Surviving a plague

Daniel Nelson

How To Survive A Plague

Image by How To Survive A Plague

The US victims-turned-activists learned to campaign and then mastered the science that enabled them to change policies and help identify new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

It’s the story of ACT-UP, formed after a lecture by playwright Larry Kramer, making wonderful use of contemporaneous film from the camcorders that went on sale just after HIV made its appearance in medical journals: “Early AIDS advocates became the very first social movement to shoot a world the dominant culture was ignoring.

“The most intimate and epic story of the plague years in America – as witnessed by the people most affected – was preserved in tens of thousands of videotapes, most of which have still never been widely seen.”

The film touches on all the key moments of the US campaign: the rest of the world gets a look-in only through the global death figures from time to time are shown climbing terrifyingly into the millions.

It’s a fascinating account of a powerful, anger-fuelled lobby and the individuals that led it. Anyone who has taken part in a campaign on any issue will recognise the meetings, the personality clashes, the differences over tactics, and will be intrigued to see the successes and failures of the various types of protest that were used, including a “kiss in” at a hospital where guards had barred AIDS patients, chaining themselves inside drug company headquarters, and, most controversially, a cathedral invasion. Always in the background and usually in the foreground are the police, pushing and hitting demonstrators, harassing and arresting them, forever policing protests instead of protecting them.

Like so many groups ACT-UP finally split, in 1992, leading to the formation of the Treatment Action Group, which five years later won a MacArthur “Genius” award.

Throughout this nine-year period people with AIDS were dying, and fear and anger were mounting, until, in 1996, AIDS deaths in New York start to decline steeply.

The film stretches to almost two hours, but it’s an important and moving document.

·        How To Survive A Plague  is In UK cinemas from 8 November

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