INTIMACIES
Kearns clearly intends to show only the AIDS victims who inhabit society’s underbelly. More than five years ago, he set aside all his other projects in order to devote himself to the AIDS crisis. An outspoken activist whose work is widely known on the west coast, Kearns began to wonder about the people he wasn’t representing, whose voices were never heard–those who were politically incorrect or insufficiently noble or just plain nasty. The ones nobody cares about, but who are dying nonetheless.
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But it is disturbing nonetheless that not a single character in Intimacies comes off as innocent. Denny is a brazen queen who claims to be “the one who gave gay liberation a bad name.” Big Red, the most moving and engaging of the characters, is a whore who only does hand jobs now that she’s infected. Patrick is an uptight, promiscuous egotist who is so afraid of anyone finding out he has AIDS that he refuses to tell even his partner of seven years. Rusty is a young junkie, a prostitute who doesn’t care who he gives the disease to, since they’re all perverted slime anyway. Mary is an aging, bigoted mother out of a Tennessee Williams play. She contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, but she proceeds to inform us of her incestuous relationship with her son, now a homosexual. And Phoenix, the final portrait, is an older junkie, a biker type, who finally finds love with another AIDS victim and a cat. All are embarrassments not only to society but to humanity. Yet Kearns portrays them so lovingly, and with such technical proficiency, that their humanity shines through. Though we can’t really like them, we do come to understand them, and so we feel sorry about their impending deaths.
