On the first Sunday in November, I sit in the darkened Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, and watch the scrolling opening credits of Fairyland. A tightness presses at my chest. I’ve read the book. I know the story. I know the author. And I know the ending of Alysia Abbott’s memoir from which the film is adapted. Abbott’s father, Steve Abbott, a gay writer living in the AIDS crisis epicenter that San Francisco was in the early 1980s, dies of AIDS-related complications in 1992.
This film represents years of work for Abbott and for those who’ve supported her story, and I genuinely want to share in the celebration of its success. But honestly? I’ve been avoiding it. Fairyland’s theatrical release in Boston was at the beginning of October. I’ve had multiple chances to go. Yet it took knowing that this was my last bid to see it in a theater to finally land me in this seat, not to mention the generosity of one of Abbott’s friends who had an extra ticket for the sold-out screening. But grief has accompanied me, sharp and insistent, its edges cutting close as I brace for the inevitable scenes of Abbott’s father’s dying—moments that will, I know, mirror memories of my own father’s death in 1995 from the same crushing disease.
Abbott’s story and mine are literal worlds apart. After her mother’s death in a car accident when Abbott was 2, her single, gay dad moved her from Atlanta to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where she lived surrounded by the artists and bohemians who’d converged there during the 1960s counterculture movement, and she grew up immersed in its once thriving gay community until that community was decimated by HIV/AIDS. Even after she’d moved to New York for university and was studying abroad in Paris, she returned home at 21 to take care of Steve when he got sick. For Abbott, AIDS history and queer history are intertwined.
For me, those histories feel separate. Only a year younger than Abbott, I lived in the 1970s and ‘80s on the opposite coast, in Maritime Canada where my life was, by traditional standards, idyllic. My father was a surgeon. My mother, a nurse who stayed home to raise her four children and support her husband’s career. My parents were committed Christians, and I grew up sheltered in an evangelical world that preached purity culture and condemned homosexuality, encouraging us to “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” a platitude that allowed us to conveniently pass judgment on people I knew nothing about.
When Canada reported its first AIDS case in 1982, I was 10. The disease seemed far removed from my life, nothing more than a sound bite on the nightly news. As AIDS began wiping out an entire generation of gay men, many of whom were part of Abbott’s found family in San Francisco, I knew of nobody impacted in my orbit, so it was easy to ignore. But, in 1985, after undergoing bypass surgery and receiving a transfusion contaminated during Canada’s 1980s tainted blood scandal, my father tested HIV positive, and suddenly the most important person in my life was handed the same death sentence.
The complicated interplay of stigma, ignorance, homophobia, and intolerance that shaped the early cultural responses to HIV/AIDS worldwide were only heightened by our cemented place in an evangelical Christian community. My father feared for his own reputation, but he also knew the threat his HIV posed for all of us in a society that largely blamed the virus’s victims for their infections. He chose to keep his illness a secret.
For the ten years before his death, silence and isolation defined my life. I had no one to confide in. Even though my three brothers were living the same family circumstances, our experiences of those circumstances were vastly different. My oldest brother had left home for university soon after my dad’s diagnosis, so his isolation was also marked by distance. My second oldest brother became a needed support for both my mother and father, shouldering a burden of care that grew heavier in the years that followed as he completed medical school and began his residency. Though I was 13, my younger brother was just 8 at the time of Dad’s infection, and my parents waited seven years before telling him. The knowledge of our father’s illness came at the same pivotal time he was beginning to understand he was gay. The secrecy surrounding my father’s disease wrapped it in shame, so conversation was not easily accessible for any of us. Six months before my dad’s death, my parents published a book that revealed the truth, but I still cradled that shame, keeping my story at arm’s length, living the loneliness of its silence for the next twenty years.
I didn’t expect these constraints of shame and otherness in Abbott’s story. From our first meeting at a national writing conference in 2015, and through our connection and deepening friendship in the years that followed, I’d always attuned more to the contrasts in our stories, to the pieces of her life that included her in the broader AIDS narrative in ways mine did not. But as I sit in the theater and journey through the vivid moments of Abbott’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood magnified on the glowing screen, tears burn at the corners of my vision, and all I can see is what’s the same: Like me, she was an only daughter who adored her dad. Like mine adored me, Abbott’s dad cherished her. As I had, she struggled to explain her life to others, and the burdens of confusion, embarrassment, and fear that tangled into her complicated upbringing kept at a distance authentic connections with family and friends. AIDS splintered the security Abbott, and I, had known, fragile though it was, and the vast and lonely grief of our losses shaped so much of who we became in their wake.
December 13th will mark thirty years since I sat beside my 53-year-old father’s bed, his hand clutched in mine, and watched his frail chest rise for one last, labored breath before falling still for good. The stretch of those years has muted the intensity of that moment, and brought me to the exact age he was when he died. Yet, when Fairyland shifts focus to Steve Abbott’s declining health and eventual death at age 49, I am instantly transported back to that cold, winter morning and AIDS’s scourges that he and my father shared: tell-tale lesions of Kaposi sarcoma, fatigued movements, shortness of breath, confusion in their once-sharp minds, the heartbreaking vulnerability in their expressions.
I surrender to the tears then. They trace hot paths down my cheeks as the wrenching currents of Abbott’s loss merge with my own. I’m crying for her and for her dad, but I’m crying for me and my dad, too. And I’m not the only one. The film’s soundtrack blends with the sounds of weeping. The woman who’d gifted me her extra ticket reaches into her bag and takes out a small packet of tissues, wipes her own running nose, and gently passes a couple to me. Gratitude surges as I reach toward her outstretched hand.
Fairyland illuminates one particular AIDS story, yet echoes countless others, mine among them. In the film’s closing line, the actress who plays Abbott invites us into a shared reckoning that acknowledges and mourns all this disease has taken: Their history is now our history.When the lights come up,I’m sobbing still—something has shifted, and I don’t rush to hide my raw grief. This collective experience holds space for me, too. Unlike at that bedside thirty years ago, when my loss felt singular, now I sit in a theater where it belongs to us all
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