In the introduction to her friend the photographer Peter Hujar’s monograph Portraits in Life and Death (1976), Susan Sontag wrote that: “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes at rest contain that knowledge. The body knows and the camera shows inexorably.” Sontag wrote those lines from a hospital bed while awaiting surgery to remove a malignant tumor from her breast. The surgery was successful, but she would die from cancer a quarter century later, terrified, furious, and absolutely unresolved. On June 5, 1981 the first clinical report on AIDS was published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In the years that followed, the gay and queer communities and other vulnerable minorities were forced to “study the art of dying,” to construct communities of mourning and activism and develop clusters of “lay-expertise” in pharmaceuticals and their trialing, endocrinology, blood science, and the legal and ethical structures of the medical and death industries. As the art historian and ACT UP New York member Douglas Crimp argued, “AIDS intersects with and requires a critical rethinking of all of culture: of language and representation, science and medicine, health and illness, sex and …