a battle against the shame
of desire
by Douglas Messerli
Isaac Julien (screenwriter and director) This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement / 1987 or 1988
Unknown filmmaker AIDS
‘Grim Reaper’ Ad Campaign / 1987 [social commercial]
Nicolas Roeg (director) AIDS:
Monolith / 1987 [social commercial]
Unknown filmmaker Cindy,
the Life of the Party / 1980s [social commercial]
Unknown
filmmaker The Patient at Stage 9 / 1997 [social commercial]
In late 1987 (according to the British Film
Institute; other sources argue for release in 1988) British filmmaker Isaac
Julien produced a new experimental film that made a very brave proposition.
During this time period, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Julien took the current
AIDS ads of the US, Europe, and elsewhere which consisted mostly of stern warnings
to gay men that unprotected sexuality led to becoming HIV-positive, followed by
AIDS and likely death, and stood those basically well-meaning but basically
homophobic ads on their heads.
But before
I describe Julien’s work it is necessary to remind viewers just what those dark
ads to which Julien is responding during the same period. Perhaps the worst of
them was the Australian government’s so-called “Grim-Reaper” ads which was not
simply aimed at gay men, but at the entire population. “At first only gays and
IV-drug users were being killed by AIDS,” begins this narrative, as a gathering
of about ten individuals, males and females of all ages are lowered by a griding
machine and dropped into place as the grim reaper rolls a larger TNT sized
bowling ball into them knocking everyone of them down like bowling pins. “But
now we know that everyone of us could be devastated by it. The fact is over 50,000
men, women, and children now carry the AIDS virus. But in three years nearly
2,000 of us will be dead, and if it is not stopped it could kill more
Australians than World War II.”
The
metaphor of the bowling ball and pins is repeated as a mother and a child held
in her arms are blown into the air by the impact of the ball.
The lecturing
voice continues: “But AIDS can be stopped, and you can help stop it. If you
have sex have just one safe partner. Or always use condoms, always.” A line of
text appears across the screen: “AIDS. Prevention is the only cure we’ve got.”
In the same year, John Hurt narrated an
even more violent British ad showing a volcano exploding (a second ad showing
an iceberg) as an unknown hand chisels unto a monolith inscribed with the
words: AIDS. Roeg chose these images specifically because they represented “doom
and gloom.”
The voice-over narration by Hurt reads: “There
is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and
there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during intercourse with an
infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it’s been confined to
small groups, but it’s spreading. So protect yourself, and read this leaflet
when it arrives. If you ignore AIDS it could be the death of you. So don’t die
of ignorance.” At this point a package of wrapped lilies are quite literally
tossed upon the leaflet on the screen.”
A 1980s US
ad features Cindy who is described as the life of the party, who goes from one
sexual partner to the next. That is “until one party she met a partner who would
stay with her for the rest of her life, AIDS.” The narration continues: “Don’t
experiment with sex, if you do, use a condom. For being the life of the party
could be the death of you.” A large skull is featured at the end.
Another ad
featured the musical group Los Lobos, again arguing for individuals to refrain
from sex but adding that if they do have sex they should use condoms. And it
didn’t stop in the 1980s. One of the worst, from 1997 is a US ad titled “The
Patient at Stage 9,” which rekindled early ads that focused all the horrors on
the gay community and drug users.
I’ll let
the commentator of commercials on Helloimapizza speak for this monstrous
AIDS commercial.
“…[I] couldn’t
find anything about the credits behind it or what company commissioned it
(although it was apparently produced by Lowe & Partners), but I guess the
anonymity just adds to
the poignancy – who exactly was Luke Stahler, and
was he even a real person? Although we may never know the truth, the ad is
still very disturbing. We see a young man sprawled on a bed in a darkened room,
quietly whimpering in pain. When he reaches out to turn on a bedside lamp, we
can see his body visibly covered in darkened lesions known as Kaposi’s sarcoma,
an AIDS-related illness. His cadaverous, fragile body tremors as he desperately
tries to sit up in his bed, but it bears too much for him as he softly sobs in
prodigious pain. There’s something that’s just so harrowing about hearing only
his cries and nothing else: no narration, no sound effects… nothing. We don’t
even see much of his face or physical body either, just a very frail young man
trying desperately to sit up in unbearable agony, with nobody around to help
him. But that’s all this ad needs to really hit you right where it hurts. “And
you think it’s hard to get out of bed to get a condom” reads the tagline….”
It has
long been my contention that the AIDS crisis changed everything about gay life.
