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‘It’s a Sin’ Reframes the Story of the AIDS Crisis
How the HBO Max series wonders what we got wrong about the past
Over the past decade, one of the richest questions popular culture has asked itself has been “What did we get wrong about the past?” From Ryan Murphy’s revisionist histories The People v. O.J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace to Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, historically oriented television has been captivated by finding new answers to old questions, by taking familiar stories and demanding we see them in a new light.
Nowhere has this effort been more forceful than in the staggered, multi-pronged effort by filmmakers, novelists, and journalists to revisit the AIDS crisis. With films like David France’s How to Survive a Plague (also adapted into a remarkable book) and Robin Campillo’s staggering 120 BPM, series like Murphy’s Pose, and book like Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Sarah Schulman’s new Let the Record Show, there has been an ongoing push to invest the story of AIDS with the experiences of the men and women who succumbed to it, who survived it, and who fought to ensure that future generations would not have to suffer as they had.
Russell T. Davies’ television work has been animated by the question, achingly relevant in the era of Trump and COVID, of how we muddle through in times of maximal turmoil. Davies’…
