This year marks the 25th anniversary of Showtime’s Queer As Folk, the American adaptation of the British series of the same name, which dared to depict the realities of gay life in all its glory and went on to inspire many a gay awakening.
But long before Queer As Folk, its co-creators brought another landmark LGBTQ+ story to our televisions, and its one that deserves its flowers for helping to shift the narrative around gay men and HIV.
Written by real-life partners Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, NBC’s 1985 made-for-TV movie An Early Frost is a star-studded drama that is considered the very first feature-length film—on the big screen or the small—to address the AIDS crisis.
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It tells the story of a successful lawyer named Michael (Practical Magic‘s Aidan Quinn) who is a closeted gay man, and is shocked to learn he’s been exposed to HIV.
After a fight with his partner Peter (Friday Night Lights‘ D.W. Moffet), Michael makes a trip to his hometown, where he comes clean to his parents Nick (The Big Lebowski‘s Ben Gazzara) and Kate (A Woman Under The Influence‘s Gena Rowlands), finally revealing he’s gay, which they both respond to in different ways.
Reflecting on the film with The Hollywood Reporter, Cowen and Lipman recall the fear and ignorance around gay men in the early ’80s, so they wrote An Early Frost hoping to enlighten the mainstream and dispel rumors about AIDS—and thankfully NBC was brave enough to champion their script.
Though plays like Larry Kramer‘s A Normal Heart had garnered attention in the arts world, the couple had goals of reaching a much wider audience. “We weren’t writing for New York or LA,” Lipman shares. “We were writing for Kansas,” his partner replies. “Because An Early Frost was designed for a mass audience, we couldn’t be as explicit. We also didn’t want to make this about sex, nor pass judgment.”
“That’s why we chose to make it about family,” Lipman adds. “By not showing AIDS in a gay vacuum, we were able to explore its devastation to our entire society.”
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In retrospect, the film feels incredibly chaste, a product of its time. The network forbade the characters Michael and Peter from sharing a kiss—in fact, the most intimate interaction that was allowed between the two lovers was a moment where one moves a stray hair from the other’s forehead.
But An Early Frost does feature another kiss that feels just as impactful: The warm, familial one between Michael and his grandmother, played by screen legend Sylvia Sidney, whose career dates back to the 1920s.
In that era, during the early years of the AIDS crisis, many still feared it could be transmitted through casual contact—a fallacy the film addresses directly. Still, certain executives were reticent to show Michael and his grandmother’s kiss on screen, and wanted to cut the scene.
However, as Lipman remembers it, Sidney—who was 75 at the time—took a stand: “She went to the top brass and in her trademark gravelly voice said, ‘You’re not cutting the kiss. No way. Cut it and I walk.’ The kiss stayed. But that’s how skittish everyone was.”
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Apparently the network needed an education on AIDS, too. In another scene, Michael convulses, prompting his father to call the ambulance for him, but when the paramedics learn of his status, they refuse to take him to the hospital.
As Cowen remembers: “Some execs balked [at that scene]: ‘Aw, come on. These things don’t really happen.’ Well, of course they did, all the time.”
The co-writers were also able to argue to keep the film’s ending as they envisioned it—their one “unnegotiable caveat”—with Michael not dying. Though he experiences a friendly fellow patient (played by Smallville‘s John Glover) succumbing to AIDS, Cowen and Lipman knew they wanted to give their protagonist a meaningful send-off that wasn’t so final: “His car rides away into the darkness, but we don’t see his demise. We felt we all needed hope.”
When An Early Frost aired on NBC in November of ’85, it was viewed by 34 million households and was the highest-rated program of the night, even outpacing Monday Night Football. It would go on to earn 14 Emmy nominations (winning three, including Outstanding Writing For a Movie or Miniseries), win a Golden Globe for Sylvia Sidney’s performance, and earn the prestigious Peabody Award.
Despite the ratings success and the accolades, Cowen and Lipman admit they struggled to get work for many years after, having been pigeonholed as writers who were “good at gay stuff.”
The pair would eventually land the acclaimed drama Sisters which ran for six seasons on NBC in the ’90s, but they officially cemented their legacy when they successfully convinced Showtime to let them adapted the British hit Queer As Folk for American audiences, and the rest is history.
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You’d be hard pressed to talk to gays of a certain age who weren’t influenced by Queer As Folk in some way, but An Early Frost seems to have been a bit lost to history, even though its one of the most important films of the ’80s.
Ahead of its 40th anniversary later this year, celebrate Pride Month with this potent reminder of gay life from the not-too-distant past.
Though An Early Frost is not currently streaming through an official channels, it can be viewed in full online thanks to the Internet Archive and the Rainbow History Project on YouTube.
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