By Vincent William Gagliostro
Based on a short story by William Wilson
The film, AFTER LOUIE, is a semi-autobiographical love story, between a gay man and his gay brotherhood, inspired from a short memoir by my friend William Wilson, who wrote of a slim moment, set, in the pre-AIDS era, New York City, circa 1980, just as he was confronting his own battle with the AIDS virus. He died of AIDS in 1999, age 51. The film speaks to a time and is an expression of what it was to lose something. I met William during the beginning days of ACT UP. We were mavericks in our own imagined wild west show. It was a moment, and in that moment was hope, freedom and expression inside the chilling hideous moments of my friends dying. I had no idea then how it would end. I have less of an idea today, and this scares the hell out of me.
The film tells its story through the simultaneous lens of myself (the director), and of Sam’s (my second-self) struggle to find the film he wants to make out of an incredibly painful yet meaningful period of our history. Coursing through four decades — William Wilson’s move to New York City in 1968, fresh from Yale — The Bernini Fountain in Rome, Italy, 1969, on the day Judy Garland is found dead in London and the drag queens riot at the Stonewall Inn, New York City — and through two sexual revolutions. Themes of love, sex and apartness connect a generation to a generation. After Louie tells a brave and hopeful and modern communal love story rising from the ruins of what some today, I believe, consider a shameful past.
The film begins as does William Wilson’s memoir, with the provocative opening line,
“Here’s how I think I got the AIDS virus.”
And continues…
“…It was the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, 1980, and I’d gone out to the Spike, the premiere New York leather bar of the era, over by the old West Side Highway, then still standing. It was merely a first stop, a way into the night; eventually, I knew, I’d wind up at the Mineshaft.”