Spaces That Feel (Un)Intimate in Early AIDS Fictions: AIDS Realism, Literary Intimacy, and (De)Sexualized Space in Facing It: A Novel of AIDS and The Gifts of the Body

This paper argues that AIDS realism, a representational mode conveying the affective reality of early AIDS fiction, is shaped by the intersecting logics of gay and queer sexuality, which organize both narrative form and the spatial experience of intimacy. Within this mode, two tendencies emerge: one renders intimacy coherent and legible, while the other fragments it through affective ambiguity. Intimacy becomes the hinge for understanding how sexuality configures realist form. Building on Lauren Berlant's concept of intimacy as a world-making force, I compare Paul Reed's Facing It: A Novel of AIDS (1984), a gay realist work that anchors intimacy in domestic and medical spaces, and Rebecca Brown's The Gifts of the Body (1994), a queer realist text that emphasizes transient care and fleeting ties to impermanent spaces. Together, these narratives demonstrate how intimacy reshapes meanings and locations through shifting spatial, narrative, and affective relations.