How To Survive a Plague
Within four minutes of the beginning of this film I was in tears. “How To Survive a Plague” chronicles the fight for HIV/AIDS medical advancement, and the social, political and bio-medical outreach methods used to ensure that HIV/AIDS was no longer a death sentence as it was from the early 1980’s to mid-1990’s. “How To Survive a Plague” recalls the protests and uprisings of the group ACT UP! and how they collaborated and culled the talents from the LGBT community, despite the fact that many of them were already infected with the virus and did not expect to live to see the victories they fought hard to win. And that’s exactly what happened. While watching those brave soldiers who “acted up” routinely by organizing at grass-roots level, as well as campaigning outside the offices and home addresses of many of the key policy-makers and research directors for the USDA, most of them died in front of us on camera. We watched their passion and the fight for the justice of their causes wither into skeletal shadows of their former selves.
The fight continued until 1996, when it was discovered that a triple-drug cocktail was the solution. Immediately everything changed. Many of the fighters who were being sustained by using drugs illegally gained from Japan or China (because they were not approved by the USDA), began the triple-drug treatment and reported phenomenal success within 30 days! It was powerful to see young, passionate men admit to expecting to die from AIDS, only to tearfully re-emerge on the screen as old men who had “survived the plague.” As a bonus, at the end of the film screening, they emerged from within the audience, and received a standing ovation.
This film was a provocative reminder of how gritty is the First Amendment. It was also a reminder of how, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
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