'Longtime Companion' Is 25: An Oral History of the Trailblazing, Heartbreaking First Major Movie About AIDS

From: Wicked Gay

In the summer of 1990, the AIDS crisis in the United States was almost a decade old. By the end of that year, the disease would claim over 120,000 lives to date in the United States alone. Though AIDS had begun as an obscure and seemingly isolated medical crisis — one that had been introduced to most of the country via a 1981 New York Times story featuring an ominous, now infamous headline, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” — it had exploded into a terrifying epidemic with no end in sight.

For the first few years at least, one of the hardest hit communities was gay men in cities like San Francisco and New York. “It was so unreal seeming,” says playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas, who lost many friends to the epidemic. “It would be like suddenly all the brown-haired people in your world were getting an autoimmune disease that was crippling and killing them in a matter of weeks. It just didn’t make any sense.” AIDS cut a devastating swath through creative professions in theater, dance, and film, but aside from the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost and the little-seen 1986 film Parting Glances, there had been no other film dramatizations about what it was like in those years. It was a stunned, benumbed kind of silence that desperately needed breaking. Full story here!