In the focus group I did with HIV+ people on Sunday, someone raised a really interesting point. There used to be all sorts of movies about AIDS, all with the same inevitable theme — death. Someone gets AIDS, and they have to set their affairs in order, or reunite with their family, or even sue for their rights, as in Philadelphia. I loved Tom Hanks in that movie, but he still died in the end.

Nowadays, with antiretrovirals, there’s not as obvious a dramatic arc. Tom Hanks gets HIV, goes on ARVs, and lives happily ever after in that loft with Antonio Banderas. That’s not a story! So stories about people living with HIV are just a lot less common these days, outside of some gay-oriented media that doesn’t always make it overseas. (Given the importance that Christianity and Zulu traditional spirituality, both extremely conservative, play in the lives of the people I’ve met here, I can’t imagine Queer As Folk going over big in Kwa-Zulu Natal.)

However, that doesn’t mean that all those “HIV and then death” stories aren’t still out there — movies, especially, have a long afterlife. And so the belief that AIDS is always already a death sentence persists and is reinforced. The question then becomes: how do you tell a mainstream story in which someone’s survival on ARV isn’t miraculous or presented as a great triumph, but just the ordinary order of things?