It took Rock Hudson's death to capture America's attention.
It's hard to watch a film like Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt and not get choked up from time to time. An Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, the 1989 film tells the stories of five people -- three gay men, one straight drug addict, and one young hemophiliac -- who died from AIDS, as related by the people who loved them. What's even more compelling is that one of the storytellers is himself stricken with the disease and it's advanced to the point where he's confined to bed. Another is film historian Vito Russo, whose book The Celluloid Closet inspired the 1995 documentary of the same name by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, who produced, directed and edited this film and co-wrote it with Cindy Ruskin, author of the The Quilt: Stories from the NAMES Project. Surprisingly, the NAMES Project itself doesn't enter the picture until pretty late in the game, but the film's closing images -- of the Quilt being displayed at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- have a power that hasn't dimmed in the intervening years. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that, two decades on and counting, we still don't have a cure for this terrible disease and it still continues to spread unabated. Sobering stuff, indeed.