Director David France (who also wrote the film, with editors Todd Woody Richman and Tyler H. Walk) benefits from being there when this all started; a journalist, he’s been covering the AIDS epidemic since the early 1980s. The raging worst of the AIDS epidemic was 20, 30 years ago, and these groups really hit their stride working in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a society, we’ve somewhat curbed the death sentence effect of HIV and AIDS since the mid ’90s. But France does justice to the subject material, drawing from a large wealth of ACT UP footage from back in the day—of meetings, protests, and other events—and really grounding us in the chaos of the time. The majority of Americans weren’t paying attention to the problem, and politicians certainly weren’t. The gay community had to stand up and do something about it, or no one else would. And, really, no one else did.
France—who has a major historical book about the AIDS epidemic coming out next year—focuses on how ACT UP and TAG worked to both raise awareness and increase scientific attention, an endeavor that eventually led to the shift in treatment from monotherapy to combination therapy, or a cocktail of different drugs. Since the switch in 1996, the cocktail approach has saved about 6 million lives. HIV is more manageable now; just look to beloved basketball star Magic Johnson and countless other HIV-positive individuals for proof on that.
What “How to Survive a Plague” does, aside from chronicling the battle for scientific interest in treating the AIDS epidemic, is demonstrate the selflessness, courageousness, and heroism of the individuals in the gay community and their supporters, who stood up to the government, to the Food and Drug Administration, to the National Institutes of Health, to drug companies, to President Ronald Reagan, and to nearly everyone who in the late ’80s wanted absolutely nothing to do with anyone involved with HIV or AIDS. The prevailing sense of apathy and homophobia depicted in the documentary is overwhelming, especially when you hear about people like U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, who basically said the gay community deserved the disease. Real nice, dude. It’s immensely gratifying to see the activists punk Helms by putting a huge condom over his house.
And that’s just the thing: ACT UP wouldn’t be dissuaded. It’s inspiring to see how they organized a response to all of this negativity and judgment, risking arrest during demonstrations and protests; hiring individuals in the marketing industry to work on slogans, posters, and other literature for their cause; and criticizing public figures who refused to do anything. The crowds of coalition members and supporters chanting “Health care is a right” and getting singled out by police for it seems eerily topical now, if you know what I mean.
This isn’t all protest footage, though. France makes a point of showing how the activists really got their foot in the door by diving into science and research, eventually earning a spot into discussions about medicine and treatment and causing a breakage in ACT UP that led to the formation of TAG. But that more academic stuff is never dry; 3-D animation keeps the scientific content engaging and informative.
And there are the tear-jerking stories, as there should be, of those who spent their lives fighting for recognition and awareness, and those who lost their lives in the process. (France maintains a tally of how many people died from AIDS each year after the creation of ACT UP, and the numbers are sobering.) Particularly affecting is the tale of closeted former Wall Street wunderkind Peter Staley, who was diagnosed as HIV positive in his mid-20s and told he had less than two years to live. But Staley refused to admit defeat—he joined ACT UP and started campaigning and speaking publically, and his 1990 speech at San Francisco’s International Aids Conference will equally ignite your fury and mist up your eyes.
The same goes for gifted speaker Bob Rafsky, who had full-blown AIDS but tore into Bill Clinton on the 1992 campaign trail about the calculated ignorance of the federal government, sparking Clinton’s now infamous “I feel your pain” line. Perhaps Clinton really did; it was during his first term, after all, that the cocktail drug method was deemed successful.
But the documentary is full of people like Staley and Rafsky, real people who were really affected by the government’s indifference, and they deserve our acknowledgment and our respect. Everyone involved in “How to Survive a Plague” certainly has mine.
