The AIDS memoir has become one of the most common genres of gay men’s writing. American autobiographical accounts of AIDS can be found across a wide range of genres, including fictionalized versions in novels and poetry. There is considerable variety in these texts’ representations of the disease, yet, for all their variety, most AIDS autobiographies have in common the paradoxical fact that they are usually about another with AIDS rather than the writer’s own experience of AIDS. This is the case even when the writer is himself infected. The emphasis on care connects to the importance of community in both the gay male experience of AIDS and of literature.