Abstract: This essay reads Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light and Other Essays (1988) and David Wojnarowicz's Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992) as their final memoirs published within their lifetimes that conspicuously refuse the primacy of the monogamous couple, written in the shadow of terminal illness and intensifying attacks on welfare and public care in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It argues that these texts displace the couple as a privileged and enforced site of care and cure that structures both romance and illness narratives. Instead, they situate life and illness within a broader framework of U.S. state power, militarism, and moral panics to foreground alternative formations of intimacy born out of necessity and desire—collective, erotic, platonic, wounded, and public. Their queer illness narratives function as a call to arms, foregrounding expansive networks of care in which collective struggle, rather than private, domestic romantic resolution, sustains life at its end.
Rebecca Teich (Sun,) studied this question.