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In the first half of the 1980s, while AIDS was ravishing homosexual men, the rest of the population of the United States took little note. The desire to believe that AIDS was a gay disease was strong and resulted in minimal media coverage of AIDS outside the gay community. In 1985, however, when Rock Hudson's diagnosis of AIDS became public, the nation was electrified. Almost overnight AIDS became a widespread point of concern for gay and straight populations alike. The illness of Ryan White, a young boy who had been infected with HIV as an infant, generated further mainstream public concern.

HIV and AIDS engendered a great deal of artistic and cultural output after that time. In 1985 An Early Frost represented the first major network broadcast of a film dealing with AIDS. That film was followed by a number of mainstream films and television movies that dealt with AIDS and HIV, including Parting Glances (1986), The Ryan White Story (1986), Longtime Companion (1990), and Philadelphia (1993). A 1989 Bob Huff mockumentary, Rockville Is Burning, chronicled AIDS activism, and in the 1990s a number of playwrights wrote plays that later were turned into general-release and cable films, including Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrance McNally, Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick, and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On (1988), which depicted the early years of the AIDS epidemic, became an HBO movie in 1993. In 1996 the musical Rent broke barriers by featuring the controversial subjects of AIDS and sexuality on Broadway.

In 2003 Daniel Bort premiered a short film called Bugchaser at the Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; the short appeared with a documentary by Louise Hogarth titled The Gift. Both films concerned a practice known as bugchasing, in which gay men attempt to contract HIV from HIV-positive men. The phenomenon appears to be quite rare, though it has generated some mainstream attention. Psychological reasons for bugchasing may involve survivor's guilt, a belief that sharing the virus creates intimacy, the excitement generated by the danger of infection, and a general relief of anxiety at having one's HIV status definitively established.

References:

Arno, Peter S., and Karyn L. Feiden. 1992. Against the Odds: The Story of AIDS Drug Development, Politics, and Profits. New York: HarperCollins.

Farber, Celia. 2006. Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House.

Shilts, Randy. 1988. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: Penguin.

Treichler, Paula A. 1999. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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