As the AIDS  crisis continued to unfold across the globe it was inevitable that it would eventually find its way into movies. The first of these appeared in 1985,with the tele-movie An Early Frost, Arthur J Bressan Jr’s Buddies, and the lesser-known A Virus Has No Morals.

It was an interesting mix: An Early Frost was very much a balancing act to appease the sponsors whilst simultaneously trying to say something about AIDS. The ‘balance’ was achieved primarily by focusing on the impact on the family of the gay man with AIDS, rather than the man or his partner. Nonetheless, even this proved to be too contentious: despite being nominated for 14 Emmy awards and winning three, NBC lost half a million dollars in sponsorship when they screened the movie.

At the opposite end of the scale was Eva von Praunheim’s A Virus Knows No Morals (Ein Virus Kennt Keine Moral). This was a very angry and cynical take on responses to AIDS – by everyone from people with the virus through liberals and political activists to the medical establishment.

Its larger-than-life characters include a gay bathhouse owner who does everything he can to block safe sex education material reaching his customers (before subsequently contracting HIV himself); a woman who wants to have a baby with a gay man “before they all die out”; and a researcher who declares. “the best defense is shame”.

Buddies lay somewhere between the two; documenting the impact of AIDS not only on the person with the disease but also on the other people in their lives. The film was directed by Arthur J Bressan Jr, who had produced little more than gay porn movies up to that time – with the notable exception of Gay USA; a documentary of Gay Pride celebrations across the USA in 1977. Shot on a very small budget and a very short time scale (apparently written in five days and shot in nine), it charts the relationship between a man with AIDS and his volunteer befriender/’buddy’.

Its small budget occasionally shows up in the production values but, overall, it still powerfully conveyed the emotional impact of AIDS: not just the grieving and the multifaceted sense of loss but also the anger felt within our communities at the lack of government action.

Neither A Virus Has No Morals nor Buddies made it into mainstream cinemas, although I do know that Buddies was broadcast on the UK’s Channel Four as part of their first In the Pink queer film series in 1986.