AIDS remains a major public health issue that still affects the entire world; it’s estimated that close to 38 million people have HIV right now. Although the world has made significant progress in recent decades, there are still important goals to reach. Division, disparity, and disregard for human rights are among the failures that have allowed HIV to become – and remain – a global health crisis. Now, COVID-19 is exacerbating inequities and disruptions to services, making the lives of many people diagnosed with HIV all the more challenging.

We just had yet another World AIDS Day on December 1st, just when we face Omicron, yet another variant of COVID. The theme of World AIDS Day 2021 is, “End inequalities. End AIDS.” With a special focus on reaching people left behind, the World Health Organization (WHO) and its various partners are highlighting the growing inequities in access to essential HIV services.

As with other controversial issues (the Red Scare, the Vietnam War), mainstream Hollywood originally feared dealing with the rampant virus of AIDs, which was first reported in July 1981. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, for which Tom Hanks won the Best Actor-Drama Golden Globe and his first Best Actor Oscar, was made in 1993, well over a decade into the disease’s lethal history.

As is often the case, it was left to the realm of American indie films to be the first to show the scary and threatening life that many people lived in the era of the AIDS pandemic, by making bold and honest features about the life with the HIV virus, both inside and outside the gay community.

Parting Glances, the stunning 1986 debut of writer-director Sherwood, was the first American indie to tackle AIDS head-on: it was produced by Christine Vachon and starred the then-unknown Steve Buscemi, both of whom would go on to make a significant mark on the nascent American Independent and Queer Cinema.

Set in New York, on the Upper West Side, the story depicts 24 hours in the lives of three gay men, who form an intriguing triangle, although it is not a ménage a trois. “I intended the film as an homage to New York and also to the gay community, which, in spite of the AIDS crisis, continues to be such a life force,” Sherwood told me in a 1986 interview.

Parting Glances was one of the first gay movies which did not deal with the issue of coming out, the theme which dominated the gayest fare of the 1970s and 1980s. Sexual orientation has long been resolved when the film’s story begins: as the youngest character, a Columbia freshman, comments, “Your dick knows what it likes.”

Sherwood showed the audience a “new world” from the inside, through the eyes of its own denizens. Moreover, unlike the masochistic and self-loathing The Boys in the Band (1970), written by gay playwright Mart Crowley, but directed by a straight man (William Friedkin), Parting Glances is ultimately upbeat, despite its AIDS theme.

In Sherwood’s film, fully rounded lives are presented through the break-up of a relationship. Structured as a romantic triangle, the script packs everything into 24 hours in the lives of Michael (Richard Ganoung), an editor, and his lover of six years, Robert (John Bolger), an official working for an international health organization. Michael and Robert enjoy a comfortable lifestyle: they live in a nice apartment, listen to Brahms, go to dinner parties, have regular sex. But Michael is feeling a little too settled; something is amiss from his life, and he’s still tormented by thoughts of his first love, Nick (the very young Steve Buscemi), a rock singer dying of AIDS.

When Robert leaves for a long stint in Africa, it allows Michael to reflect on their bond. This triggers flashbacks to Michael’s love for Nick, who represents his wilder, more reckless past. Michael drops by at Nick’s to cook, clean, and listen to his sardonic musings. He brings him a record of Don Giovanni, and Nick gets stuck on the part where Don Giovanni goes up in flames, refusing to repent. Similarly, in the film, Nick declines to renounce his past. Sherwood makes Nick the moral center: the suffering spirit of modern gay life, the proudly unrepentant person with AIDS.

Embodying sort of gay Everyman, Michael is poised between his former and current lovers, between a thrilling, dangerous past and an unexciting domesticated present. Complicating matters is a potential new lover, Peter, who works in a record store. When Michael meets Peter, he sees a 1980s echo of his own youth, except that Peter is comfortable with his sexual orientation and apolitical, drifting from one party to another looking for adventure. 

In Parting Glances, Sherwood attempted something ambitious, crafting a sort of State of the Union for the AIDS era, a look at where gay men were, and the uneasy ground on which they stood. Wishing to restore authenticity and dignity to the openly gay lifestyle, usually depicted in negative and sensationalistic manner, Sherwood treated gays as ordinary people who, like their “straight” counterparts, work, argue, make love, and reconcile.

The film broke new ground: for the first time, gay men could watch and relate to themselves onscreen. Rather than being hysterical or sentimental about AIDS, the tone is elegiac: Parting Glances, like the later Longtime Companion, the 1990 Sundance Film Festival winner, ends with a lament for a bygone, free-spirit past.

Motivated by the public’s “astounding ignorance” of gay lifestyles, Sherwood complained that “One of the problems Hollywood has had dealing with this subject is that it’s usually approached so gingerly.” He cited Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), whose plot takes one hour for the characters (played by William Hurt and Raul Julia) to kiss, and that kiss is then set up to shock the audience. “This is why I had the men kissing from the start, to get it over with right away and allow us to get on with their interaction with other people, and with what’s going on in all their lives.”

Sherwood struck a universal chord, showing that gay and straight men are not all that different – a novel idea at the time, given the stereotypical portrayal of gay men in the mass media. 

Unfortunately, Parting Glances, the first indie to address the AIDS pandemic, is the only film completed by Bill Sherwood, who died of AIDS complications in 1990.

On July 16, 2007 as a part of the Outfest Legacy Project, a restored Parting Glances got its world premiere at the Director’s Guild of America. The new print then received its New York premiere on October 29, 2007 at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.