Oscar Moore

Who is Oscar Moore?

Oscar Moore 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. He grew up in London and was educated at the independent 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. 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, 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." 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.