The first YA book to deal with HIV/AIDS was M. E. Kerr’s
Night Kites. Published in 1986, the novel features a teenage protagonist whose older brother is sick with AIDS-related illnesses. As Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart point out, this novel did not inspire a trend: HIV/AIDS “would receive major thematic or topical treatment in only three other YA novels in the eighties.”
In addition to the four novels published in the 1980s, only thirteen texts “that included any character who was HIV positive or had AIDS appeared in the nineties.” Moreover, just one of the affected characters in these thirteen books is a young person; the rest are adults, “usually uncles or teachers.” Lydia Kokkola concludes that, during this time period, HIV/AIDS functions mostly as a “punishment” for sexually active and/or queer characters.