AIDS in Film and Television

Abstract

Representations of AIDS in film and television have differed throughout the world. Accordingly, this article focuses primarily on such representations in North America, with a particular emphasis on US media offerings and occasional references to related examples from other English-speaking countries. In the early 1980s, what eventually became known as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was initially labeled GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). As a result, the earliest representations of AIDS in television news programs focused almost exclusively on gay men, and shortly thereafter intravenous drug users, as “guilty villains” in the emergent AIDS crisis, with a visual emphasis on emaciated individuals covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. By 1985, independent films and documentaries pertaining to AIDS started to emerge, along with the NBC network’s first made-for-television movie about AIDS, An Early Frost. In 1987, AIDS began entering the plots of various prime-time television series. Most of these offerings continued to perpetuate understandings of AIDS as a gay disease, even into the early 1990s. As the decade of the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, the phenomenon of AIDS was increasingly being regarded as two distinct yet interrelated epidemics: HIV and AIDS. Some film and television offerings began shifting their focus away from gay men and intravenous drug users with AIDS toward children with AIDS and healthy individuals with “at-risk bodies” that required ongoing protection. In 1993, Hollywood’s first all-star movie about AIDS, Philadelphia, flipped the script by foregrounding Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions to generate substantial compassion, rather than cultural contempt, for a gay man with AIDS. The film’s contents, viewed by a wider general public than preceding works, effectively challenged AIDS discrimination. During the first half of the 1990s, a small number of noteworthy AIDS metaphor movies were made and released, and self-representation in AIDS documentaries became more common. In large part due to the availability of lifesaving antiretrovirals, which resulted in a cultural shift from large numbers of individuals dying from AIDS to large numbers living with HIV, representations of HIV/AIDS in film and television decreased substantially during the second half of the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the new millennium. Since then, there has been a growing representational interest in exploring the early history of AIDS, in offerings such as How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and The Normal Heart (2014).