AIDSTUBE: Reflections of the AIDS Made-for-TV Film

In late 1993, Tri-Star Pictures, a major Hollywood studio, released Philadelphia, a top-grossing blockbuster that year and starring arguably two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1990s, Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. The film’s powerful performances brought the personal drama of AIDS into the minds of millions of Americans. However, Philadelphia was far from the first widely-seen film about AIDS since the disease’s discovery in 1981. In November 1985, four years into the epidemic and still eighteen months before Ronald Reagan publicly acknowledged AIDS, the made-for-television film An Early Frost reached an estimated audience of 33 million viewers on NBC, and generated an avalanche of concerned parents calling in. Capitalizing on the tropes of melodrama and disease that were already a part of the narrative lexicon of the made-for-TV movie, An Early Frost deals with a family’s (and thus the “outer world’s”) evolving awareness and acceptance of a gay relative with AIDS.

But as significantly daring as An Early Frost was, it is more concerned with heterosexual reaction to AIDS at a time when it was still considered a “gay disease.” Ultimately, it was another made-for-TV film, As Is, released on Showtime eight months later, that provided the first view of AIDS from within the framework of homosexual relationship. Portraying the types of interactions rehearsed by thousands of gay, bi, and trans couples during the height of the epidemic, As Is constituted a true breakthrough by providing a much-needed reflection of AIDS’ ravaging effect on queer intimacy.