Retroactivism, Queer Men and HIV/AIDS in Creative Non-fiction Film

Abstract

Since advances in medication rendered HIV/AIDS a manageable condition in 1996, cultural responses in Western Europe have increasingly positioned the epidemic as something concluded. This has produced what critics describe as the ‘post-crisis’, where histories of activism and loss risk being reduced to nostalgia or forgotten altogether. This thesis interrogates how creative non-fiction cinema can counter this erasure through retroactivism: the practice of revisiting traumatic pasts to reanimate them for contemporary contexts. Western Europe provides a particularly significant site for this analysis. Countries such as Britain, France and Ireland share broadly comparable epidemiological histories, public health infrastructures, and trajectories of queer rights, yet they remain marked by persistent stigma and uneven cultural memory. Examining these contexts together allows the project to map how such cinema addresses their histories of HIV/AIDS and homophobia while negotiating contemporary issues facing queer men with HIV/AIDS. This thesis focuses on queer men with HIV/AIDS in the West, whose histories have been shaped by shifting queer rights and intersectional struggles over stigma and public opinion. Their experiences provide a critical vantage point for exploring how creative non-fiction retroactivist film mediates marginalised identity, reframes communal and personal memory, and navigates vast changes in hegemonic representation. Three recent case studies (120 battements par minute (dir Campillo 2017), Pride (dir. Warchus 2014), and How to Tell a Secret (dir Dunne & Rodgers 2022)) are positioned on a continuum of creative non-fiction, spanning fiction-inflected reconstruction, mainstream historical drama, and ethically reflexive documentary. Analysed together, they demonstrate how retroactivist creative non-fiction film can successfully use affective and haptic strategies to collapse distance between viewers and the histories represented, generating embodied encounters that resist reductive images of queer men with HIV/AIDS.