Spiritual hotbeds: (counter)narratives of HIV/AIDS in Sicily

If we conceive of the Southern Question as an interpretative key to analyze contemporary history and politics, we realize that Italian LGBTQ+ historiography has hardly addressed the South. Through archival research and textual analysis, this paper proposes Sicily as a case study in the investigation of narratives on HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, with particular focus on the representation of body, sexuality, space, and serostatus. The first part examines media coverage of the AIDS crisis in Sicily, a portrayal based on the dominant themes of death, healthcare inefficiency, the clash between institutional politics and civil society, and the peculiar case of illness and heterosexual romance in the story of Claudio Belcuore and Maria Caroè. The second part concentrates on the counternarratives constructed by Sicilian activists and associations, such as the Associazione Siciliana Assistenza Malati di AIDS (ASIAMA) and its magazine Il Melograno, and Nino Gennaro’s Libretto gioiattiva: Risorsa spirituale, a collection of poems about AIDS as an occasion to practice care, reciprocity, and affection. Through this heterogeneous set of materials, it is possible to reconstruct a period of intense and intersectional political activity, and to observe the transformation of the pandemic from a health emergency with heavy moral implications into an occasion for emotional exchange.