It was an endlessly parodied cliche that any queer film released during a certain period would be about one thing and one thing only: Aids. In 1993, Philadelphia showed a wider audience a mostly clean and palatable version of the crisis, and won Oscars for doing so, and for a time, when gay men weren’t acting as sassy friends to women in need, they were coughing up blood in lonely hospital beds.
The inevitable and understandable pushback, allowing for a wider breadth of stories, brought us more “queer joy” and “chosen family” but it also allowed some to forget just what a time of unimaginable annihilation it was. It also reframed the period as an onslaught of Aids movies when the majority of them existed on the outskirts still, films such as Buddies, Longtime Companion and Jeffrey seen by mostly queer arthouse audiences. If anything, I’d argue that something so relatively recent and horrifying has been rather under-explored on screen especially in comparison with other, even fresher tragedies (Aids has killed more than 44 million people worldwide compared with just more than 7 million for Covid).
