The 1986 AIDS Comedy ‘A Virus Knows No Morals’ Resonates In Our Nasty Era – The Village Voice

Way back in the mid-1980s, you’d have needed a lot of fortitude to make a comedy about AIDS. Turns out that German filmmaker and activist Rosa von Praunheim (born 1942) had just what it took, having already released, in 1971, a clarion call for gay rights, It’s Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. With his 1986 film A Virus Knows No Morals, von Praunheim crafted what the Brooklyn Academy of Music terms “an episodic, parodic, and offbeat Brechtian skewering of the greedy, vicious German response to a brand-new AIDS crisis.” 

The prejudice of all stripes currently roiling a divided America echoes the rampant homophobia that swept the country during the AIDS crisis. Von Praunheim’s progressive provocation is a reminder that the battle for basic human rights is always with us, and forever ongoing. 

Following the screening of A Virus Knows No Morals, at BAM on February 22, former Village Voice writer and editor Jeff Weinstein will lead a discussion on “the continuing sad and infuriating story of queer-hating, money-only healthcare and the cultural response to AIDS.”

Weinstein knows whereof he speaks, having led the push, in 1982, for “spousal equivalent” benefits at the Voice. As he writes in a current article in The Baffler, “I proposed that same-gender partners be included in the Voice health plan — well before queer marriage or even domestic partnership was an option. Our owner at the time, Rupert Murdoch, didn’t object because the fat weekly was a cash cow — before Craigslist and the internet gradually destroyed the classifieds, a main source of the paper’s revenue — and the company didn’t want a costly disruption.” In the article, titled “Sex and Drugs,” Weinstein adds, “The contract agreement was ‘the second union contract in the United States, the first by a private company, and the first to be widely reported on, to offer same-sex couples these protections,’ according to my own Wikipedia page, so I guess it’s true.”

Well, you don’t have to believe Wikipedia — on Thursday, Weinstein will give it to you straight from the horse’s mouth.  ❖

A Virus Knows No Morals
Part of BAM Film 2024, co-presented with The Baffler
Thursday, February 22
Brooklyn Academy of Music
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

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