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How to Survive a Plague: the defiance of Aids activism on film

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The documentary How to Survive a Plague shows inspirational footage of 1980s Aids activism in the US – and the message is still relevant today

In 1987 Peter Staley was a closeted young bond trader working in New York in an environment he describes as hideous and stifling.

"It was like a high-school football team locker room," he says. "Sexist and homophobic and filled with testosterone. You had to play the part in order to survive. I didn't like what it did to me, but being in the closet was that much worse."

No one at work knew he was gay, but he was also keeping secret his recent diagnosis of what was then called Aids‑related complex. Staley's life, he says, changed when he was handed a flyer one day on the way to work. It was from Act Up, the Aids Advocacy group, and he'd just walked past its first demonstration, one powered by fury over the US government's refusal to release drugs that might save lives.

When he reached the office his colleagues were discussing the same demonstration. "Well, if you ask me they all deserve to die because they took it up the butt." This, recalls Staley, from the floor's lead trader. "I just kind of crumbled at my desk."

Act Up protesters with placards
An Act Up demonstration in 1991 protests against the US government's approach to the Aids crisis. Photograph: Dirck Halstead/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Watching the news that night though, he saw that the Food and Drug Administration was going to adapt its regulations in response to the protest and his mood was reversed. "I was just blown away," he says, "by that instant show of power and influence."

He saw, in other words, that direct action worked. Soon after, he "confessed all" to his boss, went on disability pay and became a full-time activist. He never went back to the trading floor. Instead, he became one of the most significant leaders of Act Up and later one of the founders of Treatment Action Group (TAG) whose inaugural act was draping a giant condom over the home of the vocally homophobic senator Jesse Helms.

Peter Staley in a still from How to Survive a Plague.
Peter Staley in a still from How to Survive a Plague. Photograph: Sundance Selects/Everett/Rex Features

This is one of the many acts of defiance depicted in David France's Oscar-nominated documentary, How to Survive a Plague, which is both a devastating indictment of the US government's negligence in dealing with the Aids crisis during the 1980s and 90s, and an inspirational account of the power of activism.

As France explains, few media outlets were covering the crisis at the time so patients and their partners took to using the then-new-technology of handheld camcorders to bear witness to the crisis. There's extraordinary material: the artist Ray Navarro, for example, very weak, yet speaking directly and passionately to the camera days before his death. Perhaps even more raw, are the scenes at Ashes Action, the 1996 protest at which men threw the cremated remains of their partners on the White House lawn.

"The whole world is watching," is one of the chants that echoes through these scenes, but part of what drove France to make the film was the worry that, two decades later, the world was no longer watching, that it had, in fact forgotten.

Peter Staley in suit and tie at the Glaad media awards in March 2013.
Peter Staley at the Glaad media awards in March 2013. Photograph: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Glaad

"We felt," Staley says, "that one of the most amazing moments in gay history was slipping from our collective memory."

He cites the 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, which documents the political career of Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the US. Watching that as a young man, Staley says, "completely centred me as an activist, it was: 'OK, this is where I'm falling in this history, this is the glorious history I'm now a part of.' Unless you look back like that and see yourself in that larger picture I think you're a little unmoored. I think you flounder."

How to Survive a Plague seems bound to do the same for a new generation. The difference though, is that Aids is anything but history. "People think it's something in the past and that is feeding a new rise of infections in young gay men," Staley says. "That's something that's terribly frustrating and depressing. If the film helps the next generation start talking about HIV/Aids again that will be a huge plus right there. This isn't just my generation's epidemic, it's their problem too."

How to Survive a Plague is in cinemas from 8 November. Visit www.surviveaplague.com @SurviveAPlagueUK facebook.com/Surviveaplagueuk"

More on this story

More on this story

  • Activists campaign for better access to 'HIV morning-after pill'

  • Growing old with HIV

  • How to Survive a Plague: watch the trailer - video

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