French writer, photographer and activist Hervé Guibert was BOTD in 1955. Born in Saint-Cloud to a middle-class family, he was raised in Paris and La Rochelle. He became a journalist, writing a dating advice column for 20 Ans magazine, and publishing his first collection of short stories, La Mort propagande (Propaganda Death) in 1977. He became a photography critic for Le Monde newspaper, establishing himself as a photographer and publishing a collection of essays about family portraits L’Image fantôme (Ghost Image). In 1984, he co-wrote the screenplay for Patrice Chéreau’s debut feature film L’homme blessé (The Wounded Man), a jarring and sexually explicit portrait of a young closeted gay man who becomes obsessed with an older male hustler. He shocked his conservative family by publishing a forensic family memoir Mes parents (My parents) in 1986, and dramatised his relationship with a 15 year-old boy in the 1989 erotic novella Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent). He is best known for his 1990 memoir À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), an unflinching account of his HIV diagnosis and subsequent illness. Unusually for AIDS literature of the time, Guibert described AIDS as an instrument of self-revelation: “I was discovering something sleek and dazzling in its hideousness… whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life“. The book made him a national celebrity in France, and was credited with shifting public prejudices towards those living with HIV/AIDS. A friend and one-time lover of queer philosopher Michel Foucault, he caused controversy by publicly revealing Foucault’s death from an AIDS-related illness. Guibert died in 1991, two weeks after attempting suicide. He was 36. His final two books detailing the progress of his illness, Le Protocole compassionnel (The Compassionate Protocol) and L’Homme au chapeau rouge (The Man in the Red Hat) were published posthumously. In 1992, the documentary La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur (Modesty or Immodesty), created from Guibert’s home videos of his daily life living with AIDS, was screened on French television to critical acclaim.