On Tuesday October 5, Ithaca College’s LGBT Center hosted a screening in Textor Hall of “How to Survive a Plague."
Luca Maurer, LGBT Outreach & Services Director, said the screening was part of the organization’s “Out of the Closet and Onto the Screen” film series that is held every semester. Maurer said he specifically chose this film because December 1 is World AIDS Awareness Day. He said even though a lot of progress has been made on the issue, it still is not largely talked about in mainstream dialogues.
“There are a couple of really important things to think about when talking about HIV/AIDS,” said Maurer, “and one is that while infection rates have drastically decreased over the years, there are still many marginalized populations of people whose risk remains extremely high.”
The 2012 film, created by American investigative reporter David France, is a documentary on the activists who fought to bring the AIDS epidemic to the forefront of public discourse during the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1987 the worldwide death toll caused by HIV/AIDS related illnesses was around 500,000, but by the mid ‘90s that number had soared to over 4.7 million with no clear end in sight according to the film. But because the HIV/AIDS was largely viewed as a disease only contracted by people of color and the LGBT community, research into possible treatment lacked significant social and political support in the United States.
At the time there were relatively few treatments for HIV/AIDS, and the few medicines available, like AZT, were either prohibitively costly or had health-damaging side effects. The people suffering from these mysterious diseases felt like they were being ignored by the public; making their increasing number of deaths a non-issue.
“You’re grasping at straws because these are young vibrant people being snatched away,” one activist in the film was quoted as saying. This was the basis for a strong grassroots movement made up of largely members of the LGBT community who were fighting not only for greater representation in the political spectrum, but the means to find a cure.
The film follows the work of organizations such as ACT UP and TAG, (the Treatment Action Group) and features input from a variety of experts and activists who were integral to the movement such as Peter Maley and Larry Kramer, many of whom were HIV-positive themselves. The documentary is set against a mixture of home-recorded footage of activists interacting with their families and friends and news footage of protests in front of the White House and sit-ins at drug-manufacturing facilities.
Maurer felt that the film was timely not only because of its proximity to AIDS Awareness Day, but because the film exhibits a number of ideas that are relevant to modern political discourse. Common arguments throughout the documentary include the right to healthcare and freedom of expression.
“There are some themes in the film that I think still have resonance today,” said Maurer. “Themes around healthcare…but also themes around issues of identity and behavior and public policy. Issues of stigma and questions of what is government’s role in providing education and resources for the American people are still prevalent.”