Tag Archives: Larry Kramer

No 11 Telling the Histories of the HIV Epidemic

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One of the main cultural phenomena of 2013, at least from my perspective, was a welcome move towards telling the history of the HIV epidemic, and in particular looking back on the key years of the 1980s and early 1990s, especially in the US.

This started with the fantastic documentary How to Survive a Plague, directed by David France, focusing on the story of ACTUP activists in New York City. I wrote earlier in the year about how powerful this documentary was – almost 10 months later and I would still say this was the best, and most important, film I saw this year.

Which is not meant as any disrespect to the also rather wonderful All the Way Through Evening, directed by Australian Rohan Spong. This documentary presented a much more targeted examination of the impact of HIV, through the story of Mimi Stern-Wolfe, an incredible woman who, each year, organises a concert in New York which plays the music of composers lost to AIDS-related illness.

In theatre, I finally fulfilled a long-held ambition by seeing the Belvoir St revival of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Staged 20 years after Tony Kushner’s 2-part epic first debuted, director Eamon Flack, and indeed the entire cast, did a brilliant job of making the pain, and fear, and hope, and hopelessness, seem all too real (which is a pretty decent effort when the plays ask the audience to suspend their disbelief about angels suspended on ropes, or in this case, standing on stepladders).

It was also a privilege to see the 7-hour marathon (we saw Millenium Approaches and Perestroika back-to-back) with my fiancé Steven. Not normally a fan of theatre, he was as engrossed as I was by this production.

More importantly, these films and plays served as a ‘history lesson’ for both of us. Steven was born in December 1983, after the first deaths from AIDS-related illness in Australia. His entire life has been in the shadow of this epidemic. Even though I am (*cough*) a little bit older than that, I still turned 18 after saquinavir and ritonavir had been approved by the FDA in the US, fundamentally altering the nature of the epidemic for the better.

It feels right that all generations of gay and bisexual men, and indeed all people potentially affected by HIV, should take the time to reflect on the history of this epidemic. That we should remember the people who fought to overcome stigma and discrimination, who fought for better access to treatment, who fought for the right to survive.

And of course it is vital to remember the personal stories of those who lost their own fight.

But it is also vital that, in doing so, we do not lose sight of the challenges that remain. Because the activists of yesterday might be somewhat disappointed in us if we did not also fight the battles of today, and tomorrow, with the same conviction that they did.

This includes tackling the stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV that continues to exist in our society. And working hard to help prevent new transmissions – something that was thrown into sharp relief by recent figures which showed that HIV notifications increased 10% nationwide in 2012, including a jump of 24% in NSW.

Above all, the global challenge of HIV is in ensuring that all people have access to effective treatments, irrespective of their race, sexual orientation or gender identity, their class or their nationality. Cost should not be a barrier to receiving the latest drugs. Indeed, access to treatment must be considered a fundamental human right.

Hopefully, Australia can play its part in the reinvigoration of this fight as it hosts the AIDS 2014 conference in Melbourne next July.

In the meantime, the recent trend towards (re-)telling the history of HIV on stage and on film, which arguably started with We Were Here back in 2011 (about the impact of HIV on San Francisco), shows no signs of letting up.

Next month, Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club will hit our cinemas. It is reported that John and Tim, a documentary about the life of the author of the memoir Holding the Man, Timothy Conigrave, and his partner John Caleo, will also be released early in 2014. [Incidentally, that book was the first I read as a young gay man, and remains my favourite to this day].

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Just this week, director Neil Armfield received Screen Australia funding to develop a film version of Holding the Man, based on Tommy Murphy’s 2007 stage adaptation. The Hollywood version of Larry Kramer’s largely autobiographical 1980s play The Normal Heart looks on track for a 2014 release, too.

Which, in a way, brings us all the way back to How to Survive a Plague. The scene of Kramer sitting in a room full of divided and dispirited activists, yelling “Plague!” is the one that has stayed with me above all others. One day, the epidemic that is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus will be over, in part because of the work of ACTUP activists and others like them.  Til then, we must keep remembering, and keep fighting.

Related posts

My post after watching How to Survive a Plague: https://alastairlawrie.net/2013/02/23/how-to-survive-a-plague/

My post after watching Angels in America: https://alastairlawrie.net/2013/07/01/belvoir-st-theatres-angels-in-america/

How to Survive a Plague

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How to Survive a Plague

So, last Sunday Steve and I had the privilege of watching the documentary How to Survive a Plague at the Mardi Gras Film Festival, presented by Queer Screen.

I say privilege, because this is both one of the best, and one of the most important, documentaries that I have ever seen. This blog post is my way of saying thank you to director David France for putting this documentary together, something which must have been an incredibly difficult thing to do, because of the subject matter involved, and because of the heavy responsibility of portraying the people and events involved honestly and respectfully.

How to Survive a Plague chronicles the activities of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its off-shoot TAG (the Treatment Action Group), from the epicentre of the AIDS crisis, the gay male community in New York City in 1987, through to the introduction of protease inhibitors/triple combination therapy in the mid-1990s.

I must admit that I cried (well, more accurately, sobbed) at many points during this film, from the visceral sense of fear experienced by these men and unflinchingly projected through the screen, through to the wonderful moments of comradery as they fought for and often won small victories in their long (and ultimately, but much too late of course, victorius) war for fair treatment, and including the tragic loss, too soon, of crusaders like Ray Navarro and Bob Rafsky (the scene with his ex-wife and child in the church after his funeral is especially raw).

Many direct action protests are captured, including the October 11, 1992 political funeral in Washington DC (where activists scattered ashes of the fallen on the White House lawns), and then the funeral of Mark Lowe Fischer in New York just before the 1992 Presidential election, where they took the open casket and chanted pleas for the polical class to listen and do something, anything, right outside the Republican Campaign Headquarters there.

But it is two speeches which for me truly stood out. The first, the amazing speech by Peter Staley to the International AIDS Conference in San Francisco in 1990. That speech is just about perfect in terms of political oratory, conveying a message while also grabbing the audience and forcing them to take on as their own the opinions and priorities of the speaker. The second, more ‘impromptu’ speech, is heart-breaking because of the sense of disunity and despair it revealed – I dare anyone not to be jolted out of their seats when they see Larry Kramer yell ‘Plague!’ to a room full of activists, who are themselves depressed and divided about the scale and severity of the challenge confronting them.

Of course, the documentary ends on a relatively positive note, as we see many of the activists from the archival footage, alive and now doing other, very worthy things with their lives (like most audience members I am in awe of the capacity of people like that to have fought such a long campaign, and then to sign up for one or indeed several more eg Mark Harrington, Peter Staley).

But just because many people in the Western world, and some in the developing world, are doing well health-wise in the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, does not mean that we can’t do better, both in terms of reducing transmission, and increasing access to treatments (and ultimately, of course, to finding a cure).

And the fact that as a society we are now doing comparatively well on this issue is the exact reason why we should watch movies like this, to reflect on the battles fought that got us here, and to thank and pay tribute to the activists who gave so much to ensure that people who followed would have a better, and more hopeful, existence.