Dallas Buyers Club lands itself in the middle “Here’s this two-bit
cowboy electrician with a seventh grade education, who is forced to become an expert, even a scientist, on how to extend his life in a healthy way with HIV.”
of that paroxysm, exposing the rawness and vulner- ability of those who were infected and the absolute lack of resources available for treatment, like no other film to date. They nailed it. The feeling that it was a war and that in order to survive it you were go- ing to have to fight—down and dirty—for life.Dallas Buyers Club shows how the battle was done and regardless of how unlike we in the LGBT community and the main character might be, he brought familiar echoes to the role. The title character, Ron Woodroof, was a hetero-
sexual Texas good-ole’ boy electrician and rodeo cowboy back in 1985. Totally reckless, he possesed a devil-may-care lifestyle that includes copious amounts of alcohol, drugs of every flavor and deliv- ery method and lots of unprotected sex anywhere he could get it. This guy was the epitome of every LGBT’s nightmare, homophobic doesn’t even cover it. Let’s just say he is not the guy you want to come across alone in a dark alley. How does this guy con- nect to HIV/AIDS? His tenacity is familiar to many of us especially after his blindsiding diagnosis with the “gay disease.” In an interview with Matthew McConaughey, we
spoke about how they decided to handle the main character, get into that chaffing exterior and beyond it in order to tell his story. “It’s not a docu-drama, it’s not necessarily even about HIV/AIDS. What’s original about it is that you have a heterosexual man and we haven’t seen that story before. When you first meet him, most people can’t stand him. This guy doesn’t start off as a flag-waving crusader for the cause in any way. He’s this selfish son-of-a-bitch who is doing what he can to survive. The challenge was keeping him true to that, trust that if we keep him this sort of bastard who wanted to make money—he wanted to beScarface—we wanted to keep him doing that, and trust that his humanity will come out in the process.” Humanity seems like a long stretch for Ron’s char-
acter but in the end the disease and diagnosis forced his hand by making him vulnerable. Like it did for so many in the gay community, that same vulnerability compelled us to band together and to learn how to fight. McConaughey continued, “Here’s this two-bit cowboy electrician with a seventh grade education, who is forced to become an expert, even a scientist, on how to extend his life in a healthy way with HIV. He took it upon himself to find out things that were on the cusp because there was really nothing to go off of. Because of his personality, when he didn’t like what they were prescribing, he went elsewhere for a solution. Even leaving the country at one point for Mexico, then later traveling all over the world to figure out how to survive.”
NOVEMBER 2013 | NOVEMBER 2013 |RAGE monthly RAGE monthly 33
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