March 21, 2012 | Health Matters

The AIDS plague and how we survived it

David France’s How to Survive a Plague is a new documentary about how the activism and innovation of groups like Act Up were key in the battle against AIDS and HIV. Pulled from never-before-seen archival footage, the film follows a small group of people, most of them HIV-positive, in their nine-year-long battle to save their own lives. As the filmmaker points out: "They end up saving 6,000,000."

France is certainly the perfect person to tell this particular story; as a journalist, he was one of the first people to report on the strange disease affecting gay men in '80s. And he watched as AIDS ravaged the community around him.

"My upstairs neighbor fell, and the guys on the fourth floor, and the one across the hall," he said. "My lover took ill. The cancer darkened his skin but it was the pneumonia that claimed him in 1992 -- four years before new medications changed the course of the plague."

Frank Bruni reviewed the film for the New York Times. And though the story is difficult at times, he said there is much hope in it as well. "I sat down to watch How to Survive a Plague ... expecting to cry, and cry I did: at the hollowed faces of people whittled to almost nothing by a disease with an ugly arc; at the panicked voices of demonstrators who knew that no matter how quickly research progressed, it wouldn’t be fleet enough to save people they loved; at the breadth and beauty and horror of the AIDS quilt, spread out across the National Mall, a thread of grief for every blade of grass beneath it.

"What I didn’t expect was how much hope I would feel. How much comfort. While the movie vividly chronicles the wages of bigotry and neglect, it even more vividly chronicles how much society can budge when the people exhorting it to are united and determined and smart and right."

The film covers many of the big protests, from pulling an enormous condom over the home of homophobic senator Jesse Helms to a “kiss-in” at St. Vincent’s Hospital where emergency room guards had actually barred AIDS patients, to staging the occupation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for opposing condoms and safe sex. 

But these people were not just protesters, they were educated protesters. They learned everything they could about antiviral medications, about clinical-trial protocols, about the Food and Drug Administration approval process. They pushed for less restrictive drug trials and a faster approval process. Soon they are being allowed onto the boards of pharmaceutical companies, while forcing Washington to spend money on dealing with the disease.

"For a long time I have wanted to tell the story of how those dark days ended," France added. "The combined brilliance that worked together to tame a virus."

The documentary is currently being shown at film festival across the country. You can see a trailer for it after the jump ...