Power Q & A with Ellis Scott
Q: Your debut novel, Night Terminus (Dundurn Press, February 2026) is an evocative debut novel reflecting the determination and resilience of a gay diaspora as it faced extinction. Would you describe for readers why AIDS was nothing like COVID?
A: In a conversation with Brian Vines for a Twenty Summers podcast in 2021, Fran Lebowitz was asked about “the strange balance and continuum” between AIDS and the current COVID crisis. She stopped him and said, “Not at all. People ask me, ‘This is like AIDS, right? It’s nothing like AIDS.’”
I often encounter those who assume the AIDS crisis was like the COVID pandemic. It’s understandable, particularly for younger generations, but it’s misguided to view both pandemics in the same light.
People paid attention to COVID. It spread fast through the general population; society was sympathetic, especially in the early days, and Western governments rapidly responded to the disease, locking down, educating the populace, and tendering contracts for an antigen. Vulnerable groups received detailed instructions on how to protect themselves. Those who succumbed to COVID were predominantly elderly. Hospitals admitted patients, and clinical staff treated the sick with dignity, commitment, and respect, often to their own detriment. Drug companies developed a COVID vaccine within 11 months. There was broad natural and mRNA immunity by 18 months. The worst was over.
In the early 1980s, a vulnerable group of gay/bisexual men and trans women contracted a mysterious and deadly immune-suppressing disease. It spread like wildfire through their community, disfiguring and killing almost everyone infected. Entire urban neighbourhoods were decimated. Most people who died were young. The government’s response was to ignore the virus. Religious groups called it God’s revenge. A 1986 op-ed in the New York Times demanded that sick individuals be tattooed on the forearm or buttocks. Ronald Reagan, the US president since 1980, did not even say the word “AIDS” until 1987, a full six years after it was first reported.
It’s hard to imagine how vicious public attitudes were towards homosexuality. Violent homophobia was endemic. In 1973, 70% of the population felt same-sex relations were “always wrong”. By 1986, it had increased to 75%. Society cheered our deaths; the jubilation was palpable. Some media didn’t refer to AIDS except as a joke, politicians stayed quiet, and the clergy prayed for our extinction. The New York Times had a policy banning the word “gay” from news copy until 1987. How do you cover an epidemic when you can’t accurately describe those infected for six years?
Doctors and nurses, save for a small minority of brave allies, refused to treat AIDS patients in the early days. Hospitals and morgues denied access, and clinicians called for a moratorium on care. Gay men were banned from visiting their life partners in wards because the state did not recognize their relationships, so they weren’t considered next of kin. Gay marriage and adoption were illegal. Partner pension security, work and housing safeguards, and civil rights were non-existent. We lived in a shadow society with no legal protection under constant threat of assault.
AIDS wasn’t in the news cycle. There was no internet. There was no effective dissemination of information on transmission, not to mention prevention education. As our dead piled up, we were met with silence. The DSM still considered homosexuality a psychosexual disorder, reclassified from being a mental illness in 1980.
There are, of course, epidemiological differences between the infections. Unlike COVID, HIV is not spread in the air by coughing or sneezing. Comparatively, it is very difficult to pass on. Because its transmission was mostly through sexual activity, public agencies were ashamed of discussing it, and so education campaigns, when they reluctantly were funded years later, were often obtuse and ham-handed. Public discourse around sex remained taboo in the 1980s, and no one mentioned gay or anal sex. Contracting AIDS carried a mark of sexual disrepute, resulting in a profound stigma for those infected, which continues today.
Over 44 million people have now died of AIDS. Almost half a century later, there is still no vaccine.
About Night Terminus:
Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades. From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis; to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri; and finally to Provence, where he meets the gregarious but wistful Frank, the narrator encounters a cast of exiles, fugitives, rebels, and artists. In a journey across continents and decades, we watch the impacts of one of the greatest health crises of the last hundred years through the eyes of those who both survived it and must now remember those who didn’t.
At once an odyssey through time and a love story to the narrator’s found family, this haunting, lyrical novel in five parts explores questions of grief, statelessness, and memory and is a meditation on survival in the age of AIDS.
Ellis Scott was born in the U.K. and grew up in Canada. He has published nine stories in literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Yolk, and The Fiddlehead. His first short story was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Night Terminus is his first novel.