS patients: “They are ravaged, disfigured, and debilitated by the syndrome; they are generally alone, desperate, but resigned to their ‘inevitable’ death.”9 Some months before Billy Bo’s photographs appeared, the jubilant twist song “My Pasha, Take My Toothbrush” (1986) was written by Lakis Papadopoulos (music) and Marianina Kryezi (lyrics), with Eleni Dimou giving “her Pasha” her toothbrush and loneliness: “And let’s promise that we will share the rest of our lives.”

Amphi, issue 20, Spring 1986

  

The canon of AIDS literature was already established by the end of the 1980s as novels and plays alike have grown both more personal and more abstract around the topic of “living with AIDS”: “[i]n the age of AIDS, literary representations of AIDS may be just as, if not more, valuable to the process of identity formation as was ‘gay literature’ before the onset of the epidemic.”10 Gay literature has been the most profound and consistent influence upon the formation of gay male identity in the 20th century, particularly since the Stonewall riots, regarded as the inception of gay liberation. One critic writes that “[h]ungry for reflections of themselves and their lives that they couldn’t find at the movies or on TV, gays and lesbians continued to take their images from fiction”11 and another that “literary representation […] has been of greater importance for gay communities than for any other ethnic, national, or religious group”.12 Nonetheless, gay literature and theatre in Greece remained highly liminoid in not involving the resolution of a cultural crisis and social condemnation, often accepting and eulogising marginalisation as a social destiny that needs to be melancholically embraced and represented.

On the other hand, journalists were very keen to criticise the social circumstances in other countries without, however, acknowledging the homophobic dystopia that Greece has. Imagining themselves as sensitive and tolerant (and perhaps they were), they did not bother to confront the prejudices and lives of actual people stigmatised by AIDS. The premiere of Angels in America in Greece, directed by Dimitris Potamitis in 1993, is a typical case. “American playwrights who dare to declare the truth and leave bare the fallacies of the establishment […] are very rare. […] Kushner exposes the devious ones and photographs contemporary misery, where every type of character, angels and devils, drug dealers, homosexuals and murderers, one night lovers live and move around without hopes and sensitivities”, wrote Perseus Athineos (“Angels in America”, Imerisia newspaper, 25.1.1994), carefully avoiding the word “AIDS” in his review. Ninos Fenek Mikelidis (a film critic) in his rave review, “Anatomy of the American Dream” (Eleftherotypia, 22.1.1994), claims that Kushner “in combining poetry with epic and irony with humour […] treats America and its people with sarcasm, persistently anatomising Reagan’s society in order to reveal its hypocrisy and ridiculousness, despite the depressive subject of the play”.

Still, these responses had nothing to do with the homophobic and stigmatising agenda of the mainstream media in Greece,13 where the safeguarding of public health was assigned to tabloid newspapers (which called for the reopening of the Spinalonga leper colony) and church leaders (who forbade the circulation of safe-sex flyers for homosexuals). The vulgarity of the Zeitgeist is overwhelmingly captured in the articles of the Avriani newspaper, the normalising violence of which still consitutes a standing cultural crime against people with HIV/AIDS and major gay artists. An article from 1985 wrote:

“Let’s get filthy Iolas and swindler Tsarouchis tested by doctors so that they don’t transmit HIV to the young men they associate with.
I read a recent article about AIDS in the prestigious TIME magazine in the USA and realised that some of the victims of this terrible disease are also carriers of ARC. Also, according to the magazine, in several people who carry the AIDS virus, the disease does not manifest itself; however, those people may transmit AIDS to other people.
The proportion of those who have AIDS to those who have ARC is 4 to 1, and most of them are homosexuals.
I would think that the Department of Public Hygiene should force the well-known conspicuous homosexuals IOLAS, TSAROUCHIS, and some friends of Hadjidakis – the notorious faggot clique of ‘high’ society – to get tested by doctors.
Because while this riff-raff of so-called culture may not have manifested AIDS, they may be carriers of AIDS. And maybe nothing ever happens to them, BUT they may transmit the virus to unsuspecting boys, sailors, presidential guards, builders, truck drivers, etc., who will get sick.
And if filthy Iolas gets AIDS, it’s not the end of the world, but if this happens to some poor young man, it is a shame.”
Αl. Sfyris

Only Lilly Zografou (a feminist writer and columnist), as early as 1984 (“Can we talk now, bosses?”, Odos Panos, no. 14, pp. 3–6), criticised the targeting of gay and trans people that are treated as pariahs of a capitalist society, which “brutally harasses” them in order to stifle their “dynamism”.

