Is it true that the man over there is dying?
The last thing that appears on the screen in Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances is the dedication "for Mark, Billy and Paul." Given the time and place it was made -- New York City in the mid-'80s -- and the film's subject matter, it's a safe bet all three dedicatees were gay men who died of AIDS, as Sherwood would himself at the dawn of the next decade. He was, however, still very much alive in 1984, when Parting Glances was filmed, and in 1986, when it was released, so he was able to dramatize what it was like to live in one of the syndrome's epicenters at a time when there was still so much the medical community and people in general didn't know about it. (Heck, at the time it was shot, Ronald Reagan was still a year away from saying "AIDS" in public, the first step toward acknowledging the public health crisis his administration was doing as little as possible about because it wasn't affecting the right people.)
In Parting Glances, the character with AIDS is Nick (Steve Buscemi in one of his first screen appearances), a successful musician and virtual shut-in. He's also the ex-boyfriend of protagonist Michael (Richard Ganoung), an editor and frustrated writer who's down in the dumps because his lover of six years is due to hop on a plane to Africa for the foreseeable future. This is Robert (John Bolger), who drags Michael to a dinner party given by his insufferable boss Cecil (Patrick Tull), and his oblivious wife Betty (Yolande Bavan), and is in turn dragged to a going-away party thrown by their mutual friend Joan (Kathy Kinney, years before she took on the role of Mimi on The Drew Carey Show), a struggling artist anxious to have her first gallery show already. All the while, Michael considers his options -- stay faithful to Robert, go back to Nick, or respond to the overtures of cute record-store clerk Peter (Adam Nathan), who's a decade younger, but it might as well be an entire generation.
Since AIDS was such a hot-button issue in the gay community at the time, it's understandable that the most pointed scenes are the ones involving Nick. Introduced watching MTV with the sound off, waiting for his band's music video to get played, he's also shown rebelling against the health-food regimen Michael has him on and taping his video will, which doubles as his coming out to his father. The strangest interludes, though, are the ones where he's visited by a ghostly knight in armor, a device incongruously borrowed from Hamlet. Then again, its appearance does get him to take action -- or at the very least get out of his mausoleum of an apartment for a little while -- so it does serve a purpose.