This article offers a close reading of Second Son, one of the first AIDS novels ever written, through the lens of distinction between paranoid and reparative reading strategies as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Written at the time when AIDS was understood as a death sentence, the novel deals with the trauma of diagnosis as foreshadowing the actual disease. Ferro, himself suffering from AIDS, dramatizes in his novel the exclusion and isolation of a seropositive queer subjectivity in the heteronormative order of reproductive futurism. The novel responds with a chain of deferrals grounded in fantasies and camp sensibilities, which result in reparative narratives of hope epitomized by Splendora, an outlandish vision of gay utopia.