COMMITMENT TO LIFE CHOCOLATE BABIES

Few artistic works remain as controversial in the present as they were during their initial release, but writer-director Stephen Winter’s groundbreaking 1996 feature debut, Chocolate Babies, retains an evergreen capacity to shock. Winter’s vibrantly original vision owes as much to Fassbinder as it does to Blaxploitation representations of Black militancy with its tragic and hilarious portrait of a radical queer activist group (equal parts House of drama through the stories of those who lived through it, from Rock Hudson and Easy-E, Elizabeth Taylor and David Geffen, the Red Ribbon and Philadelphia, ACT UP and APLA. Using first-person interviews, rare archival and activist footage, and scenes from starstudded Hollywood fundraisers, Commitment to Life resurrects one of the epidemic’s most compelling histories in order that we never repeat it.

LaBeija, ACT UP and the Red Brigades) planning the kidnapping of a closeted councilman. In its critique not just of queerdom’s traditional conservative antagonists but also of assimilationist Black liberal leadership that treated the AIDS crisis of the 90s with fatal apathy, Chocolate Babies remains a galvanizing examination of the LGBTQ movement’s challenges without and within, and one of the best and boldest films of the New Queer Cinema.