Yes, everybody knows about the Hollywood trope of dandy gays or dead gays which was starting to change by the 80's. There were starting to be more movies and series that didn't involve gay men dying and even if it were a sad ending, you can chock a lot of it up to recognizing society's homophobia which was definitely not the same as the dead gays trope which was that we had it coming. Movies like Maurice and Another Country can't have happy endings because the times didn't allow that. That doesn't make them bad for being sad, it means that homophobia sucks. It still sucks; it's still relevant. In the 80's that was something that needed to be shouted out at the top of our lungs. If that offends people's tender sensibilities today, well, fuck off. It's bad enough to have so much gay history erased at the hands of homophobes, but to consciously self-censor what things were like 100 years ago and other historical dramas is to erase our history willingly and I call bullshit on that. We need to constantly be reminded that we now are the historical oddity and how fragile that actually is.
The other thing is that historical fiction is usually done from the point of view of the victor. Well guess who the victor was back then? And the victor's literal goal was to not speak its name. Sure you can pull the Hollywood series's stunt of rewriting Hollywood's history in a farcical and completely unrealistic way but while I get what they're trying to do -- being aspirational -- it's annoying as well because it is so false. I mean, if they did a movie about Oscar Wilde, are they supposed to omit the fact that he was thrown in jail for being gay? Or maybe we shouldn't see anything about it all because it has that inconvenient sad fact. Or maybe Alan Turing to whom we owe a great deal of having this conversation at all, and omit that he was driven to suicide by the homophobic state just so it isn't sad?
Now onto AIDS. There seems to be this notion that in the 80's all movies that dealt with gay content were AIDS related. That is utter and frankly offensive bullshit. I don't think the first film that dealt with AIDS came out until around 1985 and it was a low budget affair (Buddies?) without much reach. So half the decade down without a single mention. The other thing to realize is... there was no public internet. Information moved at a glacial pace compared to today. Gay men were dying because we didn't know what was going on. So something like An Early Frost which also came out in 1985 was extremely needed just to get the word out. That's true from a health standpoint, but also from a political standpoint since nobody gave a shit because it was "killing all the right people". Oh but that was then you say. But that's true of anything that involves history which these films have become.
By the late 80's more AIDS related movies were available but they were far from common. Heck just about any gay content was hard to find. By the early 90's it was a little more common but again we are talking about a very tiny universe. We are now swimming in a sea of gay content and there's maybe a dozen or two movies that dealt with AIDS. What's the fucking problem? Some of them were even funny like The Living End. Not every movie has to be happy. Like it or not, it's part of our gay past and it's maddening that people want to erase it as if it never happened -- because it's sad. Yes, Holding the Man is extremely hard to watch but it's our history too: that gay men of my generation were practically wiped out from a disease that nobody knew about. That it was a historical accident that it embedded in the gay community in the West unlike the rest of the world where it's primarily a straight disease. That it informed a lot of the politics of the day. Everybody should watch BPM just to get a sense of how desperate it was and frankly the heroes most of whom are now dead who transformed not only their times, but generations to come. Oh, you say, I just don't want to watch it now. Ok if not now, when?
I wonder if the same people who hate sad gay content avoid movies like Schindler's List and the like that deal with the Holocaust. Or heck, even Fiddler on the Roof for that matter. Or movies that deal with Black slavery in the Americas. What, no Kunta Kinte in Roots because: sad? I'd much rather people not watch ahistoric pieces of revisionist history like Gone with the Wind that erase Black history instead. I'm neither Black nor Jewish, but I am gay and movies about our pasts need to be made and watched because god fucking damn it: NEVER FORGET.
