HIV And AIDs Gets A Sympathetic Update In The New Film "Three Months"
This trope is one that follows the queer community to this day, unless you look at Three Months, a new film from director Jared Frieder that offers a fresher and more modern look at what it means to be a queer person dealing with HIV/AIDS.The film isn't just a sorely needed piece of the queer film canon; it has the potential to ignite a new trend, where a character contracting HIV isn't a death sentence, but simply part of the journey.The film stars Troye Sivan as Caleb, a freshly graduated Florida teen who is waiting the mandatory three months it takes to get back the results of an HIV test during the summer of 2011. (The wait is no longer three months.) As he grapples with the possibility of living with the disease, Caleb confronts his own stigmas while trying to find new love and figure out his future.This film is quietly revolutionary, as it dares to treat HIV how it actually manifests in the real world and choosing to forgo queer suffering.Television shows like Pose and It's a Sin show how far we've come in dealing with HIV, but still shows the suffering of queer people.The "AIDS trope" is a recurring theme in queer and LGBTQ+ TV and film that essentially depicts queer people suffering and dying from HIV and AIDS.Take, for example, all the queer classics that have defined queer entertainment for the last couple of decades.
Think of Angels in America, The Normal Heart, Pose, It's a Sin, Philadelphia, Rent, Dallas Buyers Club, and more. All pieces of queer media that have lived on in our cultural context, yet describe a world where getting HIV means death and suffering.These works, ranging from the early days of AIDS to the last couple of years, fail to show the updated truth about living with HIV or AIDS: where.
