Documentary filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, renowned in the gay community for his 2013 film The Out List ( which included Ellen Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Larry Kramer and Wanda Sykes among its subjects ) now focuses on the baby-boomer generation—the huge population born between the years 1946 and 1964—in The Boomer List.
As in The Out List ( and previous "list" documentaries ), Greenfield-Sanders focuses his camera on heavyweight figures as disparate as Deepak Chopra, Maria Shriver and Samuel L. Jackson to Eve Ensler, Billy Joel, Tommy Hilfiger, David LaChapelle and Rosie O'Donnell. These interview subjects ( with each discussing his or her humble beginnings and rise to success ) are joined by lesser-known subjects like Vietnam veteran and author Tim O'Brien; Chicagoan Julieanna Richardson, founder of Historymakers, which collects the oral histories of African-Americans; and the openly gay AIDS activist Peter Staley, one of the early members of ACT UP.
Staley, who travels worldwide from his home in Brooklyn lecturing on HIV/AIDS and the challenges it continues to present, was also seen in David France's Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, a history of ACT UP. He spoke with Windy City Times about The Boomer List just after returning from Washington, D.C., to meet with President Obama's new AIDS czar, Douglas Brooks. The film, which premieres on PBS Tuesday, Sept. 23, will be available Oct. 1 on DVD in conjunction with a coffee-table book of Greenfield-Sanders' portraits of the interview subjects including Staley.
Windy City Times: I'm a baby boomer and a gay man, and I marched here in Chicago with ACT UP so I would be remiss if I didn't begin by thanking you for your years of community service on behalf of Our People.
Peter Staley: Thank you. It was a movement and an amazing one to be a part of.
WCT: You seem to be in great company, but I saw a post on you Facebook page where you said you were honored and thrilled to be wedged between Rosie O'Donnell and Erin Brockovich but that you were "not sure The Boomers generation as a whole has a lot to be proud of."
Peter Staley: I have problems with feeling some sort of underlying sense of pride for my generation as a whole—mostly because I think 50 to 100 years from now, and rightly so, everyone's going to lay at our feet the fact that we just let the planet go to pot by not rising to the challenge of global warming during the '90s, when we should have.
WCT: But, as you also say, there's no doubt that what ACT UP did, there is a lot to be proud of.
Peter Staley: Right. We're not a generation that is completely lacking in accomplishments, and certainly ACT UP is one of the greatest social-activist movements in American history, I think, and it was definitely a boomer generation movement.
WCT: There have been many artistic, technical and cultural accomplishments we can be proud of, too. We followed the dictates of our parents or forebears who said, "You can accomplish anything." We weren't exactly slackers, no?
Peter Staley: No, no. We weren't slackers. And yeah, there's that fighting back that I most admire but I still think we're going to have some shit laid at our feet. [Laughs]
WCT: Literally and figuratively, perhaps. [Laughs]
Peter Staley: Yes—for the one thing that we didn't rise up and handle. The biggest of things in my mind.
WCT: Of course, for the gay community there is also pride in seeing all the work bear these incredible cultural changes after going through that horrible, hopeless time and coming out on the other end. In some ways, it's like a social miracle here in America. Did you ever think back at those "kiss-ins" we'd be able to get married?
Peter Staley: No, and that's one of the cool things about now. In the last couple of years, everybody is saying the cultural wars have finally been won; there's a clear winner now and the boomer generation was on the right side of that and certainly the generations after us clearly were on the right side. But we were there, too, and we wisely evolved [laughs] just at the right time and we got it right and that happened on our watch. And now those wars are winding down with a clear victor.
WCT: So these next generations who have come along and are looking up to you and these other boomers included in the film—what advice do you offer when they ask you, "How did you do this?" "What advice do you have?"
Peter Staley: The first thing I advise is "Don't think we know it all" because we don't. I remember distinctly the slightly older generation in ACT UP, mostly with great credibility, having been at Stonewall [laughing], saying, "This is how you should do it" and a lot of us youngsters were like, "Excuse me, we'll figure this out; there's no playbook here that we have to follow."
And there's a bit of benefit to having that youthful lack of respect for what came before because there are things to learn and it is helpful to learn the lessons from the past but every time is different and every movement needs its own energy and ideas and those ideas usually come from those who are starting with a clear slate. I always advise people to trust their instincts and to create their own playbook; learn from the past as much as they want—they'll be stronger for it to know as much history as possible—but we don't have a magic formula. And that was the great thing about ACT UP: We borrowed from other social-activist movements liberally but we also created a new playbook that worked for that moment in time. And now people are borrowing from us.
WCT: Would many of the ACT UP tactics still work today?
Peter Staley: Some of them, but you have to keep things fresh if you want the media's attention. I do think that the community aspect is still key. There's nothing like coming into a room together and brainstorming. I have yet to see that replicated online.
WCT: I'm sure in some ways it was very gratifying to see the success of How to Survive a Plague—you're the literal poster child for that film—but also so bittersweet.
Peter Staley: I mostly found it a very empowering and wonderful experience. You know, the years prior to that a lot of us ACT UP alumni were feeling gloomier and gloomier that our history was vanishing. You'd meet a twentysomething or even a thirtysomething [who] had never heard of ACT UP, and it was very disheartening. There was an idea that maybe we'd be completely forgotten and we had already gone through the very painful experience of having the gay community very quickly pivot away from HIV/AIDS after 1996—when the triple drug regimens came out—and move into things like gays in the military and gay marriage so quickly. [They were] almost running away from HIV/AIDS, and that was painful.
So that was all kind of frightening, frankly, and while the film forced me and others to relive those years, it alleviated that fear and it started a bit of a revival of people remembering that moment in history with other projects. Now we have Larry Kramer's work on HBO and we've seen an AIDS movie that got an Oscar with Dallas Buyers Club, so we're seeing quite a little moment here where we're not being forgotten; I think, for me and I know for many other ACT UP veterans, it's reinvigorated us and it's reinvigorated AIDS activism in the U.S. I can point to dozens and dozens of examples of how there's been a nice little uptick in activism and optimism in being able to finish this fight against HIV/AIDS.
WCT: How is that going to be accomplished, Peter?
Peter Staley: The activists are now filled with a sense of optimism that we now have tools that when correctly applied can dramatically lower the rates of infection of HIV in the U.S. We've seen it done in some cities; we have a 45-percent drop in infections in Washington, D.C., and almost the same amount of drop in New York City. We have HIV pretty dramatically under control in San Francisco, [where it] is almost entirely among gay men, so we have these examples of using the current toolset to wind down the epidemic.
WCT: How is that being done?
Peter Staley: It's through testing and treatment. Now, we have this new prevention tool, PrEP, that we can add as an additional method to keep lowering the rates of infection and to empower HIV-negative, at-risk individuals by giving them an extra tool to prevent infection. So, it's an exciting time to be an AIDS activist and we're completely aligned with the public health officials, which [laughs] was not the case back in the '80s.
WCT: To say the least.
Peter Staley: That's right. But it's exciting to be on the same page now in cities across the country. Everyone is feeling optimistic that they can do the job just given the resources.
WCT: That alone speaks volumes to how far we've come—and what the boomer generation accomplished.
Peter Staley: Yes.
www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/the-boomer-list/about-the-film/3123/ .
