lunmione's reviews
58 reviews

words cannot express how much i loathed this book 

my review of this book is just going to be quoting sarah schulman from this article https://www.vulture.com/2014/06/writer-sarah-schulman-on-the-normal-heart-larry-kramer.html 

What did you think of How to Survive a Plague? There seemed to be a certain whitewashing of history going on.
Well we call it “The Five White People Who Saved the World” — that’s our nickname for it. And those white people are very busy because apparently they’re always saving everything all the time. Everywhere you go, you see them.

Jim Hubbard, the director of United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, and David France did a public debate. It was co-sponsored by Visual Aids and you can watch it on YouTube and it’s really really fascinating. At one point they open up for questions and the first question to David is: Why do you have no women or people of color in the film? And he says, well I wanted to focus on wealthy white men because they had the time to devote to activism. Now as a person who has interviewed 168 surviving members of ACT UP New York, I can tell you that’s not historically correct. People in ACT UP gave their entire lives to ACT UP. All different kinds of people from every class and background would report in our interviews that they were at ACT UP five nights a week, that their entire life was ACT UP. And that had nothing to do with how much money you had. And the second thing he said was that these men went to good universities and so they were able to understand the science. That is absurd. The audience almost started laughing. One of the best experts on the science of AIDS in ACT UP was Garance Franke-Ruta who was 19. We all sat there and realized that this man knows nothing about ACT UP.

And yet France’s documentary was widely praised and even nominated for an Academy Award in 2013.
Because it does the same thing that Philadelphia does: It makes the dominant culture comfortable. It gives them heroes that look like them that they can identify with. That’s the story that they want. In Philadelphia, the straight lawyer heroically overcomes his prejudice to help the poor gay man. Why Tom Hanks’s character didn’t just get a gay lawyer is something I never understood about that movie. It had this bizarre conceit, but that’s what straight people want. Now we have this whiteness that is uniting gay people, especially gay men, with the rest of the white race. This is pervasive, now we see that straight people can identify with these white gay protagonists, it made them the heroes. That’s why they like it. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t true.

yes!!! destroy goop!!!!!