FILM: HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

[Dora]

La storia di ACT UP e TAG (Treatment Action Group) e del coraggio e della determinazione di quegli attivisti.
La prima il 21 settembre.



http://surviveaplague.com/

New AIDS Film Goes Viral

While effective HIV treatment is now more affordable, 28 million people globally still cannot afford treatment. In the US, nearly half of the 1.1 million people living with HIV are not on treatment. What’s more – AIDS remains the most stigmatized disease in human history. Fighting for prevention, treatment, medical care and human rights for people with HIV/AIDS is the most pressing health care justice issue today.

Faced with their own mortality an improbable group of young people, many of them HIV-positive young men, broke the mold as radical warriors taking on Washington and the medical establishment.





HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, debuting in St. Louis on October 12th at the Tivoli, is the story of two coalitions—ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group)—whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these self-made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time. With unfettered access to a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage from the 1980s and '90s, filmmaker David France puts the viewer smack in the middle of the controversial actions, the heated meetings, the heartbreaking failures and the exultant breakthroughs of heroes in the making.

Vital VOICE recently talked with David France about the upcoming film:

Colin Lovett: This film – how much of it is actual footage vs. a recreation – it doesn’t really seem like acting – but more a documentation of the actual fight on AIDS… can you talk about the assembly of the footage and how that all came to be this film?

David France: The film used 100% found footage that was taken as it was happening. It was the first time ever that the social justice movement recorded itself wall to wall that way. It was the dawn of the camcorder – the camcorder epidemic is a near sibling to HIV. First marketed by Sony in 1982 – HIV hit in 1981 – they were kind of growing up together. In the 9-year-period – they go from the camcorder to Hi-8, to VHS, to ¾ inch – it developed over time.



To discover it – took one and a half years to find the people, then another year and a half looking through footage. Not all of the film owners survived – we got everything from whoever had the footage and the foresight to save the tapes. There were 33 separate sources of footage used to create this film.

CL: In 2012, AIDS and HIV are widely known and talked about, yet many in the world, our country, and even our own community know very little about the two. What inspired you to make this film now?

DF: This story – the story of AIDS activism was powerful and colorful – the true triumph was its role in identifying the drug breakthroughs in 1996 – that no longer made it a death sentence. My first goal was to tell the world that AIDS activism was one of those brilliant social justice movements that has changed history, and should be embraced as the worlds’ legacy – the way we embraced the liberation and civil rights movements – they’re globally recognized as one of the great accomplishments in human history. The AIDS battle belongs there. I think our community, which may not know this story as thoroughly as they should – still lacks heroes. This story of heroes got lost – and I’m hoping that gay people in future generations will see the power and brilliance that was exercised by the community and find strength and inspiration in that to take the battle to the next level. We did this. This wasn’t just saving millions of lives, which ought to be enough to get a Nobel Prize – but it revolutionized health care treatment. The way patients and doctors interact – the way drugs are researched, trialed, and marketed – that was the direct creation of AIDS activists in our community. We should learn and celebrate that and know we did that as a people and changed history as a result.

CL: The 2008 film Milk obviously had a huge impact on society (and many younger members of the LGBT community) regarding awareness of LGBT history. Do you see this film doing the same for AIDS activism?

DF: Yea – I hope so. Unlike Milk, and Milk – Harvey Milk – was a great man, AIDS activism was far more revolutionary than what Milk was doing. The story of Milk is similar – it ends in death. This story is about triumph and arrival – and the modern day gay rights movement. What was accomplished between Stonewall and AIDS was important, but nothing like what happened after AIDS. Prior, we had no allies in civil life – AIDS brought us to this brand new paradigm – and all of these accomplishments have been sparked by AIDS activism. It was 25 years of the most rapid and thorough cultural and social transformations in world history. We went from 25 years ago to being nearly invisible and powerless to being a full partner in civic life. It’s remarkable. There’s still a lot to do, but look what’s happened in 25 years, it’s head-spinning.

CL: It seems that these days, many of our youth have not lived long enough to have been personally affected by anyone dying of AIDS, and many people don’t know anyone who is HIV+. Do you think the youth of today are less and less afraid of the disease? How do you think this film and other projects like it can change that?

DF: Larry Kramer is getting a new life and that tells a story of how dark those fears were. I don’t think people today will ever experience that time – we’ll never experience that again – and we shouldn’t think that we will. People SHOULD be less afraid of HIV – but they should still be worried. We

haven’t figured out how to curb transmission – 55 million every year – we haven’t made a dent. Old AIDS looked like this – that’s why you shouldn’t get AIDS. A 20 year old who gets HIV today will live to age 70 on average with the drugs. It’s not going to be a normal life (with AIDS) and significant health issues – but they can live a normal life. It’s hard to tell someone who is 20 that 70 is not enough – there’s a whole new message we have to tell them. This film will tell people – you are powerful and you can do whatever you set your minds on – as disenfranchised from how you feel, you can find a way to fight into the center of power and make change. Twenty eight million people still have no access to the drugs. We should include a push for a cure. One person has been cured from AIDS today. Like in the film – if we can do it with one, we can do it with everyone – we just have to figure out how to make that happen – I think it’s gay people who are going to figure it out.

