The NY Times review:
The currents of rage, fear, fiery determination and finally triumph that crackle through
David France’s inspiring documentary,
“How to Survive a Plague,”
lend this history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power a scorching
electrical charge. This aggressive gay activist organization, better
known as Act Up, formed in New York in 1987 and became the irresistible
force that made seemingly immovable objects — government agencies and
drug companies — give way, develop new treatments and speed them to the
market as the AIDS epidemic spread unchecked among the gay population.
Act Up came together by a kind of spontaneous combustion after a speech by one of its founders,
the playwright Larry Kramer.
An early demonstration, staged on Wall Street, protested the high cost
of AZT, the first drug approved for people with H.I.V. some six years
after the news about a mysterious illness that was killing gay men. The
drug cost roughly $10,000 a year per patient. Burroughs Wellcome, the
company that manufactured it, was eventually forced to lower the cost in
what was the first of many Act Up victories.
From the beginning the organization was extremely adept at using the news media, from its indelible logo — the words
“Silence = Death”
printed below a pink triangle on a black background — to its public
demonstrations at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug
Administration and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One clip shows members
dumping ashes and bone fragments of AIDS casualties through a fence onto
the White House lawn.
The film is a briskly paced, straightforward chronology made up largely
of footage shot mostly by the protesters (31 videographers are credited)
and told in their voices. As the documentary gallops forward, it
conveys the urgency of a desperate race against time. Many of the
group’s leaders were H.I.V.-positive men facing imminent death.
Their efforts were met with indifference and hostility from wary
politicians. In New York City, Mayor Edward I. Koch called the
demonstrators “fascists” after he was shouted down at a gay history
exhibition, but he subsequently backtracked and used the words
“concerned citizens.” In response to denunciations by Jesse Helms, the
longtime North Carolina senator, Act Up members stretched a giant condom
over his home.
If the movie expresses equal measures of sadness and outrage, it is
charged with the exhilarating excitement felt by soldiers on the front
lines of battle. Its heroes may have been sick, but in their struggle
they are fiercely alive. They include Mr. Kramer; Robert Rafsky; Ann
Northrop; and, most visibly,
Peter Staley,
a formerly closeted Wall Street bond trader with H.I.V. who left his
job and helped found the Treatment Action Group, an offshoot of Act Up.
Self-taught in the science of AIDS, the group collaborated with
pharmaceutical companies like Merck in the development of new drugs.
A breakthrough came in 1996 with the arrival of protease inhibitors,
whose workings are clearly explained in a remarkable animated segment.
They produced the so-called Lazarus effect, in which the symptoms in
seriously weakened AIDS patients disappeared in 30 days. The death rate
plummeted. Increasingly sophisticated pharmaceutical cocktails have
since made AIDS a chronic, manageable disease for those who can afford
the protocol. Today, according to the film, seven companies manufacture
the drugs, which have saved six million lives.
The success of Act Up might serve as a template for other movements,
like Occupy Wall Street, whose protesters also put their bodies on the
line. But many of those protesters are not fighting the personal,
immediate life-or-death battles faced by the members of Act Up, who
quite literally saved their own lives.
In the words of Mr. Kramer: “The government didn’t get us the drugs. No
one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That
is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can
ever claim.”
