Thank you so much, Victoria, for both recommendations.

It's easy to forget or not to have ever known the depths of despair at-risk people felt at the height of the AIDS crisis. It's probably equally hard to understand the tremendous accomplishments of the formal and informal organizations people (primarily but not exclusively gay people) built to care for and love one another while society made that very difficult.

Jarman died during a period when despair had reached heights. Rumors of effective treatment kept being dashed. That made it hard to feel hope about actual progress in the fight to understand and suppress the virus.

I was involved in formal and informal care networks right up through 1996, and I was a member of Act Up New York. The triple cocktail therapy that created a Lazarus Effect in 1996 still came as an enormous shock to me, a joyful shock obviously, but something I wouldn't have believed truly possible even a few weeks before.

I only say that to lend perspective to Jarman's creation, which is all the more stunning in the face of his certain hopelessness.