The AIDS epidemic, which first came to medical and public attention in 1981, was characterised in part by the devastation it caused through opportunistic infections, including parasitic diseases such as Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, and cryptosporidiosis — infections that healthy immune systems suppress but that flourish in immunocompromised individuals. The epidemic disproportionately affected gay men, intravenous drug users, and communities of colour, and it killed an extraordinary number of writers, poets, and artists in the 1980s and 1990s.

The AIDS epidemic generated a vast body of literary response — poetry, memoir, and fiction — that engaged directly with the experience of parasitic opportunistic infection, bodily vulnerability, and epidemic mortality. Essex Hemphill, Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, and many other poets wrote directly about AIDS, and Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats (1992) is widely regarded as the finest English-language poetic response to the epidemic. The parasite — in this case microscopic and exploiting the body's collapsed defences — became once more a literary figure for the most intense human vulnerability and the social failures that surrounded it.