REVIEW: Struggling to Survive a Plague in ‘Dallas Buyers Club’

I will never forget the first time I heard about HIV/AIDS. I don’t think any gay man who was sexually active in the 80s can. For the generation before mine, it’s on a par with remembering where you were when you heard Kennedy was assassinated.

I was nineteen. It was a sunny autumn day in Paris, and I was lounging around naked with a French lover in my impossibly glamorous and charming duplex garret in the Marais, one of those weekends when you get stoned, have sex, eat, smoke, drink, have sex some more, lather, rinse, repeat. A friend call from New York in a panic and shattered the hedonistic bliss. “Have you heard about this gay cancer thing? They say everyone has it.”