As the famous Blondie ballad The Tide Is High opens Longtime Companions the song got me thinking. The Tide was high for LGBT people in 1981 as we began winning more and more battles for civil rights ordinances in various municipalities across the country. Then life and the tide ebbed radically as a bisexual man brought a virus over from Africa that had been decimating population on that continent and it spread like a prairie fire amongst us. Longtime Companions focuses on the intertwining lives of several gay men and how the plague virus affected both the infected and those around them.
I lost so many people in the next 15 or so years I feel like an Ishmael at times, left alive to tell the tale. That's what Longtime Companions does, it tells the tale of the loss of so much from the most famous names of all like Rock Hudson to the most insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things. How much art, music, science, human freedom, name the field could have advanced if these people had lived their allotted normal lifespan. Those who survived and especially those who worked in the field have a responsibility to be Ishmaels.
Longtime Companions boasts a great ensemble cast that functions like a well tuned Rolex watch. Some of my favorites are Patrick Cassidy the soap opera hunk who loses his job and eventually his fight for life. Campbell Scott who throws himself into the fight after losing his Longtime Companion. Most of all lovers Bruce Davison and Mark Lamos and there will be no dry eyes as you see Davison guide Lamos from one world to the next.
Two things standout for me in the Eighties which decade this film covers about AIDS. The first was in 1983 and my first exposure to someone with the virus. In my working life with New York State Crime Victims Board and after I had come out at work, I got a call from a bedridden man in Tribeca whose home health attendant had just robbed him blind of everything and he called us because the cops at New York's 1st precinct refused to go to even take the report. As our office was downtown and my dear friend Ermano Stingo lived there as well, we both went to this man's flat, a rather dingy place overlooking the Hudson River that was pretty well emptied of most of what was there save this bedridden man with lesions going into his last stage of life. Sad to say both of us saw that sight a lot more over the next decade. I filled out my paper work for a claim, witnessed his signature and Ermano went to the 1st precinct to file the report on the victim's behalf. To this day I wish I could recall his name, but Ermano is also now in another world.
The second thing was the hearings for the New York City gay civil rights law. At the many forums the City Council gave us and our opposition to testify for the bill, I remember a lot of the homophobes walking in with surgical masks covering their faces as if that would prevent them from catching the disease from the opposition which they all assumed were sufferers or carriers. How ignorant they were and still are and worse how they did not want to be dissuaded from their firmly held beliefs. A frightening time for all.
To understand AIDS and its impact on LGBT people and society as well you have to see Longtime Companions. And this review is dedicated to both my claimant in the Tribeca flat and to the first person that I knew that died of AIDS, a bartender named Bobby Lynn who worked in a long since gone gay bar in Brooklyn Heights.
