Angel Daniel Matos is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. His primary work explores how queer experiences, histories, and emotions are shaped and narrativized in LGBTQ+ youth fiction. His research and teaching interests also include space and place, digital fan production, speculative literature, and media studies. His work has appeared in journals such as The ALAN Review and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and book collections such as Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Lessons in Disability: Essays on Teaching with Young Adult Literature. How is AIDS invoked and represented in Young Adult (YA) literature during a time in which the disease has been relatively normalized due to advances in antiretroviral medications and the development of the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)? How can a YA text offer a hopeful and optimistic narrative centered on HIV/AIDS without undoing or misrepresenting the history of hurt and pain tied to the epidemic? My talk will first identify a reparative impulse found in the first YA novel focused on HIV/AIDS, M.E. Kerr’s Night Kites​ (1986)​. Afterwards, I will discuss the emotional, political, temporal, and narrative dimensions of David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing​ (2013)​, a YA text narrated from the perspective of men who died of AIDS during the peak of the disease in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My talk will not only demonstrate how Levithan’s novel invokes the past as a conduit for envisioning a queerer future for today’s generations, but also how the novel channels and reconfigures negative emotions to nourish its hopeful, intergenerational, and future-oriented purview.