Gay Power

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I was only a child in the 80s when the AIDS crisis began, too young to really comprehend what was happening, and thankfully I haven't had to experience the horror of all the people around me turning into living skeletons and dying. But it left its mark in its own way - my earliest understanding of being gay was formed from the ground up on the visual of sickness. The only time anything about homosexuality reached my eyes or ears in my small hometown, it had to do with death and fear. Let's call it The Philadelphia Effect!
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You might say this warped my early perspective (it didn't help I was raised deep in the trenches of the Religious Right), and you'd be correct - by the time my own gayness began to assert itself, there was a definite dark and stormy tinge of despair to it. I think a lot of people spend high school swooning about their own tortured destinies so I'm hardly unique, but I was pretty much convinced that the second my lips touched another man's anything I would immediately turn to ash.

This led to some bad hopeless decisions early on, but thankfully I got out into the world and started seeing that there were happy, healthy gay people out there. (This was in those heady days before the internet so you'll forgive me for not being entirely sure.) Point being, I have been tremendously fortunate, and I'm able to look at the new tremendously powerful documentary How To Survive a Plague as a new shock of emotion and history and information - I was not there and this was not my experience, but by god these are my people and this is my history. Our history. 

The immediacy of the footage the filmmakers gathered is astonishing - the arc of the story is so thoroughly covered with old footage that you forget you're watching something that happened thirty years ago. You're swept up entirely into it, and even though the story's immense and covers a dozen years it's formed around a core group of characters that you watch process the world crumbling around them and see them digging deep inside themselves for strength they had no idea they had until there was no other choice but to act. They're heroes, but the film also makes it clear that like all survivors of a war they are haunted, and confused about their own place on the other side of it. 

There are moments in this film that are too astonishing for words. Things I am never going to forget, and never should. The anger and the grief, the mourning, the will to never stop fighting no matter how hopeless it seems. It reminded me to be immeasurably proud to be gay. Our heroes kick ass.

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