The blue screen infuses whimsy and melancholy into a narration that explores what it means to succumb to a disease that strips control. Directed by Derek Jarman and released a few months before his death, the film consists entirely of a blue screen (representing his failing eyesight from AIDS complications) over which Jarman muses about his life as a gay man living with AIDS in London in the early 1990s. The 1993 drama Blue 11 does this literally. Through eulogy, certain films have the power to rescue individuals from social erasure.
We suggest that these cinematic representations serve 3 primary roles: to eulogize those who might have vanished from our collective memory, to mobilize a group by providing plague survival guides, and to humanize those stigmatized by disease. Our aim in this article is to gesture to some of the key moments in film that have actively shaped our cultural understanding of the AIDS epidemic and those impacted by it. They were terrifying sufferers of a disease.” 8 Policy changed: increased funding was devoted to research, and experimental medications became more widely available.
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7 As David France, director of the AIDS documentary How to Survive a Plague, stated in a 2019 interview with NPR, “They were no longer invisible sufferers of a disease. Groups like Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) emerged, and, to the chorus of “FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS!,” they strategically combined anger-fueled, highly visible, dramatic protesting with well-researched understandings of the disease and what it might take to treat it. Not complacent in the face of this potentially literal erasure, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and AIDS activists intensified their efforts. 6 The article itself opens with a report of a “sudden outbreak within the homosexual community,” noting escalating infection rates and calling the outbreak “a menace that must be dealt with logically and quickly if we are to overcome it, and knowledge of the disease, its causes and effects, is our best weapon.” 6 Yet by 1985, little had been done to combat the HIV/AIDS crisis. The December 1981 edition of Mandate, an erotic magazine for gay men, featured an article on the new disease with the words “Gay Cancer” plastered in hot pink over 70% of a 2-page spread in an attempted reclamation of a term that would come to shape responses to AIDS for decades. In the midst of the current pandemic, examining iconographic and thematic representations of the AIDS epidemic over the last 35 years can illuminate the effects such a contagion can have on trust, both personal and political. 4,5 The early reports bear an eerie similarity to the daily tallies of cases and deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a year of the article’s publication, the infection rate had increased 4-fold, with case numbers and fatalities rising exponentially over the next decade. This was one of the earliest reports of a phenomenon that would define a generation-the AIDS epidemic. This condition was being diagnosed in younger, healthier men, most of whom identified as homosexual.
On July 3, 1981, the New York Times published an article on a mysterious and rare cancer affecting 41 homosexuals in New York City and California 3- mysterious because this “cancer” behaved like a contagion and rare because, prior to this outbreak, such cancers were typically seen in the elderly or immunocompromised. Paul Monette (1998) 2 From Headlines to Activism to Cinema Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots. Documentaries and cinematic narratives have charted the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the United States, and this article traces a historical arc of that crisis, contrasts historical (HIV) and current (SARS-CoV-2) contagion experiences, and reviews thematic representations of AIDS and COVID-19 experiences among vulnerable patients and populations. Global transformation demanded by the COVID-19 pandemic prompts consideration of how prior epidemics have contributed to and continue to shape our cultural and sociological understandings of health care and patients.