This vocal ambivalence between militancy, silence, and vulgarity was later portrayed in Yorgos Xenos’ installation The Shouters, a graphically sketched crowd of shouting faces that carry an emotion of surprise, anger, complaining, and silencing, that was part of the Hellenic American Union’s exhibition titled AIDS: Depictions of AIDS through Art (2003). The chaotic traffic of voices on a social “blackboard” was not clearly indicative of the reality of stigma and condemnation, but it was a retrospective echo of the social hysteria and the moral panic of a deeply homophobic era.

Artemis Potamianou, People of AIDS, 2003. C-print, 61 x 127 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

  

A more realistic crowd (perhaps of the people of AIDS) that Artemis Potamianou created appeared in the same exhibition. It is a colourful tombstone, the narrative of which degrades from more bright colours to purple, celebrating and at the same time mourning the life and achievements of people who died of AIDS-related illnesses (in this photographic collage, we see, among others, Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, and Michel Foucault in their vertical fall).

In fact, the image of the crowd is one of the most characteristic themes of the HIV/AIDS art, which materially symbolises the tragic harvest of people in crisis. Untouched by the conceptions of homosexuality as an identity outside subcultural definitions and aesthetics, the reception of AIDS in the Greek arts aligned to this performative utterance, accordingly conceptualising AIDS from within the subject or the subculture. A second major body of works produced clear self-obituaries, either as narratives or images, that lend the art of AIDS its deeply thanatographic standard. Still, the image of AIDS as an illness of mass distinction (Larry Kramer called it a Holocaust14) set the stage for later, highly nuanced renderings of mass extinction: “not of the events themselves, but rather of the narratives produced by the tenuous linking of experiences”.15 Sarah Schulman’s first essay into the emerging genre of AIDS fiction, People in Trouble (New York: Plume, 1991), reflects the ACT UP’s older call for collective responsibility of people in crisis. As Kramer reports:

“With the exception of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, I have never perceived so much wrongdoing in my life. Because of this, I can’t understand – and have less tolerance for – why every so-called artist in the world is not dealing with the horrors of contemporary life. But most contemporary art has little relevance to the lives we lead. Perhaps that is why I’m not interested in calling myself an artist. I just wish that those who do call themselves artists, or those who traffic in art […] would call themselves artists less and become message queens more.”16

A different call for relevance and solidarity was addressed in Greece by Yannis Palamiotis, whose prose glorifies the biopolitics of the gay lifestyle that is turned into a pleasant personal martyrdom (with great anger against “normal” family relationships). The piece “A Strange Epidemic” appeared in Kraximo magazine in 1989, describing the unusual appearance of gay men who recently “wear long-sleeved blouses buttoned up to their neck. They look like they want to hide something. But what they cannot hide at all is the black circles under their eyes. […] And additionally, the bulbs of their eyes, excessively hazy, lie deeply stuck in their sockets – a savage and repulsive image, especially when you see them gathered all together and aggressive in the same restricted area, which is packed with people day and night.” The author is terrorised not only by his fear of illness but also by the future, which will deprive him of his sexual sanctuaries and achievements:

“A new generation of homosexuals will start to rise in a while, I foresee. These homosexuals, because they have been terrorised and easily deceived, will renounce the sites of collective erotic delectation, believing that only there the risk is lurking. Something else will blossom in the years to come. Something that I cannot define now.
Until then, how many heroic homosexuals fallen on the battlefield of our own particular honour will we count?”

Not only death but its inconceivable size meant to become the principal premise of the HIV/AIDS art way beyond the decades of the crisis.

Photo from the first action of the Greek branch of Act Up, 1997.

  

Autothanatographies and the deployment of selfhood

The canonical text of the Greek AIDS literature of the 1980s is Andreas Angelakis’ short prose piece “The Carrier” from his collection, Unforgettable Cinemas (1989). It is a theatrical monologue similar, but more joyful, to the ones appearing in his gloomy Three Gay Short Plays (1981). These theatrical pieces portray quite apologetically the melancholic life of unloved gay men in hostile parks and bars full of loneliness and heartless rent-boys (the typical ethography of Modern Greek Theatre, which repeats and confirms social structures and ideologies). “The Carrier” is the self-presentation of an anonymous HIV-positive man who fights with social and medical phobia. Except for a confession of illness, which turns into a proud defence of gay lifestyles, this monologue is, above all, a psychosocial anatomy of gay biopolitics (also interested in the internalised homophobia of the Greek gay “subject” and suffering speaker):

