Goals



Project Treatment


Set-Up and Setting

From The Ashes Risen is a film in, metaphorically, four chapters, ostensibly documenting the AIDS holocaust of the 1980's and 1990's in Chicago, as told through the stories of ten Gay men diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980's and three Registered Nurses from Unit 371, one of the most heroic and compassionate AIDS Units in one of the local Chicago hospitals, a model for AIDS Units throughout the country. In truth, however, the film is the story of the growth and restructuring of the Chicago LGBTQ community and its influence on the Community of Humanity. Chicago will play as important a role in the film as the Gaymen and nurses being interviewed. In a sense, we will interview the city through its buildings, parks, restaurants, sunsets, lakefront, and neighborhoods. Chicago will speak as loudly as the narrators. Communities are not made in vacuums; they are made in contexts, and Chicago is the context for this story.


Chapter 1 examines the pre HIV/AIDS Chicago Gay male community in the 1970's and early 1980's, when community and connection were formed largely through sex and parties, with drugs and alcohol being the glue. Sex was the main form of communication, especially in the urban environments,; body fascism reigned supreme. The Gay gyms became places of body sculpting and rampant sex in the steam rooms and Jacuzzis. Bars became our family restaurants. Bathhouses became our playgrounds. For a large majority of Gaymen in the post Stonewall years, sex was play and recreation, as well as being serious and intense. Sex partners were collected like trophies. How many men could we have sex with in one day? What was the sum total? How many parties could we go to? How many bars could we drink in? How many drugs could we ingest? As many of each as possible was the answer. The sex could last for an hour or a night, or, all too often, only for ten minutes, and then on to the next conquest, often in bathhouses and public parks. On such was community built. It was a time of carefree, riotous play with not an inkling of what was to come in just a few years - the terror that waited right around the corner. It was also the time when community STD testing began � when the personality of Wanda Lust, an outrageous drag queen in a nurse�s uniform, went from bar to bar in a van testing as many men as possible for gonorrhea and syphilis, which was running rampant through the Gay male community in Chicago.


Chapter 2 explores the demise of the community of sex, parties, alcohol, and drugs, and its transformation into a community of compassion and blindingly beautiful Love amidst the death and terror of the AIDS War of the mid-80's and all of the 90's, when sex, the trigger for the enormity of the AIDS War, was no longer sought out as a form of play. Parties and drugs became things of the past as we fought with all our might in a too often futile attempt to stay alive. Alcohol was still used, however, to numb the reality, numb the pain. We knew that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was sexually transmitted, and our fast paced sex lives slowed down to nearly a halt. For most of us, the party was over. For some of us who were in denial, though, the parties went on, the drugs and alcohol imbibed, and the sex in the bathhouses was rampant. As we were dying by the tens of thousands, we were plagued not only by the disease of the body, but by the disease of guilt for having brought HIV/AIDS on ourselves, without our knowledge certainly, but brought it on just the same. Sex guilt. Guilt over the very thing that helped to define us as a Tribe, that gave us a large part of our identity in the world. Our identity was killing us, and the guilt was thick and slimy. The point, however, was not to feel the guilt, but certainly to take responsibility for our behavior and for having treated our Brothers as sex objects and toys to be played with. As a consequence of the behavior, transmission albeit unwittingly engaged in, the Gaymale community started dying like flies on flypaper, only the flies never suffered the way Gaymen suffered with their opportunistic infections. The community of sex and constant play, drugs and cocktail parties at fabulous beach houses in the Pines on Fire Island or along the Dunes of Lake Michigan became a community of horror and daily death, of daily funerals and memorial services. In Unit 371 alone, three to four men died every day, seven days a week for 12 years. We became a community fearful of one another, not daring to look each other in the eye for fear of seeing death staring back at us. We dared not form love relationships for fear of having our partners die before our eyes. We were even very careful in choosing our friends because, again, we did not want to get too close to the Death Specter.


