THEGAYUK WINTER 13 /14 Issue 1
FEATURE
We sat down with film maker, journalist and director David
France and gay rights and HIV activist Peter Staley to
talk about their brand new documentary film How To
Survive A Plague, which chronicles the astounding
progress of the modern gay rights movement and how the
gay community dealt with the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and
90s.
By Jake Hook & Greg Mitchell
Why was it important to
make a documentary like
How To Survive A Plague?
!
David France: I wanted to go
back and do a project about the
early years of AIDS, which I had
covered as a print journalist and
it occurred to me that somehow
in our collective recollection of
what happened in those years, we
kind of
condensed
everything. We
thought of the
early years as
being sad and
then better, but
what was lost in
that recollection
was what it took
to get to one
place to the
other.
What do you want How To
Survive A Plague to achieve?
!
DF: I want people to remember
what happened. I want people to
recognise that AIDS in the plague
years, before there was effective
treatment, wasn’t just a period of
tragedy. Although it was marked
by these intense tragedies. These
deaths were just unstoppabl