Reed's Nonfiction

Reed also produced several volumes of nonfiction, in addition to his journal writing. He co-authored, with Patti Breitman and Kim Knutson, How to Persuade Your Lover to Use a Condom and Why You Should (1987), and he produced two editions of Serenity: Challenging the Fear of AIDS (1987, rev. ed. 1990), which offers hope as an antidote to fear during the Age of AIDS.

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Reed also wrote the humorous Cats Are from Jupiter, Dogs Are from Pluto: A Communication Guide for Humans (1994).

Reed's nonfiction work appeared in venues as various as Black Sheets, San Francisco Chronicle, The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter, University Journal, and The Writer.

Reed also contributed to the theory of AIDS writing with his short yet insightful essay "Early AIDS Fiction," which was collected in Judith Pastore's Confronting AIDS through Literature: The Responsibilities of Representation (1993).

Conclusion

Reed wrote in several genres, but almost everything he wrote is touched by the great crisis of his cultural moment: the AIDS epidemic. His critical reputation is based primarily on Facing It, which has been widely acknowledged as a pioneering AIDS novel. He has been credited for his depth of knowledge regarding the epidemic and for his sensitivity and insight into the spiritual and emotional toll it exacts from persons living with AIDS, as well as from their formal and informal caregivers.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Facing It is that it may have initiated a new thread of realism. Four years before Susan Sontag revisited her Illness as Metaphor to write AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988) to remind us of the risk in metaphorizing illness, Reed may well have crafted an AIDS medical realism.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

San Francisco has enjoyed a reputation as a "gay mecca" since World War II.

The pseudonymous Andrew Holleran has placed his homosexuality at the center of his commercially and critically successful novels.

The bisexual novelist Anaïs Nin is best known for her sexually frank diaries and the erotica published after her death.

One of the most prolific gay writers of recent decades, John Preston helped elevate pornographic fiction into a genre viewed as having literary merit.

May Sarton, who gradually revealed her lesbianism in her writing, worked successfully in poetry, the novel, essays, and the journal.