1993 Year in Review : AIDS : The Year the Plague Went Mainstream

Usually it’s considered a triumph when something breaks into the mainstream. It means that that phenomenon or group is now widely regarded as part of American life. But when that something is AIDS, the breakthrough signals both victory and failure.

And so it is that 1993 has been a year of dark conquest. The plague has reached a new level of visibility--with Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning “Angels in America” on Broadway, HBO’s “And the Band Played On” and the just-opened film “Philadelphia.” Yet these works also stand as painful reminders of how little has been done to stop the death march, now more than a dozen years into the epidemic.

Where the politics of medicine have come up short, though, the theater has weighed in with a heroic burst of defiant creativity, and Kushner’s magnum opus is a symbol of this. Seen at the Mark Taper Forum in 1992, it became the most anticipated show of the 1993 New York season. And with critical kudos--and a hefty running time and ticket price--it has proved that an epic play about AIDS can cross over with both gay and straight, New York and non-New York audiences.

TV and film, however, haven’t been as consistently attentive. While there have been movies of the week and installments of episodic shows that have dealt with AIDS, albeit in limited ways, most major gatekeepers have been reluctant to bankroll large-scale AIDS-related projects.

It certainly wasn’t a clear path to September’s milestone “And the Band Played On.” The movie--based on Randy Shilts’ controversial 1987 bestseller about AIDS researchers and activists during the plague’s early years--featured Matthew Modine, Ian McKellen and Alan Alda, with star cameos by Anjelica Huston, Steve Martin, Richard Gere and others. Yet ABC and NBC passed on the project before it went to HBO, and the eventual director, Roger Spottiswoode, was the third one hired.

“While this wasn’t our first venture into the AIDS territory, it was the most difficult project we’ve ever done, partly because when you’re dealing with nonfiction you have to be very careful,” says HBO Chairman and CEO Michael Fuchs. “It was a breakthrough only in retrospect, because it got so much attention and (generated) controversy, both on and off the entertainment pages.”

And film, as of last week, finally weighed in on AIDS too. For while independents have been making films like “Longtime Companion” and “Parting Glances” for years, Hollywood has been slow to get with the program.

TriStar’s “Philadelphia,” directed by Jonathan Demme, is the first big AIDS-themed movie by a major studio. It stars Tom Hanks as a hotshot lawyer who is canned when his respected firm finds out he has AIDS. He then hires a personal-injury lawyer (Denzel Washington), who also happens to be homophobic, to sue his ex-bosses.

Clearly “Philadelphia,” “And the Band Played On” and “Angels in America” represent progress in giving voice to and making visible the plight of those with AIDS. In this way, 1993 has been a year like no other since 1985, when both William Hoffman’s “As Is” and Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” received major New York stagings, NBC’s “An Early Frost” broke the small-screen silence and film star Rock Hudson died of AIDS, causing Americans to take notice in a way they previously hadn’t.

This year’s mainstream works have not only unprecedented scope and caliber but also star power. That means, in part, that they have the potential to reach an audience that might have previously considered itself uninvolved.

“We chose the subject because it is probably one of the most dramatic stories in the world, certainly in America,” says HBO’s Fuchs. “It almost starts to take on mythic proportions. Even if they’re still people out there who say, ‘I don’t know anyone,’ AIDS has touched everyone.”

And heightened awareness may not be the only perk. While these works should help dispel the notion that AIDS affects only gays, they could, simply by virtue of the increased number of portrayals of gay characters, begin to mitigate entrenched cultural homophobia.

In that way, the personal journey of the lawyer played by Washington in “Philadelphia,” who comes to deal with his own attitude toward gays by virtue of his relationship with the Hanks character, may stand for the symbolic experience of the American public in 1993.

As it enters living rooms, plays multiplexes and treads the Broadway boards, we may begin to realize the extent to which this disease is part of all American lives now. AIDS, for better or worse, has gone mainstream. Now, as one of Kushner’s characters says, “The great work begins.”