1986: Diamanda Galas

Diamanda Galas is an an important connector between the artistic practice of a boomer musician, taking on more grim social issues such as the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. That crisis was certainly a nerve point for many musicians and artists, exploring the knife edge of macabre subject matter and a public militating against it.

Her operatic trilogy, The Masque of the Red Death (based on the Edgar Allen Poe short story), was written during the period her brother playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás was ill from AIDS. He died in 1986.