“All this is over and done with. The young mechanic left me, and most of my friends made for the hills when they knew about this, and I was left with Kostoula only; God bless the girl. She was there for me; I couldn’t complain. She was like a mother and father and brother to me. When I was in the hospital, Ippokrateio, which was quite far for her, she’d close her salon an hour earlier to come and see me when I suffered from that great exhaustion. I stayed in the hospital for a month. All my savings went up in smoke […] I wrote to my older brother in Thessaloniki, swallowing all my pride, and asked him for money. ‘You’ve been dead to me for a long time now’, he wrote back. ‘I won’t have my family associating with faggots. And change your name because you are a disgrace to us.’ And not a dime. He only cares about the name, damn and blast him, the pox on him… Forgive me, God. His kids are not to blame. He’s never let me meet my nephews, buy them a gift, ask them about school. […] The pharmacist, who knows my problem, often gives me vitamins, drops, enzymes, and such stuff for free. He won’t take money. He’s a very decent fellow. So I take a walk during the day and make a phone call or two; Kostoula brings me magazines like Domino and Pantheon, which help to pass the time. I can’t help it […] They say that you can buy the treatment from certain hospitals, but it’s expensive, and they don’t want to spread the word. In America, everything is possible. If you have money, you can turn cancer into a flu. Fate, you bitch, it was our lot to be born poor […] The doctor made me stop smoking. That was a heavy blow. I wish I had just a cigarette now. Oh well. Such is life. Mostly sorrows and struggle.”

The gay lifestyle is the literal and metaphorical borderland between the materiality of the biographical self and the contextual social environment. It functions simultaneously as a personal, political, psychological, and ideological boundary of meaning – a contested border of restraint and transgression through which subjectivity emerges. Besides, the literature of Angelakis declares the absence of a relationship with something or someone that would give meaning to the momentary daily deaths that enframe the limits of conscious life, as Vrasidas Karalis concludes.17  The colloquiality and plainness of the language usurp the theatrical mechanisms of ethographic monologue, although there are moments where the voice departs from its subcultural homosexual self and hopes to function like a pedagogic commentary on how people should see homosexuality and AIDS compassionately. This schism between the public and the personal dramatises within the text the essential existential dichotomy of the homosexual process of a double life (which Angelakis lived anyhow). In that sense, the writing of a (soon-to-be) dead author registers the writer to death at a very particular point in time where life seems already been lived and needs to be retained. To write is to relate to absence or, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, “to write is to accept that one has to die without making death present and without making oneself present to it”.18 The presentation of the self is a writing of the death of the self, a thanatography, in any case:

“To write one’s autobiography, in order either to confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide – a death which is total inasmuch as fragmentary. To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest – the other, the reader.”19

The term autothanatography was widely used by Jacques Derrida in order to decipher the type of biographical writing that recounts the improper or untimely death of its own writer, more or less as a sort of literary strategy in which “[o]ne must send away the non-proper, reappropriate oneself, make oneself come back until death. Send oneself the message of one’s own death.”20

In 1994, Alexis Bistikas published the poetry album Evangelismos with poems and black-and-white photographs he took while he was hospitalised at Evangelismos General Hospital in Athens. The title has actually a double meaning concerning not only the site of Evangelismos, but also the Holy Annunciation (of illness, in this case) and the presence of a Holy Spirit in the form of a white dove. Doctors in hospitals announce illnesses and therapies, and the gardens and yards of Greek hospitals are occupied by pigeons that fly annoyingly out of the patients’ windows, sometimes leaving their marks on the buildings. In the Bible, the Annunciation is narrated in Luke 1:26–38:

“God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth […] to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you. […] Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.’”

The profound irony of Evangelismos is devastating, given also that in times of AIDS Annunciation, there is no Joshua, there is no salvation, and there is no God (a typical absence in times of holocausts). Still, the innocent subject had the power to re-appropriate and present the fragments of himself facing the agony of death with courage and wit:

“They will take us with them and
they will caress our hair,
so softly and softly as
we craved for all these harsh years.

Yesterday, I bought him clothes, and I didn’t know if
I was taking them to dress him up and go for a walk
or to decorate his dead body.
I read his first letters from Crete
back then when he didn’t know what he wanted and felt guilt
and inhibitions. He told me, ‘When my body dies,
dress it up with seaweeds’.

Your youthful tears on my face.
The brisk, happy farewell.
‘I spent a life with you’, you told me
With all the emotion of your eighteen
years. We have spent a few months
together, and you’ve got the whole life ahead of you.

I love the Xylocaine, and I hate
the Erythromycin through the vein. But
more than anything else, I love humans.
The smiles of the nurses, the
trembling hands of doctors,
their green uniforms with
the plastic little shoes.

He looked at the Hickman catheter on
his chest, and he said, ‘Is it true,
all these things happen to me
or to someone else?’

The prayer acted like a paracetamol pill and
in a bit, the pain of separation became
sweet, sweaty sleep.”

