Douglas Messerli | AIDS after AIDS [Introduction]

aids after aids

by Douglas Messerli

 

One might have thought that with the public announcements beginning in 1997 when the first approved combination of anti-HIV drugs came onto the market as Combivir, and even more importantly after the development in 2010 of PrEP and Truvada which lower the risk of each becoming HIV-positive, that, as many doctors announced at the time, there should no longer be the general fear of, or even more importantly, the stigma that had been attached to individuals who found themselves HIV-positive or were suffering from AIDS.

    But clearly that didn’t happen. Many young males and females in Western countries where the medicines were easily obtained continued to suffer over the possibility that their sexual lives had led to disease and suffering.

     In many countries, moreover, these drugs were not, and still are not, readily available, and even when they are, young HIV-positive individuals cannot afford them or do not yet fully comprehend how they might change their lives. Furthermore, with Combivir there are still side effects for some patients, although there are now at least a dozen antiretroviral drugs on the market.

      Although there has been remarkable progress since the first reports of young men becoming ill in New York and California in 1981, HIV-positive results and AIDS has not disappeared and to many represent a terrifying prognosis.

     As the films I’ve chosen below reveal, the horror of AIDS and being HIV-positive still very much continued to haunt the minds of gay film makers and individuals long after the new drugs were approved. And, more importantly, becoming HIV-positive often revealed outside sexual activity for individuals in marriages and close relationships that helped to destroy those situations. As I suggest, at one point, medical information became something close to the police in the days of closeted gays, intruding upon their lives and revealing their own indiscretions and sexual behavior.

      As director Matthew Puccini, the director of one of the best of these films, described the situation, discovering that one may be HIV-positive was still a “scare.” As he observed in Huffington Post:

 

“A close friend and I both had HIV scares last summer. I remember sitting in the cramped waiting room at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in midtown Manhattan, with my mind racing through all of these crazy hypotheticals, all these conversations I was dreading having to have. It felt important to make something that reflected our experience [and] showed the HIV screening process in a detailed, contemporary light.”

 

    And AIDS, of course, has not disappeared. As I note in one footnote, in 2011, the date of one of these short films, The World Health Organization estimated that 1.7 million people had died of AIDS-related causes, with a total of 34.2 million people infected.

    I describe the six films I have selected—Bill Mullan’s Disclosure (2012), Ian Wolfley’s Bug Chaser (2012), Sean Devaney’s Bare (2012), Matthew Puccini’s The Mess He Made (2017), Giorgio Volpe’s StandBy: l’attesa (2018), and Kyle Jumayne Francisco’s Gulis (Lines) (2019)— as the “Five R’s,” since quite coincidentally, over a period of several years, I had unconsciously titled each of these essays with a single word beginning with “R,” without even imagining I might someday wish to join them together under a shared theme: “Revelations,”  “Risk,” “Remembrance,” “Removal,” “Reckoning,” and “Reconnecting.”

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2025).