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The question isn’t whether I liked #ItsASin (I didn’t) but whether we can move beyond moralism in telling the story of AIDS. As someone living with #HIV, I found its sympathy for people with AIDS was mixed with dangerous homophobic pathologising. #LGBTHM https://brianmullin.substack.com/p/howd-you-get-it-such-a-shame?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter
Then as now, people with HIV/AIDS deserve agency, dignity and the right to full, satisfying emotional & sexual lives (cf. Denver Principles). Too often RTD’s #ItsASin script presented them as silent or self-hating victims, perpetuating homophobic ideas with its narrative choices.
The narrative pitfalls of #ItsASin are not new. As @sarahschulman3 has said, many early AIDS narratives told “a false story of gay people being alone and abandoned by each other, without community or political organization, dependent on benevolent straight people to rescue them.”
