Film

How to Survive a Plague

Fighting for your lives

Reviewed by Melissa Anderson · Monday, October 15, 2012

In his filmmaking debut, journalist David France, who first wrote about ACT UP for the Village Voice, assembles a thoroughly reported chronicle of that direct-action advocacy group’s most vital era, from its founding in 1987 (six years into the AIDS epidemic) through 1995. Expertly compiled from hundreds of hours of archival footage—depicting fractious meetings, infamous demonstrations like 1989’s die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and hospital visits with the gravely ill—France’s documentary captures the fury and unflagging commitment of ACT UP to target those in power who did nothing to stop the disease. Present-day interviews with members who in 1987 doubted they’d live to see their 30th birthday deepen the film’s impact as an essential document of queer history.

Following through on its instructional-manual-like title, France’s film highlights the unlikely assortment of individuals who comprised ACT UP—those who “wrote” the primer. Many were white gay men in their 20s, like Peter Staley, a once-closeted, HIV-positive bond trader who joined the activist group after picking up a flyer at its first demonstration, in March 1987 on Wall Street. But the coalition’s ranks also included Garance Franke-Ruta, a high school dropout (she is now a senior editor at The Atlantic), and Iris Long, a retired chemist and housewife from Queens partial to floral shirts. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power did so by marshaling the energy and expertise of people who were sick, had lost someone to the disease, and/or were outraged by politicians’ indifference and homophobia. (Jowls flapping, Jesse Helms is shown fulminating on C-SPAN about “the revolting behavior” that has led to the proliferation of AIDS). “They all had to become scientists in a way,” playwright Jim Eigo, in a present-day sit-down, says of his former comrades in ACT UP; their knowledge equaled and sometimes surpassed that of the immunologists and medical researchers they tangled with during the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton eras.

Dispensing with voiceover narration, How to Survive a Plague is instead a compilation of first-person remembrances, a time-toggling polyphony emphasizing both individual struggles against illness and collective action—the we of me. Like Jim Hubbard’s similarly impassioned documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, France’s film gains in poignancy as its subjects reflect back not only on the group’s insurrections at the FDA, the NIH, the White House, and pharmaceutical-company headquarters, but also on their much-younger selves. Yet France is always careful not to confuse “tribute” with “nostalgia.” Ann Northrup recalls the less-harmonious moments in ACT UP’s history, “the inevitable splits in priorities” and “the charges of sabotages and threats.” Amplifying this, France includes electrifying footage of Larry Kramer, the catalyst behind the activist group, erupting during a meeting after a prolonged exchange between unseen, nasty cavilers: “Plague! We’re in the middle of a fucking plague, and you behave like this! ACT UP has been taken over by a lunatic fringe!”

Two decades after this incident, Kramer, in his signature overalls, makes another kind of stirring claim: “Every single [treatment] drug that’s out there is because of ACT UP, I am convinced. It is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim.” Of course, the disease still rages around the globe; 2 million people die every year from AIDS because they can’t afford the drugs, a closing intertitle reminds us. But millions of lives have been saved—and extended—as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, “put their bodies on the line.”

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