The modern history of the gay rights movement, including prejudice and homophobia and events that led up to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, is revealed in The Fight Continues, a short documentary directed by Ryan Murphy. The film incorporates vintage footage of gay men cruising, the police raid on Stonewall, antigay activist Anita Bryant getting a pie slammed into her self-righteous mug and early health warnings about the mysterious cancer “triggered by the lifestyle of some homosexuals”— and since Ryan is peerless at choosing just the right song for the soundtrack, this non-fiction video is scored, appropriately, to Bronski Beat’s classic gay anthem “Smalltown Boy.” Murphy’s short film has been released just a few days before the May 25 premiere of HBO’s The Normal Heart, a searing drama about the early years of the AIDS crisis, which he directed.
Watch The Fight Continues below.
Merv
That could easily be mistaken for an anti-gay video.
Stache99
@Merv: ..or the evolution and strength of a community.
dali
Oh man, that was really tough to watch!
inbama
@Merv: Yep.
Needs some editing and positive footage.
Harley
Lived through that. Watched countless friends die from this terrible disease. It clearly shows what the gay community had to deal with in the 70s and 80s. We have certainly come a long way baby.
Aires the Ram
That took me back 30 years, I’m feeling terrible right now, all the friends and acquaintances lost during those years. The younger generation of gays just have no way of knowing what we went through. I’m very glad they are not experiencing anything close to that, but it is still terribly painful after all these years.
Maude
I still can’t understand why AIDS is a predominantly gay illness.
Forget the religious junk, why, for the most part, only gays?
In NYC, I had had a ‘BI’ friend who had sex with women as well as men.
I knew a women who had sex with him many times, just as I did.
Neither she nor I got AIDS.
I had sex with others who caught AIDS. I went to the funerals of some, I knew others who had sex with some of the guys I had sex with, and some got AIDS while others didn’t.
I don’t understand any of this. I asked My straight NYC doctor who knew
I was gay, and his answer was, “I wish I knew”.
Stache99
@Maude: Depends on what part of the world you’re in. In Africa it’s more of a straight problem.
DK
@Stache99: @Maude: You’re both ill-informed. It’s a human problem — gay, straight, and bisexual — the world over.
Good grief, is Miss Information running the Internet again.
Aires the Ram
This left me feeling very cold on the inside. I lived through those years as a young man, lost many of my friends. This video clip does look like it’s made by our enemies, needs some serious work. It brought back those old, old, old feelings of society treating us like “dirty filthy fags”. I won’t be watching it again. I was just plain and simply, bad.