What an excruciating ordeal! I sometimes don’t know how it is that we all survive as a specie. We can be really stupid, blind, ignorant, stubborn when dealing with whatever makes us afraid. It takes time before we understand it is just better to look straight in the eye of horror and start doing something soon. Or is it, as Gandhi’s famous quote says, that we don’t care while it is not happening to us? As if it was not enough having to deal with the stigma of being gay, trans, lesb, “different” in those days, AIDS came to this community as the proverbial sign of punishment, and the “normal” praised the Lord! As I said, how more stupid can we be?
With a thorough script, and a deluxe cast that helped Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, and Matt Bomer deliver unforgettable performances, from several points of view, this remarkable movie depicts the inertia, the wait, the frustration, the anger, the resentment, and the desperation of a community while dealing with an epidemic disease no one is absolutely sure how it is contagious; much less preventable. But what got my attention the most was a trait of character from my own comparison with the victims of WWII; it is awful to be the victim of others but, it is so much worse to submissively become the victim of your own slaver… “If we behave”, “if we don’t make too much noise”, “if they don’t find who we are”, “If we hide”, “if we help them”, “if we stay quiet”, “if we do not push for our rights”, “if we do not advocate”… ah, the emotional closet is the worst!