CL: With President Obama finally endorsing same sex marriage, the fall of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the granting of marriage and civil unions in some states, what do you see as the next equivalent “big breakthrough” in the AIDS movement and when do you see it coming?

DF: The cure – right now the excitement in AIDS research is concentrating on the idea that we’re getting close to a cure to AIDS. We have already seen one person cured – his name is Quincy Brown – lives in San Francisco – he went through an experimental treatment after living with HIV for over 20 years. It shows us it can be done – the question is, if we can do it with one, we can do it with everyone – how can we get there? That’s what this AIDS conference from July addressed. In the mean time – we have to make sure that everyone who needs AIDS drugs gets them. The drugs are taken by 6 million people – there are still 20 million who have no access to those drugs – will not get access and will die at a rate of 4 per minute in the same ugly way that Americans were in the 1980’s and 90’s.

There are an estimated 800,000 people living in the US with HIV who are not getting medicine – no health care, no diagnosis, or no access to HIV care – so their doctors haven’t told them how important it is to get on the pill. There are a few experiments going on in Washington and the Bronx where they’re testing and treating the entire population. We don’t know how it’s going – but it’s VERY interesting – they’re trying to test EVERYONE who lives in Washington DC and get them on effective treatment. The earlier you get on the drugs, the better the prognosis – if you are on effective anti-retroviral therapy, you’re virtually non-infectious. If you bring your viral load to undetectable levels, it reduces the chance dramatically of transmission. 1 in 4 in Washington DC is HIV+ - if you take all of them and put them on drugs, we end the epidemic.

CL: Do you intend to get this film to the White House?

DF: There is a white house screening – have a contact with Kathleen Sibelius – she’s a fan of the film. We are currently in partnership with the State Department – Hillary Clinton announced last year that she correlates LGBT rights to human rights – they just recently had their first LGBT conference in furtherance to that policy in Albania. The State Department translated the film into Albanian to screen the film there. We believe the administration has the power to bring AIDS back to public consciousness. We also believe the administration has to do better – Hillary announced that by 2015 she hopes to have an end to mother-to-child transmission, and eventually an AIDS-free generation. In order to do that, we have to get these drugs to people who need them. We have to redouble our efforts for AIDS cure research. And we haven’t seen it yet out of this administration. The George W. Bush administration did nothing right except for PEPFAR – a multi-billion dollar effort to get people drugs around the world. Obama has just rolled that funding back. So, how is this administration going to get an AIDS-free generation if they’re rolling back these programs?

CL: What was the best part about making this film

DF: It was humbling to be entrusted with this historical footage that had never been made available to anyone before – and that this history was known so broadly and the footage was delicate.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE debuts October 12th at the Tivoli in the Loop.

Director/Producer David France is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who has been writing about AIDS since 1982 and today is one of the best-known chroniclers of the epidemic. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, GQ, and New York magazine, where he is a contributing editor, and has received the National Headliner Award and the GLAAD Media Award, among others. Several films have been inspired by his work, most recently the Emmy-nominated Showtime film OUR FATHERS, for which he received a WGA nomination. He is at work on a major history of AIDS, due from Alfred A. Knopf in 2013. Based on decades of reporting, HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE is his directorial debut.



BY: COLIN LOVETT – STAFF WRITER

Una videointervista a David France

[Dora]

[Dora]

Andrew Sullivan su "HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE".
Segue un post che Sullivan ha scritto lo scorso giugno per thedailybeast.com: una delle pagine più belle e commuoventi che io abbia letto dedicate a questo film (e forse anche a quegli anni).



How To Survive A Plague

I've seen and read and written a lot about the AIDS plague in America, fifteen years of mass sickness and death that killed five times as many young Americans as the Vietnam War in roughly the same period of time. I was a volunteer "buddy" to a man dying from AIDS before I tested HIV-positive myself. I lost my dearest friend, who found out he had AIDS at the very moment I found out I was HIV-positive, and countless others as well. I was scared shitless for years. I remember one night talking on the phone to an old boyfriend who was in the same mess as I was: "One thing we need to remember, if we survive this," I said. "We must never forget how fucking terrified we are."

I channeled that fear into my books, Virtually Normal and Love Undetectable. I wrote the first because I didn't expect to live to write the second. The date on the preface is the day I was diagnosed. I wrote the bleakest essay of my life in 1990 for TNR: "Gay Life, Gay Death." I went to ACT-UP meetings in New York City to absorb the scene and to Harlem's projects to see a dying gay man whose main worry was that a white guy like me on his doorstep would out him in front of his entire community. I watched young, vibrant men in their twenties turn into skeletons in a matter of weeks. I wandered through the great horizontal cathedral of the AIDS quilt on Washington's Mall, and saw a wave of grief that reduced the entire scene to an eerie silence.

