This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
Over the last forty years, seventy five million people have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, and in America alone nearly three quarters of a million of those people have died. With numbers like that, the film tries to give the whole thing some real context. Jonathan van Ness from Queer Eye narrates, and the film does a solid job reminding people that while this disease is still very much active, millions of people are also living with it and thriving despite the diagnosis. It kicks off by digging into the stigma and misinformation that caused so much damage back in the eighties and nineties, and how a lot of that same misinformation is still floating around today, especially among younger generations. So many Millennials and Gen Z kids honestly don't even know the basic facts about HIV and AIDS. And there's still a ton of shame and guilt tied to getting diagnosed, something van Ness understands firsthand since he's living with HIV himself. The documentary also touches on newer treatments and promising research happening now. Regular people from all over the country share their honest stories about living with HIV and AIDS, taking ownership of their diagnosis instead of hiding from it. Their stories, some from older folks and some from younger ones, offer a fresh perspective on what it actually means to be HIV positive today. Between the stigma, the misconceptions that still linger, and the way the film lays the disease's history side by side with where things stand now, you really get a sense of how much has shifted and how much honestly hasn't.
That said, I did feel like the documentary's focus jumped around a lot and felt kind of unfocused overall, but it still does a good job driving home just how serious this disease remains, particularly for minority communities and people experiencing homelessness. The production itself was fairly average, mostly just personal stories stitched together with various statistics thrown in. I'll admit I was genuinely surprised by some of the numbers, stuff I didn't know before. Like how the public conversation really only took off after a famous Hollywood actor was diagnosed in the eighties, or how this one thirteen year old boy who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion ended up playing a huge role in pushing treatment efforts forward, among other things like that. Looking back at how the world responded to covid, it's honestly kind of shocking to realize there was basically no coordinated medical or political response during the peak of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the eighties. We know now that a lot of that came down to plain indifference and lack of compassion toward the communities hit hardest by the disease. It's genuinely heartbreaking to think about how many lives could've been saved, and where things might stand today, if people back then hadn't been so gripped by fear.
Bottom line, unfocused at times but still an important, eye opening look at a crisis that never really ended. (5.5/10)
Comments