GREG IN HOLLYWOOD

celebs! hugging! greg!

LATEST

GREG YOUR WAY

Take the feed! Subscribe

Get GIH news via Twitter

Follow Greg: Twitter Facebook

Greg on Flickr:

“How to Survive a Plague” director David France on Ed Koch: “His failure in AIDS should be, and is, the defining cornerstone of (his) public life”

If How to Survive a Plague wins best documentary at the Oscars on Sunday, I will be as happy as a clam at high tide.

But even if it doesn’t, the movie has had such an impact on how we look back at the AIDS epidemic.

The film’s director, David France, says he believes the success of the film may have been responsible for The New York Times quickly amending Ed Koch’s obituary earlier this month to include his inaction during the AIDS crisis that had gripped his city during his terms as mayor.

France tells HitFix.com: ‘Almost immediately after the piece came out, the uproar from readers of that obituary was so great that the Times had to circle back and correct it. And within an hour they issued a correction to the obituary. And I can’t think of a time that that’s ever happened before that the correction was explicitly and solely to put the appraisal of his handling of AIDS in the central part of his biography.’

France believes this is how it should be.

‘His failure in AIDS should be, and is, the defining cornerstone of this public life,’ the filmmaker says. ‘Nothing else played as big as role historically as that. And I think if it weren’t for How to Survive a Plague and the kind of consciousness that it’s helped create and recall, that the New York Times would not have gone back and he made those corrections.’

FILE UNDER: Uncategorized

Comments

(All comments are reviewed before being published, and I review submissions several times per day.)

2 Remarks

  1. Man, you guys are awful harsh on the guy…you have to remember the times. It is not like today where we know EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING and Time square is all bright and bubbley. New York City was bankrupt, Broadway Theatre was on life support and and almost dead,Time square was dark and full of porn shops and hookers and 3rd run houses. Crime was crazy (I was mugged twice in a week), the place was dark and gloomy and everyone was on strike and we had double digit inflation and worst of all Ronald Reagan was in office.
    I think the mayor did as best he could plus he was probably fighting his own demons of not coming out. In those times if he came out he would have been thrown out of office and his family and religion would have turned there backs on him. I believe he did what he could for the times we were living in.
    As they say, don’t throw stones……all of us were in a bit of denial over AIDS…it was so big no one really understood it or could even get our arms around it. It was truly an awful time for all of use to be living in.
    If you want someone to blame, lets blame Mr Ronald Reagan!!! He turned his back totally on the problem, never even saying the word. He was so behind the times, and in denial, that there were NO problems in the United States, that he even took the solar panels off the roof of the White House setting us up for oil crisis after oil crisis over the next 30 years. To this day we are still suffering from the policies and problems he (and his right hand man, the devil himself, President,2001-2008, Dick Chaney) caused. I can’t wait to see a “REAL” documenty on those two crooks.

  2. Perhaps I’m a bit older than Jad. I was an activist in the ’60′s and ’70′s, or what is now called the great old days of sexual liberation. I was in the Stonewall, in the riots that followed: and but for an otherwise undistinguished and rarely mentioned NYC Mayor, John Lindsey, we could and probably have been slaughtered by the Tactical Police Force. Lindsay told the corrupt Precinct police to “contain but not attack”; same too the TPF. He took heat for trying to clean up the streetwalking, massage parlors and sexual license of the times, but in retrospect that was precisely the correct action before AIDS was ever heard of. No one younger than I can know first-hand what the abuse and hatred toward gays was like — the police entrapment, beatings, murders, mafia control, corruption and collusion in government. Ed Koch knew. He knew it all, and he did not have 1/100th the courage of Lindsay who ruined his own potentially Presidential campaign to maintain fairness in social change. Ed Koch was all mouth, no positive action, massive housing corruption, and minority support “in the limelight only.”

    We knew about AIDS in Greenwich Village in early 1980 — much earlier than is generally reported. The Advocate and Village Voice printed the first exposes of Hatian swine flu and US microbe manipulation at that time. The Pasteur Institute in France was where the fight against AIDS sincerely progressed, not in Robert Gallo’s Washington sideshow. Jad is more right than he knows about Reagan, because patient zero in the gay epidemic had been identified. I’m not making this up. Just study the media reports and investigative journalism from the very early 80′s. Ed Koch not only knew everything we knew, and protected himself, he made sure the city of New York did not become “conspicuous” in its response to “isolated population disease” (i.e. gays, blacks and drug users) as opposed to “epidemic” unconfined to special populations. Bottom line, from 1980 onwards, until AIDS became a world epidemic, I watched hundreds of truly wonderful, heroic people — people who fought for and procured YOUR rights — dying excruciating, terrifying deaths . . . often alone, abandoned by families and erstwhile friends. Yes, it was a terrible time to be living; the best and the worst simultaneously. But the “blame game” is not open for revisionist judgments: Ed Koch was worse than Ronald Reagan because he lived in New York, he was gay, he knew the situation and the suppressed medical studies and the scope and the world danger of this plague, yet he wanted th BIg Apple to bring in tourists and buy coops and condominiums. Koch gave use the plague of Yuppies along with the unconscionable neglect of AIDS. A Mayor like LaGuardia would have blown the roof off the coverup; he would have joined the marches on Washington; he would have collaborated with the French scientists on behalf of his city instead of tolerating the Gallo Fraud. What Reagan knew or did not know, by experience and by choice, I do not know. But I sure as hell know what Ed Koch knew, and did nothing about.

Leave a Reply