Writing an Obituary for AIDS

Earlier this week I viewed the 1990 film Longtime Companion for the umpteenth time, watching with the kind of obsessive fascination one usually reserves for a slow-motion train wreck or for the video-loop collapse of two gigantic buildings in lower Manhattan: you know what's going to happen, and you're horrified, and yet you simply cannot turn your eyes away. Written by Craig Lucas, Longtime Companion was the first Hollywood film to deal with the AIDS epidemic in the United States and, predictably, it concerns itself almost exclusively with gay men of the sort who spend part of each summer at Fire Island and part of every day at the gym, mediated for middle America through the point of view of a straight woman: homosexual culture for the masses.