From The Apprentice to It’s A Sin: the making of heroes and villains in screen depictions of Aids

Culturally, we are in the middle of an Aids “memory boom” as film and television creatives turn to stories from the terrifying crisis that began in the early 1980s. In the last few years we have seen the huge success of dramas like It’s A Sin and Pose, which explore the lives and experiences of gay men and trans women during the early days of the Aids epidemic.

The latest – and perhaps unexpected – addition to this raft of dramas revolving around the issue is the new biopic about Donald Trump’s early business career, The Apprentice. Here we see the former president learning the ropes from his homosexual business mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, who later died of Aids.

In the 1980s, the Aids epidemic in the US and UK affected mainly gay men who were just beginning to emerge from decades of discrimination and criminalisation to take pride in their gay identity.

There was much fear, anxiety and stigma surrounding the virus, with Aids used as a weapon to demonise homosexuals. As the virus was transmitted through sex, gay men would become defined through their “sexual deviancy”. Governments led by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, refused to discuss the virus in public and take action against it, and mainstream media often legitimised homophobic attitudes.

However, as the Aids epidemic took hold, those living with the disease began to tell their stories. Journalist Oscar Moore, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote about his experiences of the disease for more than two years until his death in 1996 at the age of 36. He had lived with Aids for 13 years.

British filmmaker Derek Jarman announced his diagnosis publicly in 1987 and later chronicled his deterioration in his last film Blue, released in 1993. The sharing of personal stories challenges associations of Aids with deviancy, an approach that continues in the depiction of the condition in film and television today.

As film and media academics we are involved in ongoing research that analyses how the Aids crisis is memorialised on screen and how it is represented to contemporary mainstream audiences.

Programmes and documentaries like the BBC’s Aids: The Unheard Tapes and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed reveal prejudiced historical attitudes towards gay men and Aids.

Rock Hudson, the Hollywood heart-throb of the 1950s and 1960s, would have been villainised and his career sunk, had he been open about his sexuality at the time. However, the death of this all-American movie star from Aids in 1985 helped to shift public attitudes towards gay men and the disease. The All That Heaven Allowed documentary tells a fuller story and affords Hudson the legacy he deserves.

In turn, hugely popular drama series such as It’s A Sin, Pose, and Fellow Travelers all document in vivid detail the historical discrimination against gay men, and reveal the defiance, humour, pleasure and horrors of gay life in the years before and during the Aids crisis.

These productions provide an important and too-often neglected history for contemporary audiences. They memorialise those who have died of Aids and hold to account the people in power for their failure to provide adequate healthcare and basic human rights to people living and dying with Aids. A key function of these narratives is to provide a moral compass with which to judge figures from history, whether biographical or imagined.

The Apprentice and the making of a villain

In The Apprentice, the lack of moral compass demonstrated by the young Trump (Sebastian Stan) is depicted through his relationship with his mentor, the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

A huge influence on Trump as a younger man, Cohn was a malign and corrupt presence in the world of American business and politics. His hypocrisy as an amoral closeted gay man who would persecute other gay men in positions of power has been well documented, and is revealed in the Trump biopic.

While the lawyer’s ruthless methods are central to the creation of Trump as Cohn’s apprentice in the film, it is Trump’s callous treatment of Cohn when he is weak and dying from Aids that is key in depicting the former president as a villain.

In The Apprentice, Trump refuses to take calls from Cohn when he is sick and no longer of use to him. Trump’s character is further revealed when he has Cohn’s lover, Russell Eldrige (Ben Sullivan), removed from one of his hotels once he discovers he has Aids, and sends Cohn the bill for his stay.

Heroes of the epidemic

While Trump’s villain status is bolstered in the film by his treatment of the dying Cohn, many LGBTQ+ television dramas place the spotlight on the heroes who emerged from the Aids epidemic. Pose showcases a diverse community of carers as trans and gay members of the ballroom scene in New York look after each other when sick, and take to the streets to publicly protest their neglect by the authorities.

One of the main heroes is Judy (Sandra Bernhard), a lesbian nurse who gives practical care to the community, offers wise counsel and leads the protagonists to embrace the performative political acts of the Aids protest movement. In Pose, Judy represents and pays homage to the many lesbians who were carers and activists in the early days of Aids when patients were faced with the neglect of doctors and scientists.

Another woman who stands up to gay prejudice is embodied in It’s A Sin through the character of Jill Baxter (Lydia West), based on the real-life Aids activist Jill Nalder.

While not a nurse, Jill takes on the caring for gay friends as they start to get sick from the virus. She is also the agent of change – acquiring and sharing vital Aids information, volunteering for helplines, visiting isolated Aids patients in hospital – and plays a key role in activist protests. Following the success of It’s A Sin, the hashtag #BeMoreJill trended on Twitter and was adopted by the writer Russell T. Davies himself.

If the history of Aids on screen teaches us anything, it is that this epidemic revealed true heroes and villains, and provides a perspective on the behaviour of society, governments and the media during this crisis, and that of people who stood up for those who could not stand up for themselves. In these documentaries, films and dramas, audiences are invited to reflect on the way people with Aids were treated, and condemn homophobic and transphobic bigotry.

This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.