LGM Film Club, Part 433: Love in the Time of AIDS

I’ve been watching quite a few films lately, but I’ve also been trying to write and I haven’t gotten to the point of writing Film Club posts very often. Will try to work on that. One fascinating film I’ve seen recently is Love in the Time of AIDS. Directed by Deepa Dhanraj and released in 2006, it follows a set of kothis, an Indian term for femme gay men, as other gay men attempt to get them to use condoms in order to not die of AIDS. It’s fascinating because it’s basically a how-to film (with plenty of explicit positions demonstrated, though always clothed) combined with these men just talking about the lives and loves. Criterion had an essay on Dhanraj’s films a few years ago, when they must have done a retrospective of her work. I’d like to see more, that’s for sure. She’s a social justice documentarian in a nation where there’s plenty of social justice campaigns to fight. This opened a whole world to me (what do I know about India period, not to mention the lives of gay men in India?) and I enjoyed it. Not all of it is on YouTube, but a sizable chunk is and so here’s what I found.