The major defining feature, open sexual behavior, suddenly became a death
warrant, and the concept of having sex with only one partner, obviously a pitch
for monogamous sexual behavior became central to all these ads. Is it any
wonder that gays would work harder than ever in the late 1990s and into the new
decade for the right to marry, which of course explains the proliferation of
virtual hundreds of films over the next several decades focusing their themes
of finding the one desirable boyfriend and settling down with him forever after,
a reiteration of the heterosexual world view.
A few long-sighted gay cinema makers such as Derek
Jarman, Lionel Soukaz, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr, Bill Sherwood, Amos Guttman, John
Greyson, and particularly Jerry Tartaglia attempted to warn the gay community
about this loss of sexual identification, but given the consequences of the
AIDS epidemic and the shrill lessons of the media, of which AIDS ads are only
one of many attempts to alter gay life styles, which just as often came from
within the community itself, it was a losing proposition. Gays were basically
neutered, transformed in the world consciousness to normative lovers who just
happened to like the same sex.
Within
this context, accordingly, we now can realize just how radical Isaac Julien’s
short film of made in 1987 truly was.
Julien’s
film is divided into two parts, the first of which simply presents the beauty
of gay love. Shifting from scenes in London to Venice and the grand canal, home
to lovers around the world, the director’s wordless testimony, presents shimmeringly
beautiful seascapes that might remind one of Monet, a mixed racial couple
handing the film’s viewers their floral bouquets, a man caught within the image
of a brightly lit exit and that same image trapped with the man, as well as gay
men simply strolling the streets, kissing, and enjoying their lives.
Mary
Downes, writing one of the earliest reviews in Independent Media Magazine
in 1987 nicely summarizes the film’s purpose and its overall effect:
“How is sexual desire surviving under the modern
regime of Aids fearing morality? This video reclaims some of the territory
seized by the new puritans. A pulsating soundtrack and hot pink tinting make
men the objects of desire in this unashamedly erotic”
The
second part of the short film, moreover, goes even further, repeating several
of the images, while adding a seemingly rap music text that repeats over and
over the words: “Feel no shame in your desire,” the words also appearing
separately at intervals upon the images themselves, sometimes creating a
collage of 3 or even 4 layers of visual interplay, at other times breaking the
frame into 4 equal sections as if to repeat the images of love themselves as
often as the quiet voices are implying through their mantra.
Writing
on this film for Jump Cut in 1991, José Arroyo nicely explains this
second and the film as a whole:
“The second part begins with a male head turning,
trying to face the audience as if struggling to materialize. It finally does so
and stares blankly at the audience. This section is characterized by the
accretion of images introduced in the first section juxtaposed against new
ones. The images are cut to the beat of the soundtrack's rap. The figures in
the frame invariably look back at the audience. They are aggressive objects who
gain subjectivity through the matching of their gaze to that of the audience. A
recurring image in the first section of a blindfolded man unblocking his eyes
and gaining sight makes more forceful the power of their gaze. The film's
message becomes underlined through a kind of video aesthetic of synchronously
superimposing the different words that make up the phrase, "Feel no shame
in your desire," onto various images. This section, like the first, ends
with the laughing kiss of the interracial mate couple.”
Perhaps
Lee Ray, writing on Letterboxd best summarizes the film as a whole:
“While the AIDS advertisements were loaded with
imagery of death and filling everyone with fear regarding sex, Isaac Julien’s This
Is Not an AIDS Advertisement flips them on their head. celebrating joy, the
beauty of the world, and making sure that no one feels shame in desire. Bright
colors, lovers holding flowers, dancing, upbeat music…this isn’t an AIDS
advertisement, it’s an advertisement for desire, for a shame-free life, for a
breather from death’s presence…the very things all the other advertisements
forget about.”
The shame
of desire continues even today to haunt the Grindr generation, seemingly having
to apologize and explain themselves for simply attempting to find someone—
given the effects the 1980s and 1990s plagued with disease also had on gay bars—to
share the joy of sex. AIDS not only change the sexual habits of much of the
LGBTQ community, but altered the sense of community itself. As lovely as it
might be to imagine thousands of gay couples sitting home at night by the fire
reading or watch their TVs, such actions define the end of the very notion of
community. I have lived that life apart for some 55 years now, and I don’t
regret the love I found with a safe sex partner who surely saved me from AIDS
and death; yet I still miss the thrill of the gay bars and the gay men within
them and on the streets that preceded such domesticity.
And
finally, my bet is that Julien’s film perhaps rose AIDS consciousness more than
all those horrific visions of sex and death.
Los Angeles, December 12, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December
2025).
