The recently released movie version of Rent, the musical that took Broadway by storm in 1996 and won many major awards (and is still playing to packed houses), is not an AIDS movie, per se. Yet AIDS is a major part of the story and it's clear that in 2005, the film suffers greatly from its dated subject matter and tired clichés.
Set in the late 1980s, before the advent of protease inhibitors and combination therapy, the movie includes antiquated references like AZT. And when Angel, a likeable drag queen, succumbs to AIDS late in the movie, he's shown dying in a hospital bed with KS lesions covering his body. That scene is reminiscent of the 1993 film Philadelphia , in which Tom Hanks played a lawyer dying of AIDS who was helped by a homophobic attorney in his pursuit of a wrongful termination lawsuit against his conservative law firm. Hanks's character also suffered from KS, which may have been more accurate at the time, but by now is rarely seen in AIDS patients.
And like previous movies and plays about people living with AIDS, Rent recycles the stereotype of gay men and death: In The Hours, the gay character dying of AIDS commits suicide; in the aforementioned Philadelphia , the gay man dies; in Angels in America , a gay man leaves his lover when he's diagnosed with AIDS. Yet these mainstream releases won accolades and were hailed as "progressive" messages about how gays live in the age of AIDS. That's just not the reality.
In Rent, which has a diverse collection of characters, including a straight man and woman who also have AIDS, the disease kills the character who we liked the most, but who Middle America (read: straight) would like the least.
"... The larger issue has to do with the representation of AIDS, gay people, and urban gentrification. These three areas have been massively misrepresented in the mainstream entertainment and media, and Rent is the epitome of that misrepresentation," said Sarah Schulman, a lesbian playwright and author, in a recent interview with Slate. It was Schulman's 1990 book People in Trouble from which Rent playwright Jonathan Larson borrowed material to create his musical; and while Schulman never sued his estate (Larson died shortly before the musical made its debut) for copyright infringement, it is widely accepted that the gay portion of Rent is her work, but with a twist. In the musical, it's the straight man, Mark, who's the protagonist, while in Schulman's book, LGBT people took center stage.
Schulman, who has been involved in compiling an oral history from those involved with ACT UP/New York, sees the big picture. "It's true not only with Rent, but with all the iconic works about AIDS. The political movement of AIDS activism – which is an integral, organic part of the history of the crisis – has been removed from most of the mainstream storytelling around AIDS," she said. "[In these pieces,] gay people are always alone and self-oppressed, and have no community, and are dependent on some kind of other – a benevolent straight person, a homophobic lawyer, or even, in some cases, a woman – to take care of them, because they're so self-hating that they cannot take care of themselves."
Today's observance of World AIDS Day is as good a time as any to think about these issues. And during the height of the AIDS epidemic in this country, the reality is that here in San Francisco and in other cities like New York, the gay community came together to fight the disease. We had to. No one else – from President Reagan on down – was doing a damn thing.
"The real story of the AIDS crisis," Schulman said, "is the story of a group of despised people who had no rights, who came together, saved each other's lives, and changed the world."
The next time Hollywood decides to mount a major motion picture about AIDS, we would like to see a film that shows gay people living with AIDS, not just dying from it.