Illinois State University's Queer Coalition kicks off a month-long film series this week at the Normal Theater. Fired Up: The American AIDS Crisis on Film captures the early days of the AIDS crisis, with community leaders and scholars introducing each film—those who lived through and cared for others during the height of the epidemic.
The series is an extension of the Queer Coalition’s mission to bring LGBTQ+ people across campus together. Co-presidents Brie Byers and Karmine Beecroft are staff members at Illinois State, and said the group is intentionally intergenerational, including undergraduate and graduate students plus faculty/staff.
“Before we were Queer Coalition, the organization was called Triangle Association, that was begun in 1998,” said Beecroft, who works as the digitization coordinator at Milner Library. “The first president of that was Dave Bentlin.”
Bentlin, currently the board president of Prairie Pride Coalition, is scheduled to introduce United in Anger: A History of ACT UP on Feb. 18. The 2012 documentary directed by Jim Hubbard mixes archival footage with oral histories with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power [ACT UP], a grassroots activist movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience to reduce stigma and expose social and political ambivalence toward the disease.
“[Bentlin] also lived through the AIDS epidemic,” said Beecroft, who uses the pronoun they. “That is something that we really want to highlight through the film series. We’ve lost this entire generation of voices to this devastating disease. That has led to generations of young people growing up—especially my generation—without those queer mentors.
“I know my mother’s cousin, her best friend, was a gay man—his name was Mikel—who died of AIDS in 1991. If he had been in my life growing up, I would have come to an understanding of my identify much sooner,” said Beecroft.
Byers, who works in University Marketing, said growing up, she was only vaguely aware of the AIDS crisis.
“I put it this way: I knew of [AIDS], but I didn’t really know about it,” she said.
“I never really got that in depth education at all—ever,” said Byers. “It came on my radar a couple years ago when I came across one of the films that we’re screening, No Regret from Marlon Riggs. It was such a deeply personal, intimate look at this one man’s experience with AIDS and it piqued my interest.”
Riggs’ 40-minute 1993 documentary memorializing the experiences of five HIV-positive Black men is paired with two shorter films, Affirmations and Anthem, on Feb. 25, with an introduction from ISU interim chief equity and inclusion officer Byron Craig.
Riggs, himself a Black gay man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, designed his own curriculum at Harvard University and became a tenured professor at UC Berkeley, where an endowed graduate fellowship carries his name. Riggs died of AIDS in 1994, at age 37.
‘A chilling parallel’
Beecroft and Byers said there is shared empathy and solidarity between the generation of queer folks who lived through the epidemic and young LGBTQ+ people today.
In talking to Sharon Tear, a nurse practitioner who cared for AIDS patients in Central Illinois during the 1980s and ‘90s, Byers saw similarities to the present. Tear introduces the 1985 feature film Buddies, which opens the series on Wednesday.
“From the apathy of our government, to the suffering of so many people, to the unjust stigma attached to people with AIDS, to their numerous plights in health care, to everyday people fighting tooth and nail for their very lives against a massive, complex system of marginalization.
“That really brought to mind a chilling parallel of how trans people are being villainized by our government today and a very worrying portion of our peers in the county,” she said.
Beecroft said they hear elders pointing to the current time as “feeling familiar.
“I always look to history to see if we can find a roadmap through our current struggles,” Beecroft said. “Some of the parallels that I’m seeing is a lot of the same antiqueer, anti-trans rhetoric that we thought we put to bed 20 years ago, or longer, suddenly coming up. You realize it was never gone. It was just sleeping.”
Byers said if there’s one throughline in the film series, it’s “a rejection of helplessness.
“In Buddies, it’s about a stagnant moderate learning to engage in activism for the first time in his life. United in Anger is a documentary about how one of the forefront AIDS activist groups was formed. The Marlon Riggs short films are an incisive autobiography about the intersection of being Black and gay, and what that means in the time of the AIDS crisis.”
The culminating film, screening March 4, is Poison, which Byers characterizes as a “scathing satire about the stigma of being a person with AIDS.”
Professors Gavin Weiser and Eric Wesselmann introduce Poison, which aligns with a Queering Horror series running in tandem at the Normal Theater.
“I think it’s very timely,” Byers said. “Yes, we are going through a very rough period of time in our community again. Looking back to our history and drawing inspiration from that can be very helpful to bridge gaps between the generations.”
Fired Up: The American AIDS Crisis on Film runs 7 p.m. Wednesday through March 4 at the Normal Theater, 209 W. North St., Normal. All events in the series are free and open to the public.
