An Early Frost offers the first widespread depiction of AIDS in the LGBT community

November 11, 1985

When the television movie An Early Frost debuted on NBC Nov.11, 1985, producers, writers and life partners Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman made history for producing the first large-scale media production dealing with the AIDS pandemic. An Early Frost's premier occurred just weeks after actor Rock Hudson's highly publicized death from AIDS. The film was honored with the prestigious Peabody Award, a Golden Globe and four Emmy Awards.

An Early Frost depicts the life of young, successful gay lawyer Michael Pierson (Aidan Quinn) and his struggles with HIV. His positive status forces him to confront his family and friends with the difficult news in an era when the life expectancy for those with AIDS was short. For many viewers, this was their first time seeing someone with AIDS not as a statistic but as a human being - someone's son and brother.

This film brought the emotions surrounding the pandemic into people's living rooms, but within the confines of 1980s network television, the emphasis was on how AIDS affected Michael's family. Film scholar Moshe Suhovsky points out that AIDS was depicted "first and foremost as a threat to white, middle-class heterosexual families and only secondarily a disease that brings death upon its victims and destroys homosexual family units."(1)

Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman addressed this issue when, fifteen years later, they adapted the British series Queer as Folk for American audiences as a Showtime series. With their version, they continued to break media taboos as they showed how living with HIV and AIDS affects the gay community.

References

1. Suhovsky, Moshe. "Film Reviews." The American Historical, October 1994; Vol. 99, Iss. 4. pg 1266-1270.