And the Band Played On (DVD, 2001)

The very best of a generation of American people perished on the frontline of an unnamed war every bit as horrific and indefensible as Vietnam and Iraq. The AIDS Pandemic first appeared in 1980, and seemed to many to be a "gay plague" which slowly infected intravenous drug users, then disproportionately struck at black Americans, and now all of Africa -- with no end in sight. Some people, in warped interpretations of religious scripture and moral conformity, actively welcomed the AIDS Pandemic. It seemed to strike directly at the very personal targets of their self-righteous condemnation: gays, drug users, blacks, foreigners, the unnecessary and unwanted elements of western society. Accordingly, the Reagan Administration moved slowly, half-heartedly, resentful of committing any resources to meeting this disease let alone curing and preventing it. The puritanical streak in the American character had its way; the disease spread throughout the gay community claiming many of that generation's heroes who had fought so tirelessly for civil rights. Politics both at home and in France made cooperation in research a practical impossibility for most of a decade. Meanwhile, we saw Rock Hudson, Leonard Bernstein and hundreds of thousands of such luminaries die slowly, an excruciating prolonged death, in such pain and debility that no amount of drugs could touch it. People like you and me, gay, straight, black, white, adult, infant, native and immigrant, rich and poor, moral and loose, family person or independent -- we sat vigil for months at hospital bedsides as hundreds of our friends and family, people we knew and loved, perished in agony. As we sat there, trying to pour our force and our love into victims of this horror, we asked "Why? Why is this plague being "spun' by politicians into an unfortunate but contained 'misfortune' which an overworked, under funded CDC was handling?" We were there, on the frontline of the war. We saw real people, human beings, ordinary and sometimes celebrated human beings, literally rotting screaming and dying in our arms.

When we see a photograph of an American soldier carrying a wasted, tortured and dying concentration camp victim out of Belsen or Auschwitz, we cringe, we cry, we are ashamed to be human . . . since only humans can do this kind of thing to their own species, do it ruthlessly and sometimes with grim pleasure. How many realize the 1980's, when we did it to each other right here in America, Land of the Brave.is very

This film tries to tell some of that story. Everything it shows and implies is true; and it shows only the tip of the titanic iceberg. Actors in a story set in an atrocity, like "Diary of Ann Frank," depend on the audience's full knowledge of "the way things were then." But only a few now really know and remember. Vietnam vets often can't watch "Platoon" -- too real. Friends and families of those who perished in an entire decade of AIDS neglect and covert punishment have only this film, and a very few like it, to tell a little of the story. Self-righteousness, religious fanaticism, politics, professional competition, fights over patents and prizes . . . many people proud that "God was punishing the wicked," standing on the sidewalk cheering the death march . . . until it was too late, until it struck their wives, their children, themselves, and became a fast mutating scourge that l conjoin with other viral factors to create the nuclear devastation disease which no human survives.