Chewing the Fat about AIDS - Arts Today with Stephen Holden The disappearance of AIDS as a subject for movies and television drama at the end of the 90s is hardly surprising. Hollywood has always had a difficult time confronting what I call Real Sex and Real Death, as opposed to the escapist prurience, titillation and shoot-`em-up gore that pass for Eros and Thanatos there. The few AIDS movies and television dramas that were made at the height of the epidemic tended to be high-minded, disease-of-the-week dramas awash in teary-eyed-sanctimony-autumn leaves drifting and rain streaming down windowpanes. Picture the most common variant: a young, cute, white affluent gay man returns to his parents' home to die. Typically, he finds an understanding mother and an intolerant father, and achieves some partial resolution before the inevitable, deadly denouement. In other words, they laugh, they cry, they come to terms. But as soon as drugs prolonging the lives of people with AIDS appeared on the market, Hollywood sighed a collective Whew! and turned its back on AIDS. Yes, the advances in AIDS treatment and the development of protease inhibitors that appear (for some and for now, at least) to have made AIDS a manageable disease are cause for rejoicing. But they have allowed American mass culture to bury its head in the sand and to pretend the epidemic is not over. The Gulf War and the war in Kosovo are "over," too, but that doesn't mean that the problems in Iraq and the Balkans have disappeared. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic remain in power. By the same token, there is no vaccine or cure for AIDS. And in Third World countries where expensive treatments are unaffordable to millions infected with HIV, the pandemic rages on. The only times we hear about it are in occasional summary articles or newscasts tallying up the infected, giving the percentages of those infected in various countries, and offering grim projections of future fatalities. One measure of the disparity between real life and Hollywood has been the movie industry's duplicitous response to the AIDS crisis. A significant percentage of Hollywood's middle-management is gay, and the movie industry has suffered serious losses from AIDS. To its credit, the industry has raised tens of millions of dollars for AIDS charities. But at the same time, paranoid actors and film makers are loath to be "outed" as either gay or HIV-positive. The disparity between these real lives and the industry's AIDS-phobic product says a great deal about the values that go into creating that product. For in Entertainment Nation, nobody wants to be bummed out. And in Entertainment Nation, Real Sex (the kind that's complicated, messy, wet and that can transmit disease) and Real Death (the kind that's slow, painful, unglamorous) are box office poison. Economics are one reason why the theater, not movies, television, or pop music, has been the only popular art form to confront AIDS directly and honestly. William Hoffman's "As Is" and Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" began a cycle of impassioned, realistic AIDS plays that reached its pinnacle with Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic, "Angels In America." These plays were hits and went on to have productions around the country. Yet none has been made into a Hollywood film. It's the difference between risking $50,000 to $500,000 to produce a serious play and $50 million to make a movie, the difference between a niche- and a mass audience. The only place to find films that have dealt realistically with AIDS, is to scour the margins of American mass culture. "Parting Glances," "Longtime Companion," "It's My Party," and the movie of Paul Rudnick's hit stage comedy "Jeffrey," are among the few American independent films that deal directly with the epidemic and its devastating toll. But even here, the demographics are almost entirely limited to white, middle-class gay men and their problems. It's not really much different in Europe or elsewhere. Mainstream Hollywood's one and only high-end AIDS drama, Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia," could be described as the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" of AIDS dramas and gay-themed Hollywood films in general. To make its subject palatable, the hero, a gay attorney with AIDS fighting his dismissal from a white-shoe firm on grounds of discrimination, was played by Hollywood's most likable heterosexual everyman, Tom Hanks. Although he was given a lover (avowedly straight actor Antonio Banderas), the two were not allowed to kiss on the screen. Hanks's character, we were told, contracted AIDS from a single indiscretion in a movie theater(!). "Philadelphia" was a big hit that probably helped nudge along the causes of gay civil rights and safer-sex education. But in its prim sanitized way, it also helped set the tone for the post-AIDS culture of denial. That new squeamishness is palpable in a movie like "Boogie Nights," a subtly anti-sexual, anti-hedonistic look back at the 70s porno industry. Pity poor Hollywood, which has lost sight of the difference between box office success and artistic merit. And pity audiences starved for films that aren't market tested to make sure there's nothing discomfiting in them . Peddling sexual fantasy has always been Hollywood's bread and butter, and late-90s movies are more obsessed than ever before with pretty bodies and titillating sex talk. But Real Sex of the kind in which you feel a genuine erotic heat and loss of control on the screen is scarcer than at any time since the early 60s. Late-90s Hollywood sex is all posing and teasing: it's lip gloss and no saliva. It's also 99 and 44/100th percent heterosexual. As far as movie subject matter goes, the AIDS epidemic did accomplish one thing: It largely buried the corny disease of the week sub-genre. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to say something more positive? That the AIDS epidemic is gone but not forgotten? Unfortunately, it's the other way around in American popular culture. AIDS is forgotten, but it certainly isn't gone. Stephen Holden is a film and music critic for the "New York Times". The symposium "panelists'" - Chris Dohse, Stephen Holden, Eileen Myles, and Nancy Princenthal.