Out In The Mountains : A+E - An Early Frost: The 1985 TV Movie Available on DVD

by Mikhael Yowe

An Early Frost
starring Aidan Quinn,
Ben Gazzara, Gena
Rowlands, and Terry
O'Quinn

NBC first broadcast An Early Frost on November 11, 1985, when it beat Monday night football as the toprated program that night. People wanted to know something, anything, about this new disease that was sweeping the country. The movie won four of the fourteen Emmys that it was nominated for. The DVD hit the streets on July 18 of this year. I didn't even know this movie existed until now.
An Early Frost was the first major film to look at the AIDS crisis. Well, it didn't exactly look at the whole crisis. It followed one young man's interaction with his family as he became ill and found out he had AIDS.
An Early Frost on DVD.

       I watched this movie three days ago, knowing that it would push all my buttons, and it did. It was a trip back in time to a place where my friends were dying. It was a place where everyone was afraid and confused about what was going on and what to do about it.
      It was a year after the broadcast that my friends died and our little girl was diagnosed with HIV. I can remember the horror of that day and the year that followed. It seems ironic that she died two years to the day after the movie aired.
      As I watched the movie, I could relate to the emotions of the characters. The realistic portrayal of people's reactions to AIDS and those who had it reminded me of how some of our friends and family shied away, or found excuses not to come around. But in 1985, the average person didn't know how it was contracted.
       It seems to me that was the whole point of the movie: to educate people about just how AIDS was spread. The writers managed to get that information into the dialogue through Gena Rowlands' role as the mother, with her matter-of-fact "you can't get it that way" attitude. I didn't find the father's (Ben Gazzara) process of acceptance convincing, but maybe that's just from watching my friends deal with their fathers. Aidan Quinn's portrayal of Michael was powerful. His self-effacing struggle was evident though out the movie.
       This movie went a long way toward letting Americans know how they could avoid getting AIDS. I think that it probably quieted some people's fears. I wonder, though, how many people in 1985 were turned off from the movie because it was a gay man struggling with the disease. His family was forced to cope not just with AIDS, but also his homosexuality. But back then, maybe everyone else really thought that it was just a gay disease, and they could sit back and not worry about it.
      Watching this movie and looking back twenty-one years reminds me how far we have come since the epidemic started. It also reminds me how far we still have to go. It is a good movie. It is a reminder that the battle is not over. An Early Frost is relevant today, because as always, history repeats itself until we learn from past mistakes.

Mikhael Yowe is a married trans-queer leatherman who lives in Williamstown, Vermont.