AIDS: Not Only In The Movies

I recently watched a film about a gay con artist living in the era when HIV/AIDS was first discovered. The film’s title “I Love You Phillip Morris” indicated by title to most viewers a film about the founders of a cigarette mogul. The film was not about that at all, impressive marketing strategy.

Jim Carey’s character was in and out of prison and quite the promiscuous fellow, especially for his era. Towards the end of the film, we find out that his character had AIDS but his lover did not. At first it spoke to me about the fact that the HIV virus is not so easily transmitted and is essentially a predominantly weak virus. Other viewers would question why Carey’s characters’ lover never caught the virus considering all of the intercourse they were presumed to have had (including some very graphic scenes). I didn’t question it, but others most likely did.

Also, Carey’s character is a con artist, and he actually fakes his own death in the state of Texas in order to get out of prison once again. (I hope I am not ruining the plot line for anyone, but see the film. It’s well done). One of the lines that resonated the most with me was one about how the state of Texas didn’t once actually test Carey’s character for HIV, Assuming his promiscuous gay lifestyle and the fact that he was in prison put him at high risk in the eyes of the majority of medical practitioners first studying HIV/AIDS in the era when the virus was fairly new and still extremely mysterious to the medical field. I found the irony in the brutality behind this statement. I also questioned why his lover actually had to hear through the grapevine that he had acquired the virus and was in a critical state. Wouldn’t you think that the lover that he was known to have co-resided with would have been among the first to be notified? Scary indeed. This piece of the plot line both confused and angered me. This referenced the fact that medical practitioners and original CDC reports associated such a stigma with homosexual men in the U.S. that they didn’t even bother to notify his lover. Of course this may have been something that they simply omitted from the film or changed at the last second for dramatic affect, my sociological ‘antennas’ on the lookout for the discourse (or lack thereof) of medical practitioners regarding HIV/AIDS were fully functioning.

Even though the movie was fictional in every sense of the word, it carried some heavy socio-political messages about HIV/AIDS, both masked and obvious.