A Story of AIDS, From the Beginning
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Version 0 of 1. LAST Wednesday night, David France, the director of the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” made his way to the Open Society Institute in Columbus Circle for a question-and-answer session and a screening of his film, which is about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Afterward, he was mobbed by well-wishers and advice-seekers. First came a woman named Naomi Schegloff, who explained that she was a director of a project called the Graying of AIDS, aimed at helping older people with H.I.V. “Can we do the card-trade thing?” she asked Mr. France, who was wearing a gray blazer over a sweater and a pair of jeans. Of course they could. Next up was a man in his 50s, who said he was making a self-financed film about “cannabis prohibition” and “the war on drugs.” “Your piece is fabulous,” the man said, before requesting a card exchange as well. “Really important.” After that was another fellow who wanted to take the movie to South Africa to screen for local activists and people working in medical care, and suggested the third weekend in February. “That sounds good,” said Mr. France, 53, before correcting himself. “So we know we’re busy on the 23rd,” he said. “We’re hoping we’re going to be busy on the 24th, too.” After all, that is Oscars weekend, perhaps the culmination of an already-heady awards season. First came prizes from the Gotham Independent Film Awards and the Boston Society of Film Critics, both of which recently voted “How to Survive” the best documentary of 2012. Then, on Nov. 27, Mr. France received word that the Independent Spirit Awards, given out the day before the Oscars, had nominated his film for Best Documentary. On Dec. 3, the documentary wing of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the film had made its shortlist as well, pulling in front of roughly 100 other eligible films and now in contention with 14 filmmakers for the coveted 5 slots. (The final list of nominees will be announced in January.) Pretty good, given that until fairly recently, Mr. France’s main connection to the entertainment industry was via his partner of 18 years, Jonathan Starch, a producer at “Law & Order: SVU.” But in 2008, Mr. France wrote a jaw-dropping piece for New York magazine about a promising young doctor named Gabriel Torres, who ran the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital for much of the ’90s, then descended into drug addiction shortly after antiretrovirals came onto the market. In the article, Mr. France found not an anomaly, but a textbook case of a person who had battled the worst years of the epidemic, only to find himself lost and confused about where to go and what to do once the crisis abated. “I think just about everybody who lived through that is wounded,” said Mr. France, smoking a cigarette and walking over to a bar in the Hudson Hotel for a chat after the crowd at the Open Society Institute dispersed. “It’s especially true of the people who were on the medical front lines. Because the work they were doing was life and death.” Moreover, to Mr. France’s additional dismay, little credit had been given to the activists who worked tirelessly throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, in many cases laying down in the streets to try to bring attention and money to the disease. So he set out with a small film crew and began collecting video footage from the era. He also met with more than a dozen prominent activists and veterans of the movement who appear in the film, which charts the journey of the disease from the first days, when a rare skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma began mysteriously appearing on the bodies of gay men all over New York, until the advent of antiretrovirals 15 years later. Among those interviewed are Larry Kramer, the playwright and co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis; David Barr, a founding member of the Treatment Action Group and the Act Up/New York Treatment and Data Committee; Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Garance Franke-Ruta, who helped found Countdown 18 Months, a group that pressured pharmaceutical companies to speed up the process of developing AIDS drugs. “I think it’s very difficult for anything to capture the awfulness of those years, but this movie comes close,” said Ms. Franke-Ruta, now an editor at The Atlantic. Then, when the film was done and edited, Mr. France took it to Sundance, where buzz followed almost immediately. As the fledgling filmmaker tells it, he could not save those who had fallen, but he at least thought he could honor them. And certainly, Mr. France knew their stories well. He came to New York in 1981 from Kalamazoo, Mich., which at the time was hostile to gay men and lesbians, he said. Then, within a week of his arrival and move to the East Village, the first report of AIDS hit the pages of this newspaper. “I came to New York to be free, and that’s what met me,” said Mr. France, now sitting in the bar and sipping a glass of wine. In 1982, he had his first byline as a journalist, writing about AIDS for The Gay Community News. A year later, he joined The New York Native, another newspaper aimed at the gay community, as its news editor. “I edited Randy Shilts,” he said. “I typeset Larry Kramer. You don’t edit Larry Kramer.” And he also wrote prodigiously: articles about friends dying, politicians ignoring the epidemic, early drugs that largely failed. The epidemic hit home, too. In 1992, Mr. France’s boyfriend of five years, Doug Gould, died of the disease. (The documentary is dedicated to him.) To this day, Mr. France is unsure how he managed to avoid infection. “I assumed I was positive, too, and I never did contract H.I.V.,” he said. “By some miracle.” Eventually, more-mainstream publications — among them New York Newsday and The New York Times — began calling. By the time antiretrovirals emerged in 1996, Mr. France had amassed a body of work as a freelance journalist that allowed him to move more easily into a world beyond the disease that defined so many of his contemporaries. “I wrote about the Catholic Church,” he said, referring to his book “Our Fathers.” “I became fascinated with life in the closet today and joined Jim McGreevey to write that book of his. I ghosted that. I was looking for other challenges outside of the AIDS wheelhouse.” Before, he had thought of himself less as a writer than as a person simply trying to get information out. Now, with the face of AIDS changing, Mr. France realized he could be more than that. Still, it was not always seamless. “I don’t know anybody that hit 1996 without massive debt,” he said. “Because you were not going to live, so you didn’t worry about it. None of us invested in the future.” I asked Mr. France if that was why he still smokes. Was it a vestige of an era in which no one thought about middle age and beyond? He said that wasn’t it at all. As he told it, he had stopped smoking for many years, and only recently resumed the habit because of the stress of Oscar season. “I got on the shortlist,” he said. |