HIV/AIDS: Playing with Failure in Caper in the Castro and Two Boys Kissing

This chapter puts into conversation two temporally and formally distant texts: C.M. Ralph’s video game Caper in the Castro, created during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989 and recently restored in 2017; and David Levithan’s 2013 young adult novel Two Boys Kissing, which is set in the present-day but narrated by a ghostly chorus of gay men—called the “shadow uncles”—who died during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. As a video game, Mason argues, Castro allows us to play with and feel the anxieties about HIV/AIDS that continue to circulate in queer YA and its criticism—including Levithan’s novel, which confines HIV/AIDS to historical trappings, keeping it detached from the social worlds of its young contemporary protagonists. This is consistent with the treatment of HIV/AIDS elsewhere in young adult literature, which habitually mis- and underrepresents the virus in order to preserve the innocence of its protagonists.