World AIDS Day 2011: Depictions Of AIDS In Movies And TV For The Past 25 Years

Recognize the stricken young man in this photo? That's Steve Buscemi in one of his first roles, as a gay man with AIDS. Parting Glances has been praised for its realistic look at gay urban life during the Reagan era, mostly through the mouthpiece of Steve's character Nick, who has his ex-boyfriend take care of him and talks frankly about missing the decadence of the '70s and early '80s.

Of Buscemi's character, The New York Times said, "It is to both his and the film's credit that the anguish of AIDS is presented as part of a larger social fabric, understood in context, and never in a maudlin light."

Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his portrayal of an HIV-positive lawyer who sues his firm for firing him, believing he was wrongfully dismissed because of his disease.

Philadelphia remains a classic and is hailed as providing a realistic depiction of a gay man, though it's interesting to note that some of the scenes featuring Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas in bed together were not included in the original theatrical release. (They did, however, make it to the DVD.)

Pedro Zamora is one of the most beloved reality-TV stars thanks to his advocacy for AIDS prevention programs to protect youths where he (an HIV-positive gay man) had not been educated. MTV's cameras documented his disease even after The Real World stopped filming, giving the public an intimate look into Pedro's last months. The most jarring thing about this photo is that it's not staged. Pedro's story is one of the few positive things about reality television, and undeniably influenced the way we think about HIV/AIDS today.

The AIDS-related urban legend that will always stick with me is the story of "AIDS Mary," a play on Bloody Mary: A man has anonymous sex with a woman, who leaves before he wakes up. But then he finds that she's written in lipstick on his mirror WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS.

Seeing as this myth started to circulate in 1986, it's no surprise that Law & Order snatched it up for their 1998 episode "Carrier." Except this time, the roles were reversed: The episode's antagonist was an HIV-positive man trying to infect as many women as possible.

Personally, I found the HBO miniseries less compelling than the play itself, but what it doesn't lack is spectacle--just look at the image of the Angel America appearing to HIV-positive Prior Walter to tell him of her plan for him to become a prophet. If nothing else, Angels in America shared a sympathetic HIV/AIDS narrative on a grand scale different than the Hollywood movies and TV series before it.

Although this irreverent comedy focuses mostly on celebrity commentary, hot-button politics, and puppet sex, it does open with a parody of the musical Rent, called Lease and with a theme song called "Everyone Has AIDS."

We're not sure if this counts as any sort of positive strides since Trey Parker and Matt Stone unabashedly make fun of almost anything.

The same year that his film Milk--which would nab him Best Original Screenplay at the 81st Academy Awards--came out, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black saw another queer passion project come to life: His biopic about Pedro Zamora.

Pedro sought to tell the story, on-camera and off-, of Pedro changing the country's consciousness not only about gay people, but about HIV people. Better yet, MTV were the ones to make it, so they recreated footage from The Real World as well as Pedro's heavily-documented life after the show.

For the most part, the biopic was well-received, though people were split between confusion and admiration that MTV would make an entire fictional story instead of just repackaging season 3 of The Real World.

I won't say too much about Rent here because we'll be talking about it in greater detail in the coming days. But consider that the 2005 adaptation of the 1996 musical suddenly reached a lot more audiences than just those who could afford to see it on Broadway, and it mostly glossed over the actual dangers of contracting HIV and just went straight to how glamorous it was to be a bohemian in Alphabet City.

Count on Lifetime to jump on the HIV/AIDS awareness bandwagon, in their own well-meaning but cheesy way. And although the movie has its moments--following the typical teenage-pregnancy plotline before whipping out the dramatic HIV gamechanger, having Jennie Garth play an HIV-positive teacher--overall it was still too cliched to have any real effect.

Precious was already being marketed as the most depressing film of 2009 (and subsequently, Oscar-bait): An illiterate teenage mother the victim of incest and abuse by her parents. And then we find out, partway through the film, that she's HIV-positive. This development could have seemed like yet another dramatic heaping on poor Precious, but the filmmakers handled it incredibly well and used the diagnosis as a catalyst for Precious to escape her abusive mother and try to create the cycle of neglect for her children.

Con man Steven (Jim Carrey) pretends to be dying of AIDS so as to see his estranged boyfriend Phillip (Ewan McGregor) one last time.

Not cool, guys, not cool at all.

In this indie film about faith, Christopher Gorham plays a supporting role as Chris, a gay man who's also HIV-positive. His status is downplayed in relation to the movie's main plot, about an atheist who is challenged by his lover's dogmatic husband to jump to his death despite not believing in an afterlife.

That's not to say that it's trivialized; rather, it's something that his character has come to terms with and still survives. In fact, it mirrors what we would say is the general public perception of HIV/AIDS today--that it's not a death sentence.