I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly) not as affecting. But the films are, of course, naturalistic (or mostly so), and dramatic and tear-jerking, etc., so watching these is a bit like jumping into the deep end of this work.
(Or perhaps I'm wrong – because, in a different way, it will of course be extremely hard to listen to Diamanda Galás' music, or perhaps to hear a lot of difficult pop songs, or... anyway, this feels very difficult right now.)
Jeffrey (1994) is a comedy, light and funny and... but I cried through half of it anyway. If that one is so hard to watch, how will I get through something really tough like Longtime Companion?...
On the other hand, perhaps Jeffrey is difficult to watch because it's about fear and not having sex. With, of all people, Michael Weiss (pictured above)... sigh. This possibility is confirmed by watching the respectable but now rather clunky-looking documentary Absolutely Positive (1991) or the unfortunately schlocky, though admittedly realistic, It's My Party (1996), neither of which, as it turns out, bothers me much at all....
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II. Another chance
... Later, getting through Parting Glances (1986) has its own complications: when it first came out in theaters, I went to see it with my best friend Kevin, but I fled after the second scene when one of the leads cuts his hand in the kitchen of a friend who has AIDS. I thought, as it turned out incorrectly, I knew what was coming: a dramatic tragedy of infection... I was offended enough to skip out on my friend, the film, everything. (Was this shortly before my own diagnosis – which I remember perfectly well was April 1987 – or by any chance did I see the film after?...) And, despite having owned the DVD for several years, I've never seen it before now....
Welcome (back) to the 80s.
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III. Monumentum pro 1986
Halfway through Parting Glances, at a point where I'm thinking: I seriously have to go talk to someone, do something, that gets me away from watching movies about AIDS – Patrick texts me that he and his visitor from Bristol are going out and I should come along. After a bit of testiness that he texted me so late (I know, I should be pleased he did it at all – but I depend on him perhaps too much for companionship, given how little I get from anyone else here), I shower and go out around midnight, eventually finding them in the main local gay nightclub.
And, for the ensuing four hours or so, proceed to have what feels at points like a quasi-1980s experience, mixed irregularly with fragments of twenty-first-century provincial Britain: the music, the lights, (some of) the guys. A massive steroid-built, tattooed behemoth bouncing across the floor like a medicine ball. Shy, feral Northern lads. A chunky, gentle-looking young man with a face one could come to love, trailing around behind a more sharply dressed pair of gym-builts (just as I am trailing around behind Patrick and Colin). Vast numbers of trampily arrayed, shrieking northern women. And, once, a remix of that peculiarly disturbing disco version of Barber's Adagio for Strings rings sadly across the floor, but everyone dances just as they do for anything else.
Finally, around four a.m., at a point where things no longer resemble 1980s clubs (when, in fact, people start to stagger a lot – northern Brits are not sensitive about motor skills, as they like to get really, really smashed), I gracefully take my leave and come home.
But, I'll admit: it was fairly, well, resonant....
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