I love reacher features. Reacher features are films from the late 80s and early 90s that document an era of gay life that was nearly wiped out by AIDS. Films like “Longtime Companion,””Torch Song Trilogy” and “It’s My Party” are important because they serve as mentoring surrogates, when the mentors have been taken from us.
If we look at the whole of gay culture as a ladder, and each generation as a rung on the ladder, then the rung above mine is gone, leaving a large gap in the ladder, and making me a reacher. I have to reach because I don’t have the experience of my predecessors. I must grab in the dark for my future.
My elders, gay men who would now be mostly in their late 50s and early 60s, saw most of their peers ravaged by the plague. Plague was what we called it back then, and plague is what we still have now.
Those who live with HIV and AIDS have slightly better lives, and they can look forward to health and happiness for much longer than previously thought possible, but that doesn’t mean there is a cure. It doesn’t alter the memory of what we have lost, what we may still lose. AIDS in the 80s and 90s was nothing less than a plague, for it deprived us of a generation of teachers, and an adequate reflection of ourselves peering back from the mirror of time.