Poetry, in these cases, becomes a continuum of pain and suffering and quite conspicuously functions as a manifestation of mourning, which is itself healing and “disruptive of time”, as “it interferes with the flow of daily life, but does not disrupt the ontological sense” of illness as a terminal end “of what is and what is not or what is possible or likely and what is not”.21 Bursts of anger erupt from this continuum mostly against a mother, this bitch who sits and smokes in the chair and will burry us all; or, when the girl in the opposite ward was given a teddy bear called AIDS. In the working through of physical pain and loss, the subject, secluded for months in a hospital, internalises the lost others he sees leaving daily in the process of identification, introjection, or incorporation (as seen in the poems above).

On the opposite page of every poem was a printed photograph of a staff member or visitor to the hospital (along with four drawings by Zafos Xagoraris showing birds on black or red backdrops), all of which intensified the meaning of the poem. Most individuals photographed (visitors or staff) are shown with half-lit faces (in limbo between the worlds of light and darkness). The only patient photographed is glowing in a devastating rehearsal of death (before the white sheet finally covers his face).

The last poem next to a blank page (tombstone?) stands like the final prayer, which restores the regular order of grief and Annunciation:

“I woke up like a well-printed script.
From outside the window, the night didn’t have anything to look for,
and the city was okay. The only thing
the night wanted was the end of the prayer.
‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’”

Greek literature’s endangered presences had been asking for action, and on June 21, 1994, the first demonstration of the Greek ACT UP took place outside the Greek Ministry of Health in the centre of Athens. The pavements of Aristotelous Street turned into an arena of agonistic action, with wooden tomb crosses, bodies lying around, and drag nurses standing over them. These precarious bodies were composed of rituals of mourning and anger, demanding better healthcare and the amendment of the public’s feelings towards people with AIDS.

The pharmaceutical turning point of 1994–95 led to the sensationalisation of memory and the lure of melancholy, sometimes failing to establish a cultural identification of the survivals “with the abandoned object”.22 The assault on gay memory (following the AIDS crisis and thanatological art) took precisely the form of “cleaned-up” versions of the past as substitutes for more challenging memories of social struggle. In that sense, unremembering meant “to undo the historical basis for communities that once offered radically new forms” of social, sexual, and artistic engagement,23 producing an enormous cultural capital as queer testimony and standing canon.

Action of remembrance on the World Aids day, 2022 at Monastiraki Square by Positive Voice, the Association of people living with HIV/AIDS. Photo: Yannis Boziaris

  

Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012, p. 155.

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, chapter 3, pp. 39-72.

Usually translated as: Gay Bashing (note of the editor).

Underground hit of the time by the rock band Mousikes Taxiarchies (note of the editor).

Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, p. 2.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 27.

Douglas Crimp, “Portraits of People with AIDS”, in Douglas Crimp (ed.), Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002, p. 86 (83–107).

Thomas Piontek, “Unsafe Representations: Cultural Criticism in the Age of AIDS”, Discourse, vol. 15, no. 1, Fall 1992, p. 136.

Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, New York : Vintage Books, 1995, p. 476.

David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature, Madison:The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 9.

See Dimitris Papanikolaou and Giorgos Sampatakakis, “Censorship as Cultural History: HIV/AIDS in Greece” (in Greek: Η λογοκρισία ως πολιτισμική ιστορία: Το HIV/AIDS στην Ελλάδα (1982–2000)”, Arxeiotaxio, 22, 2020, pp. 163-182.

Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 2nd ed., New York: St. Martin’s, 1994, p. 263.

John Charles Goshert, “The Aporia of AIDS and/as Holocaust” in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 23.3 (2005), p. 53 (48-70).

Kramer, op. cit., pp. 146-147.

Vrasidas Karalis, Essay on Andreas Angelakis, Athens: Odos Panos, 2003, p. 65. (in Greek).

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln and London : University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 66.

Ibid, p. 64.

Jacques Derrida, “To Speculate on Freud” , in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 355.

Monica B. Pearl, AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss, London and New York : Routledge, 2013, p. 76.

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in Angela Richards (ed.), On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (trans. James Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library 11), London: Penguin, 1991, p. 258 (245–268).

Christopher Castiglia και Christopher Reed, op. cit, p. 2.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giorgos Sampatakakis is an Associate Professor of Drama and Performance at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Patras, Greece. He is a graduate of the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens (BA), and has studied Classics (M.Phil.) at the University of Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theatre from the University of London. His areas of interest include Performance Studies, the Reception of Greek Drama, Theatre Histories and Theories, and Queer Theory. Ηis most recent publications include: “(Still) Shopping and (Still) Fucking: The Stylistics of Queer Desire on Stage”, in: Kate Mulley (ed.), Dramaturgy of Sex on Stage in Contemporary Theatre, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2024, pp. 7-14; HIV/AIDS: Theatre and Trauma, Athens: Sokoli Publications, 2021. He is an academic advisor to the project “HIV in Greece: A political archive”.