Oscar Moore (novelist)

Oscar Moore (23 March 1960 – 12 September 1996) was a British journalist and the author of one novel, A Matter of Life and Sex, published in 1991 originally under the pseudonym Alec F. Moran (an anagram for roman à clef). He grew up in London and was educated at the independent The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, going on to read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in 1982. He worked as a journalist and critic, under his own name and various pseudonyms, to such magazines as Time Out, I-D, The Times, Punch, The Evening Standard, and The Fred Magazine (in which his novel was first serialised). He was editor of The Business of Film magazine during the mid-1980s, and served as editor of the journal Screen International from 1991 until his death.

A Matter of Life and Sex is an autobiographical novel recounting the coming of age of a gay man, Hugo Harvey, who engages in sex from a young age and later, during college, works at least part-time as a prostitute, contracting HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s before the advent of effective anti-HIV drugs. The novel describes the protagonist's relationships with his family (most significantly with his mother), his school friends, his casual sex mates, and with other friends battling HIV/AIDS. Moore himself has been described as "handsome, bright, witty, and gay," and worked occasionally as a male escort in addition to his magazine work. He lived with HIV for the last 13 years of his life, and from 1994 to 1996 wrote a regular column for The Guardian entitled "PWA (Person With AIDS)." Moore lost his sight owing to his HIV infection and died of AIDS-related illness in 1996 at the age of 36. A book collecting his "PWA" columns was published a month after his death. A stage adaptation was produced in London in 2001.