This semester the focus of this course will be placed on the issues of gender, sexuality, and the discourse of AIDS in two Taiwanese novels; namely, Pai Hsienyung’s Crystal Boys and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (both in English translation). We will go through these texts first by reading seminal articles on gender, sexuality, and AIDS and then contextualize these discourses within Taiwan’s cultural history. Insofar as these two important works were situated in the 1980s and the 1990s respectively, different attitudes toward gender/sexual identities can be observed and their constructions can be teased out through a contextualized and detailed reading of both novels. It is the instructor’s intention to rekindle the students’ awareness of the issues of gender, sexuality, and the discourse of AIDS which, in an uncanny way, are still very much with us today.