I got a big bear hug on Sunday night from Andrew Sullivan. He had just seen HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, and had felt the same cathartic outpouring of emotions I had felt the first time I saw the film. It was a survivors embrace, filled with a mix of guilt and overwhelming pride.He just wrote about the film and the span of history it covers, and it's a must read.
"If you want to understand the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years, you need to see this film. None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth."
The full post is on his blog here.
[Pictured: Andrew Sullivan, Peter Staley, Ben Thornberry, David France, and Aaron Tone. June 17, 2012, Provincetown.]
Peter on:
Follow @PeterStaley
Comments on Peter Staley's blog entry "Andrew Sullivan On The Plague Years"
For me, not to at all disagree, it was the mid 1980's that I remember as being the most grim. I worked as a home attendant/case worker for several NYC terminal AIDS patients who had to be within months of dying to be in a program funded by the city with one (and we didn't know this until he died) ill social worker and one executive. Whom I worked with varied each week as men were in and out of the hospital. God's Love We Deliver relied on local restaurants to supply meals to those without them would not be eating in some cases. There were no answers. Drugs and nondrug options were passed around as possible answers even when they both made and didn't make sense. PWAC voted directors in as large numbers as possible, hoping that a few might survive until the next election. Doctors burned out and doctors worked around the clock. The men you dated would back off suddenly. You didn't understand until you read their obituary. Obituaries could be cut out and turned into artwork in remembrance. You were so happy that you had called that short story writer about how much you enjoyed his new book because he would never write another.