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Outstanding ACT-UP documentary “How to Survive a Plague” opens in NYC, LA, SF and more tonight! Don’t miss it!


One of the best and most compelling films I saw at Outfest this summer was the documentary How to Survive a Plague which I hope all of you will go and see now that it has been released into theaters today in major markets.

You will see how absolutely heroic people can be, how smart, how resilient, how amazing, how persistent, how angry, how determined, how brilliant.

I can’t say enough about these people, most of them facing certain death from AIDS. They were determined to go down swinging.

And swing they did: Plague gives us a front-row seat to the epic day-to-day battles that ultimately resulted in AIDS no longer being a death sentence. But the drug treatments that became available in the mid-90s would not have happened if not for the work of ACT UP members who elevated themselves with their own self-education.

They interacted with scientists, researchers and regulators and eventually spun-off into the Treatment Action Group (TAG) founded by Peter Staley who survived the plague and was at the Outfest screening in July.

Thanks to the development of Protese Inhibitors (the film does an amazingly effective job of explaining the science behind the disease and the drugs without losing momentum) which became available in 1996, AIDS deaths in New York City declined by 50 percent that first year.

Since then, close to 8,000,000 lives have been saved by the drugs.

“All of us are still alive,” Staley told the crowd at Outfest. “It’s pretty remarkable. … Unlike the five times in this film where I said I was going to die, I might actually might live long enough to see a cure.”

The film’s director, David France is a journalist who covered most of the events that take place in the film and lost his lover to the disease in 1992.

“For a long time, I’ve wanted to tell the story of how those dark days ended – the combined brilliance that worked together to tame a virus,” he said at Outfest.

France went through 700 hours of footage for the film which was originally 13 hours long.

“It took us two days to watch it and we loved every bit,” he said. “We didn’t want to take any of it out. We told the stories of people whose lives were lived brilliantly. To take any of it out seemed like an act of cruelty. But we had to make the film digestible.”

Staley was a rising star as a bond trader and deeply closeted before HIV struck him down. He became one of the most visible member of ACT UP and memorably went toe-to-toe with Pat Buchanan about safe sex on CNN’s Crossfire.

He said it was “disheartening” that the LGBT community – even the AIDS activists themselves – seemed to move on so quickly to such issues as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and gay marriage once effective drug treatments were made available.

“We never processed the worst years of it,” Staley said. “A lot of us put it on a shelf emotionally. It took awhile before we could look back and remember what we all went through.”

“It’s time now,” he added. “We need to remember these people. … Tell some friends about these incredible lives.”

FILE UNDER: Movies

Comments

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2 Remarks

  1. Cannot wait to see this. Another searing documentary with the same subject matter is ‘We Were Here’. Essential viewing.

  2. Is it wrong to think Peter Staley is HOT! I love that photo!

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