THE LIVING AFTER DYING

Christopher
Brand

By
FRANK BRUNI

Published:
March 17, 2012

I SAT
down to watch “How to Survive a Plague,” a new documentary   about the history
of the AIDS epidemic, expecting to cry, and cry I did: at the
hollowed faces of people whittled to almost nothing by a disease with an
ugly arc; at the panicked voices of demonstrators who knew that no matter
how quickly research progressed, it wouldn’t be fleet enough to
save people they loved; at the breadth and beauty and horror of the AIDS
quilt, spread out across the National Mall, a

thread of grief for
every blade of grass beneath it.

I expected to be
angry. Here, too, I wasn’t disappointed. The words of a physician on the
front lines in the early days reminded me that “when people died
in the hospital, they used to put them in black trash bags.” Many
politicians mustered little more than contempt for AIDS sufferers.
“There’s nothing ‘gay’ about these people, engaging in incredibly
offensive and revolting conduct,” snarled Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican
from North Carolina, at the time. The documentary memorializes that
rant and that mind-set, and also shows Helms saying that he wishes
demonstrators would “get their mentality out of their crotches.”

What I didn’t
expect was how much hope I would feel. How much comfort. While the movie
vividly chronicles the wages of bigotry and neglect, it even more
vividly chronicles how much society can budge when the people exhorting it
to are united and determined and smart and right. The fight in us
eclipses the sloth and surrender, and the good really does outweigh the
bad. That’s a takeaway of “How to Survive a Plague,” and that’s a takeaway
of the AIDS crisis as well.

I referred to the
movie, which was produced and directed by the journalist David
France, as a history of the epidemic, and it is. But it teases out a
specific strand and tells a particular story, focusing on the protest
group Act Up, which was set into motion by Larry Kramer 25 years ago this
month. He had already sounded an alarm over the rapidly spreading
epidemic with his landmark play “The Normal Heart,” and in March 1987,
during remarks at the lesbian and gay community center in downtown
Manhattan, he bluntly told a roomful of men that if they didn’t take
bold steps to make America and its government care, two-thirds of them
could be dead in five years.

That same month Act
Up — the acronym by which the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
quickly came to be known — staged the first of its many protests, visiting
New York’s financial nerve center and blocking traffic there. It
occupied Wall Street long before the verb and address were welded
together, in an era when ire over indiscriminate greed, manifest
just last week by the viral sensation of a Goldman Sachs executive’s
resignation, hadn’t been stoked to its current fury. And the group
morphed from then and there into a model for the here and now of how social
change occurs.

What you probably
remember best about Act Up is its theatrical genius (or gall, depending
on your sensibility). Its members held a “die-in” during a Mass
inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, going limp in the aisles so that police
officers had to use stretchers to carry them away. They hurled the ash and
bone of fallen comrades over the fence around the White House and
onto the lawn.

But if boldness had
been the sum of Act Up, the group wouldn’t have accomplished so
much. It added enterprise and erudition to the mix. A friend of mine who
covered an Act Up demonstration in San Francisco remembers standing
in the street, chatting over the phone with a group spokesman and
telling him that she would file her newspaper story as soon as she rounded
up a certain statistic. Minutes later he called back, said that he
had found a Kinko’s store nearby and told her that documents with the
information she was seeking had already been faxed to her there.

In “How to Survive
a Plague,” gay men and their allies are shown educating
themselves about antiviral medications, about clinical-trial protocols, about
the Food and Drug Administration approval process. They are shown
successfully making the case that the trials should be less restrictive,
and the process much faster. Because what they’re saying is so
concrete and constructive, scientists can’t avoid paying it heed.

“If you come at a
problem in a way that’s just disruptive and iconoclastic, but
you don’t know what you’re talking about, all you are is a nuisance,”
said Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when we talked last week. Act Up’s
leaders, he told me, knew what they were talking about. As a result,
they “cracked open the opaque process” of drug development,
altered the patient-doctor relationship and “changed the whole face of
advocacy,” he said.

That’s a remarkable
tote board, and it’s not all. Act Up gets crucial credit for
advancing the acceptance of gay people. A slogan it popularized, “silence
equals death,” persuasively argued that gay men had to emerge from
hiding so that people around them would see AIDS not as a distant
abstraction but as a killer potentially stalking their brothers,
sons, co-workers. Those men indeed came out, and people indeed saw.
That’s why same-sex marriage is now such a prominent issue,
with so many ardent advocates. That’s why the bullying of gay
teenagers has become a national concern, and why the conviction of a
Rutgers University student for spying on and taunting a roommate who then
committed suicide has drawn national attention. 

There are still
politicians like Helms out there, but not as many. There’s still hate,
but not as much. After more than 600,000 deaths from AIDS in this
country and about 30 million around the globe, scientists still
haven’t found a cure or vaccine. But there are highly effective
treatments, and H.I.V.-infected people who get proper medical care —
which isn’t, mind you, nearly enough of them — can expect long, full
lives. And that’s largely because 25 years ago, a tribe in desperate
trouble did something that religious conservatives who can get their
minds out of people’s crotches should in fact admire. It elected
self-reliance over self-pity, tapping its own reserves of
intellect, ingenuity and grit to make sure its members were cared for.

In “How to Survive
a Plague,” being screened just twice in Manhattan later this month in
advance of an expected fall release, one of the epitaphs for that
effort is given by Kramer himself.

“We had the
brainpower, and we had the street power,” he says on-camera. “We, Act
Up, got those drugs out there. It is the proudest achievement that
the gay population of this world can ever claim.”

SOURCE: NYT