In the midst of the terror, loss, and grief, a community of life and Light, of compassion and care for our brothers by both Gaymen and Lesbians and straight women allies who were also our sisters, arose to provide grace and dignity to those suffering and dying. The second chapter delves into this movement towards community strengthening and growth. It was the first time since the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, in June 1969, that Gaymen and Lesbians faced a common enemy against which we banded together to fight. We instituted AIDS service organizations like Open Hand Chicago that brought hot meals to people with AIDS who were shut-in and who could not cook for themselves. We formed the AIDS Alternative Health Project, AAHP, a clinic where people with AIDS could receive complimentary therapies like acupuncture, massage, bio-energetics, Chinese herbs, nutritional counseling, yoga, meditation classes, and psychotherapy, all free of charge with the practitioners volunteering their time and skills. There was, and still is, Test Positive Aware Network, which provided social, spiritual, and emotional support for people with AIDS, There was the AIDS Pastoral Care Network, staffed by clergy of all faiths, for spiritual counseling. There was the founding of Bonaventure House and Chicago House, where people with AIDS who had no income could go to live out what was left of their lives with dignity. Individually and in groups, we went into the homes of sick Gaymen to feed them, hold them, read to them, talk to them, clean their homes and do their laundry, clean up their vomit and change their urine, feces, and blood soaked linens. We carried our brothers to doctor�s appointments and to the Emergency Rooms, which finally opened their doors to us. The community of compassion and ineffable Love, of care and empathy, did all of these things because no one else would do them for us. We had to do them for ourselves.


In Chapter 3, through the voices of the Gaymen interviewed, largely because of the new medications that kept us alive and relatively well, the story then goes on to look at the demise of that community of compassion and Love, as it shifted into a community of apathy, disconnection, assimilation, dislocation, fear of the other, materialism, consumerism, competition, and individualism. The LGBTQ community wanted all the things that the heterosexual paradigm presented: marriage with children and suburban homes, luxury automobiles, high incomes, city penthouse condominiums and summer homes in Michigan. As the new medications kept us alive and thriving, the community of compassion and Love and Spirit, died. Nearly everyone became self-interested in the pursuit of personal gratifications and materialism. The paradox is that while Gay Body was dying in the 80�s through the mid-90's, Gay Spirit grew and thrived, and when Gay Body came back to life through the miracle of protease inhibitors starting in 1996, Gay Spirit died an ugly death. Body dies-Spirit lives. Body lives-Spirit dies. This is paradox, indeed.


Finally, in Chapter 4, through the stories of the men and nurses in the film, we will look at the possibility for community in the future, moving out of just the LGBTQ community as the microcosm into the larger macrocosmic Community of Humanity, the community of the world, using what we have learned as LGBTQ people and becoming the mentors and teachers of the larger society. In this last chapter, the film will explore how we re-form the community of compassion, altruism, peace, non-violence, wellness, respect, abundance, and ineffable Love by looking at the contribution of young people to the community as they bring a new energy, a new spirit, and a new consciousness to the world. The film will be transformative, raising consciousness in the viewer and putting the viewer in touch with his/her higher Self, where all these human and divine attributes dwell, deep in the cave of the heart.


The film will first expose the viewer to the alienation of the sex community, then the AIDS War and its oppression--the poverty, the sickness and death, the stigma, the suffering and pain brought on by human against human, the injustice poured out on people with AIDS, the disowning by families, the firing by bosses, the eviction by landlords, the refusal of treatment by many in the medical profession, the Emergency Rooms which, at the beginning, would not allow us in, even the taxi cabs that would not give us rides, the general Darkness of that time. Then the viewer will be exposed to the community of compassion, love and grace that sprang up in the midst of chaos, terror, and death. Afterward, the viewer will see that community's demise into alienation and isolation, materialism and consumerism, just as it was during the sex/party/alcohol/drugs community. Finally, the viewer will taste the possibility of a re-formation of that community of compassion and Love, wellness, justice, abundance, peace, altruism, relocation, non-violence, and the celebration of difference. By the end of the film we will all know the possibility of a transformation into people who are better keepers of our Brothers and Sisters of all skin colors, all classes, all sexual orientations, and all genders, ushering in the era of the Community of Humanity.


Summary and Conclusion

The story will be told through one-on-one interviews with each of the Gagmen and nurses, and there will be footage of group sessions with all the Gaymen in the film as they create their own community of support and affirmation, exploring their feelings of grief and loss, as well as triumph and victory in a healing circle of their peers. There will be footage of days in the lives of the men in the film, shot in the workplace and in their leisure time with friends and partners. Part of the film will be devoted to the interaction between generations, the Tribal Elders in the film and LGBTQ Youth, in both a workshop setting and in mentoring times together. We will focus on the vision that the Youth have for the future of the Community of Humanity. There will also be footage of the City of Chicago through all four seasons of the year, a city that, like a good community, is constantly being torn down and built back again better than it had been prior to the razing. It is a city of neighborhoods that create their own communities. The City of Chicago�s history is not unlike the history of the LGBTQ community. In order to build a city of compassion and beauty, it is necessary to tear down some of the old, yet also to respect the history and preserve what is of historical value. As we maintain respect for our Tribal Elders in the film, so the City of Chicago maintains and has respect for its wise old structures. In the old there is wisdom. In the new there is expectation. Chicago and the LGBTQ community, and hence the Community of Humanity, have much in common