THE GREAT AIDS NARRATIVES

LONGTIME COMPANION

The film that many see as the precursor to 1993’s Philadelphia, the first major Hollywood endeavour to trace the effects of Aids, over a Fourth of July weekend in Fire Island.

BLUE

Derek Jarman’s experimental film masterpiece, voice overlaid on a single blue screen.

RED HOT + BLUE

Blockbuster MTV-era stars rework the songs of Cole Porter to raise funds directly for the international Aids charity, turning Neneh Cherry’s tough reading of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ into an unofficial anthem to the cause.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

David France takes all his work as a young journalist covering the early years of the epidemic and turns it into a patchwork documentary of devastating effectiveness.

PHILADELPHIA

Tom Hanks plays the lawyer with an incurable diagnosis in a ground-breaking first, Oscarnominated tract on HIV.

CITY BOY

Edmund White’s memoir of his entrée into New York forms a startling, personal parenthesis to the city, pre and post Aids.

THE INHERITANCE

Matthew Lopez’s ambitious two-part theatre extravaganza (inset below) retells EM Forster’s Howards End as his origins of gay history. The first part closes with one of the most evocative, ghostly processions ever seen on stage.

THE NORMAL HEART

The most iconic of the early New York Aids activists, Larry Kramer made enemies to make friends with his stark stage depiction of the early years of the disease, due to be revived this spring at The National.

CHRISTODORA

The unlikely friendship of a young graffiti artist and first-gen HIV survivor in an East Village apartment block forms the basis of Tim Murphy’s compelling book, a brilliant evocation of how HIV and drug cultures collide.

ANGELS IN AMERICA

Subtitled ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’, Tony Kushner’s multi award-winning stage play, later TV film, is a two-part epic triumph that traced Aids and the 1980s with metaphysical flair (inset above).

WE WERE HERE

A 2011 Sundance film festival documentary smash pieced together from heartbreaking first-person testimonies in San Francisco from the peak of the Aids crisis.

POSE

Russell T Davies’ US television counterpart, Ryan Murphy, chooses the Vogueing ballroom culture of the late Eighties to backdrop his story of Aids in America.

120 BEATS PER MINUTE

Director Robin Campillo’s forensic, militant and inspired depiction of the beginning of the Parisian arm of the Aids activism network, ACT-UP!

GHOSTS OF ST VINCENT’S

Tom Eubanks’ wonderful book chronicles the Aids wing at New York’s West Village hospital in the context of its historical precedents.