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system - but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These "OI"s were something out of Dante's Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my "buddy" screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can't tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

In this immense catastrophe, you had an almost epic tale: no sooner had a critical mass of gay men actually come out, established themselves in urban ghettoes, and finally celebrated their humanity and sexuality than they were struck down in droves. But the next part of the story is the most amazing. We could so easily have given up in shame or self-hatred or exhaustion. But somehow, we found the internal resources to fight back. We knew that the federal government would refuse to react as they would have had this disease occurred anywhere but among homosexuals. And so we were almost a model of self-help, activism and empowerment. We had nothing to lose any more - and that unleashed a kind of gay power that is the most powerful reason, in my view, for why we have made so much progress so quickly since.

ACT-UP had its problems. It would alienate people unnecessarily; it would polarize; it would disrupt religious services; it could be a parody of p.c. claptrap (some meetings were interminable victim-fests), and tiresomely accuse almost anyone not in ACT-UP of being a murderer (yes, I was busted more than once). And yet all of this was a function of rage and will that was and is inextricable from defeating the plague.

"How To Survive A Plague" is the first documentary that I have seen that does justice to this story of a civil rights movement rising from the ashes of our dead.

It gets the chronology just right - with the false hopes and then the real progress and then the crushing news of bad drug trials. The worst years were 1992 - 1995. That was when the deaths were always at your door, when our local gay paper, the Washington Blade, had up to a dozen pages a week just for obituaries, and when I lost my friends who just missed the miracle of cocktail therapy. 1996 was a real nail-biter. Everything was a race against time; some won that race; some fell before the finish. "I just got out from under the barbed wire," said one friend who lived just long enough to get the treatment. But he left many behind who had been hanging from the same length of string.

ACT-UP begat the Treatment Action Group, which having stormed the drug company and research citadel went on to help guide and revolutionize it.



The whole concept of being a patient was turned from being a passive recipient of authoritative men in white coats to being an aggressive interrogator with any medical doctor who didn't know his shit. Almost all of us were certain we'd die of it. And almost all of us mastered the science because we didn't trust anyone else to help us.

The film gets this; it shows us what today's generation never saw: the extreme suffering of agonizing and terrifying deaths, compounded at times by ostracism, shame and family betrayal . It shows the women who helped lead the movement - Ann Northrop and Garance Franke-Ruta (now an Atlantic blogger) among many others; and it beautifully captures the manic passion of Mark Harrington and the sharpened lead at the end of the activist pencil, my old friend Peter Staley. There's one moment in it when you forget and forgive all of Larry Kramer's occasional excesses because of the look in his eyes. The look was determination to live. And he lived.

If you want to understand the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years, you need to see this film. None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

I was there in Ptown at the film festival with some of my generation of survivors - Peter Staley, Kevin Jennings, David France, Tim McCarthy, whose videos of throwing the ashes of loved ones over the White House gate cannot leave my mind. We hugged afterward, my face blurred red with sobbing. It felt a little like a veterans' get-together, we older men remembering our salad days of terror and combat. We are not free of health issues as older HIV-positive men. But they are nothing compared with the past. In that sense, we are all children of the plague, forged by it, tempered by it, and, in the words of Mark Helprin, I doubt we will ever be anything else ...

• ... for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever... That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they will never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.

[stealthy]

Sempre su How to survive a plague. Uno speciale che Democracynow.org ha realizzato per i 25 anni della ACT UP.

Prima parte


Seconda parte

[Dora]

A proposito del lavoro degli attivisti americani: Mark Harrington ha appena pubblicato nel sito di TAG un articolo dedicato alla storia della scoperta e alle battaglie per l'approvazione dei primi farmaci contro l'HIV, all'inizio degli anni '90.
Questo è il secondo articolo, dopo un altro uscito la primavera scorsa dedicato alle prime campagne del Treatment Action Group e intitolato TAG at 20: Early Campaigns.

Se qualcuno avesse voglia di tradurlo, penso che farebbe davvero un'opera meritoria.

L'articolo è questo:

• Before the Discovery of HAART

[uffa2]

per l'intanto, ecco la traduxione del brano tratto da "Dover Beach" che apre l'articolo:
E siamo qui, come in una piana che s’oscura
sbattuti tra confusi e allarmi di lotte e fughe,
dove eserciti ignoranti si scontrano di notte

[Dora]

per l'intanto, ecco la traduxione del brano tratto da "Dover Beach" che apre l'articolo:
E siamo qui, come in una piana che s’oscura
sbattuti tra confusi e allarmi di lotte e fughe,
dove eserciti ignoranti si scontrano di notte

Mi fa tanto piacere, Uffa caro, che tu ti sia FORMALMENTE IMPEGNATO a tradurre tutto l'articolo (ne vale la pena).

[uffa2]

fottiti
e non sperare di vedere la traduzione prima del 2013: stasera devo stirare, domani sono dal visagista, mercoledì ci sono le partite di coppa...

[Dora]

fottiti
e non sperare di vedere la traduzione prima del 2013: stasera devo stirare, domani sono dal visagista, mercoledì ci sono le partite di coppa...

E quando pensi di prepararmi la marmellata di fragole?!

[uffa2]

la stagione delle fragole è finita...