Douglas Messerli | Lockdown: Ten Gay Covid Films [essay]

lockdown: ten gay covid films

by Douglas Messerli

 

As of the date of my 76th birthday on May 30, 2023, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there were 6,938,353 deaths of 767,364,883 confirmed cases of COVID globally. Just so that we can comprehend this vast number in relation to that other horrific pandemic in near memory: around 40.1 million (estimates being between 33.6 million to 48.6 million) people died of AIDS with 84.2 million infected. It is believed that in 2021 there were 38.4 million people living with AIDS.

    In short, although substantially more individuals contracted COVID than AIDS, far more many people died of AIDS than of COVID.

    It is important to remember that both pandemics were “equal opportunity killers,” infection being easily spread to all genders and any sexuality; the deaths have killed vast numbers of both men and women, and in Africa the number has been primarily women. Yet, there is no question, that although there is no way of telling what percent of those who died of AIDS were homosexual, we know that at least in the US and in European countries, the hardest hit community were males who had sex with other males (described in the statistical reports as MSM). It was not until 1982 that the disease stopped being called “gay-related immune deficiency” (GRID), and was retitled Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). According to a report by Dr. Dana Rosefeld of The British Academy gay men suffered “the most AIDS deaths by far at the epidemic’s height.”

   To my knowledge, COVID has not hit the LGBTQ community any heavier than other groups— the communities suffering most being economically deprived blacks and Hispanics and the elderly in general, all of whom died from the current pandemic at much higher rate. Just as I was a member of one of the most endangered groups in the AIDS crisis, so too was I in this pandemic.

    The first gay movies concerning AIDS were released in 1985, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies, John Erman’s TV drama An Early Frost, and Canadian documentary filmmaker’s No Sad Songs, with others important works followed such as Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), David Wojnarowicz’s Beautiful People (1988), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), Marlon T. Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989), and Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992). It wasn’t until eight years later that the first truly commercial film dealt with the subject, probably the film most audiences remember today, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) was released, the same year three other memorable independent films were made, Roger Spottiswoode’s HBO production of And the Band Played On, Steve Levitt’s short work Deaf Heaven, and John Greyson’s truly innovative musical drama Zero Patience.

      What is interesting about the above time lines is that AIDS was first identified in 1981, and by 1982 US Representative Henry Waxman already convened the first congressional hearings on AIDS at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood.* It would take years to reach the ears of the general public and even longer before the government took any interest in attempting to do something about it.

      One need only compare that with the fact already in 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, 8 of the short films I discuss here and Mexican director Roberto Pérez Toledo Hidroalcohólico (Hydroalcoholic) and The Fourth Date—which I discuss elsewhere—all were released.

       Obviously, there are numerous reasons why there was a much quicker response in cinema to this pandemic than for AIDS, one of them being simply the history of AIDS itself, which no young director can forget, since the disease (as well as COVID) is still very much with us. Moreover, the gay community was still relatively silenced in the early 1980s and there was no proliferation of gay short films as there is today, indeed there was no guaranteed audience for such films, while today the young directors can imagine, at least, that their works might be seen by sympathetic audiences at LGBTQ+ festivals.

       But I was struck yet again, given the above statistics, just how devastating to the global population and particularly the queer world that AIDS had been, particularly in relation to a disease which from day one received major newspaper and—despite a slow-thinking and dismissive US president—substantiative governmental action. Yet a well-informed, even learnèd, politically left-leaning friend of my age commented that he had believed that our generation might have been spared the international horrors of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations of the 20th century, meaning the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 (killing internationally some 50 million individuals), two World Wars, and the Holocaust, only to suddenly be faced with a disease of such global proportions as COVID. Evidently, for him, as a heterosexual American living in Britain, AIDS had not at all appeared to have been an even worse and more life-changing phenomena.

       Yet I have no intention in these comparisons of diminishing the terrible effects of COVID and its continuation in various new strains, as well as the effects upon the world population from what has been described as “long COVID.” Once again, in the US and elsewhere governments were slow to act and, under Trump’s first period as President, important vaccines were often mocked. The President himself came down with the disease, although he did not take it nearly as seriously as he should have. It was and remains a true horror, as many of these films reveal. And it affected many businesses and industries, ultimately changing the role both cinema and theater had in our lives, both art forms seeing a significant drop in public attendance for years after the disease.

       However, I will not begin in this introduction to analyze what these 10 works concerning COVID reveal to us overall; I discuss some of the general implications within the works themselves.

       The films I discuss here (and there were others) are British director Leon Lopez’s Hey Google, the same country’s Marco De Luca’s Two Meters Apart, US director J. T. Seaton’s Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye?, US filmmaker Mariano Rodriguez Ingold’s The Meeting, US director Colin Sheehan’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting, another film by a British citizen Leon Lopez, Where's Steve?, an innovative work, involving both AIDS and COVID by the Canadian LGBTQ genius John Greyson, Prurient, and the Skype-based work between Italian Michael Vaccaro and American Tom Pardoe in Same Time Tomorrow, all of these works made during a year in which theaters and major film studios were shuttered. In 2021 Filipino director Narciso Nadal Santos’ 14 days appeared, and in late 2023, Indian director Anjay Duggal filmed his Boyfriend, about an eight-day lockdown from COVID in New Delhi.

 

*What isn’t generally discussed is that AIDS had already appeared Off-Broadway in William Finn’s musical March of the Falsettos from 1981, and in the final part of that work, Falsettoland in 1990. The work was presented on Broadway in 1992. In the musical there is still no name for disease suddenly striking down young gay men. The work appeared in film in 2017 and is reviewed in these pages.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from My World Cinema (June 2023).