Charles Horne (1946 - September 2, 1994)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Charles Horne was an American playwright. His credits include the AIDS drama The Smoking Room and the documentary Our Sisters Are Dying.

Charles Horne, a playwright who detailed his battle against AIDS for a Syracuse newspaper, died here on September 2, 1994, at Community-General Hospital. He was 48.

The cause was AIDS, after he suffered a stroke several weeks ago that left him paralyzed, the hospital said.

In the last year, Mr. Horne had written occasional columns for The Herald-Journal addressing issues from the perspective of someone infected with the AIDS virus.

Mr. Horne's plays included "The Smoking Room," a drama set in a hospital AIDS ward. He also wrote and produced "Our Sisters Are Dying," a 30-minute documentary about women and AIDS, and he was working on a documentary about AIDS in prisons when he became ill.

Mr. Horne came to Syracuse in 1985 to direct an acting company at the Landmark Theater. He had also done graduate work in Germany and at the University of Massachusetts. Mr. Horne lived in New York City for about eight years, writing and directing plays.


AIDS Quilt

He is survived by his parents, Clyde and Hilda Horne of Acton, Mass.; three brothers, Mark, of Rochester, N.H.; David, of Westford, Mass., and Barry, of Acton, Mass.; and his companion, Tony Williams of Syracuse.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/05/obituaries/charles-horne-48-wrote-about-aids.html

Further Readings:

AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (Gender and Genre in Literature) by Steven F. Kruger
Hardcover: 424 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (March 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0815309252
ISBN-13: 978-0815309253
Amazon: AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science

This is the first book-length study of the rich fiction that has emerged from the AIDS crisis. Examining first the ways in which scientific discourse on AIDS has reflected ideologies of gender and sexuality-such as the construction of AIDS as a disease of gay men, part of a battle over masculinity, and thus largely excluding women with AIDS from public attention-the book considers how such discourses have shaped narrative understandings of AIDS. On the one hand, AIDS is seen as an invariably fatal weakening of an individual's bodily defenses, a depiction often used to reconfirm an identification between disease and a weak and vulnerable gayness. On the other hand, AIDS is understood in terms of an epidemic attributable to gay "immorality" or "unnaturalness." The fiction of AIDS depends upon these two narratives, with one major subgenre of AIDS novel presenting narratives of personal illness, decline, and death, and a second focusing on epidemic "spread." These novels also question the narrative structures upon which they depend, intervening particularly against the homophobia of those structures, though also sometimes reinforcing it.