Dallas Buyers Club’: How Stigma and Profits Worsened the AIDS Crisis

In 1981, a global AIDS epidemic began which, to this day, has taken the lives of over 40 million people. In the U.S. specifically, the virus started to spread especially throughout the gay community in New York, which triggered nationwide homophobia, stigma, and misinformation around those diagnosed with HIV, as well as negligence from the Government and the FDA. All these themes can be seen in the Oscar-winning movie Dallas Buyers Club.

The movie stars Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof, a racist, homophobic cowboy whose world ends up completely changing after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. There were 339 documented cases in the U.S. in 1981, and over 400,000 worldwide by 1989, leading the disease to be called “the gay cancer.”

The film begins with different scenes showing just how “macho” Ron was- attending rodeo shows and riding bulls, having sex with multiple women at a time, and getting into fights with police officers. However, after ending up in the hospital following a work-related accident, he gets the diagnose and is told he has 30 days to live.

Ron becomes enraged and confused by the news, as he was led to believe that the disease only infected gay men. His own homophobia causes him to reject the diagnosis at first, but after a phase of denial that includes drugs, alcohol, and sex, he ends up trying to educate himself. He learns that he might have gotten it from having unprotected sex with a drug-addicted woman and, therefore, that AIDS is not just a “gay disease.”

After the Stonewall riots in 1969, the US was slowly starting to become more LGBTQ+ friendly, with state-level protections being made against discrimination in public employment and about two dozen states decriminalizing sodomy by 1980, with activists looking into legal recognition for marriage.

However, when the epidemic hit, it appeared as though all this progress would be lost. News outlets misinformed the public, the Government was pressured by religious leaders to not speak out about it, and, in 1982, Larry Speakes, press secretary for Ronald Reagan, laughed when asked about whether the president was tracking the spread of AIDS.

In 1984, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announced that a vaccine would be available by 1986, but no vaccine ever came. By 1985, over 12,000 Americans had died and the virus had begun to spread swiftly through hemophiliac populations and intravenous drug users.

In the movie, Ron begins to research on possible medications to treat the disease, which leads him to learn about the drug zidovudine, or AZT, which could not be given to him because it had not yet approved by the FDA. In 1987, AZT became the first drug approved to treat AIDS, but it only seemed to slow the progression of the disease, and not cure it or even prevent death. Patients were prescribed to take an AZT pill every four hours, night and day, for the rest of their lives, which would end up costing them $10,000 per year. Today, we know that this amount of AZT is a toxic overdose.

Due to the FDA’s shortcomings and the Government’s silence, activists began to take matters into their own hands to save terminally ill patients. Ron then realizes that AZT was not only not helping him, but making him worse, and ends up finding more effective medication during a trip to Mexico. He travels with Rayon (Jared Leto), a trans woman whom he first is hostile and transphobic towards- as many heterosexual people were in the 80s- but ends up befriending her after realizing that their fight and search for treatment has brought them together.

The pair then begin to smuggle these medications into the US to help patients, using the Dallas Buyers Club as a cover. However, the FDA interfered, even though they were trying to save lives; the institution wasn’t making money and that was a problem. Ron decides to take the FDA to court after they seized their drugs, but the Judge ends up failing him.

“The law does not seem to make much common sense. If a person has been found to be terminally ill, they ought to be able to take just about any drug they feel will help… but that is not the law. Mr. Woodroof, there is not a person in this courtroom who is not moved to compassion by your plight; what is lacking here is the legal authority to intervene. I’m sorry. This case is hereby dismissed,” he states. 

Although Ron leaves the court defeated, he was welcomed by a round of applause from the community and seen as a hero. The movie captures the tragedy that was the AIDS epidemic, and the homophobia and stigma that came along with it, but also the extent of what people had to do to save themselves and the people they loved, and how the government failed to help them, prioritizing money over lives.