In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the disease was widely believed to affect only gay men. As a result, the media paid little attention.

That all changed in 1985. According to the Vanderbilt Television Archives, the three major TV networks' evening news programs broadcast over 150 AIDS stories that year--more than double the total of AIDS stories broadcast in 1983 and 1984 combined.

Of course, they focused on the most dramatic aspects of the disease. Horrifying media images of gay men wasting away terrified people about a disease of which they knew next to nothing. Legendary actor Rock Hudson's coming out in the summer of 1985 catapulted AIDS from the back pages to the front page of the New York Times and Newsweek, but for many, it was still just a punishment for "those people."

Then An Early Frost, an NBC TV movie-of-the-week helped to change that perception.

An Early Frost was groundbreaking in every sense of the word. Not only was it the first movie ever about AIDS--on TV or in cinemas--but it portrayed a gay man proud of himself and his relationship, as well as his family coming to grips with his homosexuality and AIDS diagnosis.

When writers Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen (creators of Showtime's Queer As Folk) started working on the script, the disease wasn't even known as AIDS. It was called GRID, short for Gay Related Immune Deficiency and the medical community had yet to isolate the HIV virus or to understand exactly how it was transmitted.

The film tells the story of Michael Pierson, a young, gay, upwardly mobile lawyer for whom everything seems to be going right. He's just been made a partner at his law firm and each night he goes home to his boyfriend (whom he has managed to keep secret from his co-workers and family for two years). All that begins to fall apart when he's diagnosed with AIDS, forcing him to come out to his parents about both the disease and his sexuality. As his family struggles to accept him, Michael struggles to accept what he sees as a death sentence.

The movie's creators were forced to fight every step of the way to get their movie made. Lipman and Cowen's script went through fourteen drafts, and it took two years before Standards and Practices (the network's censors) would clear it. The censors objected to everything from the male lovers having too much physical contact--they couldn't even show the two men lying in the same bed, let alone kissing or hugging--to Michael's grandmother giving him a kiss.

The one thing the censors didn't object to was Victor (John Glover), the movie's most flamboyant gay character. In the DVD commentary, Lipman and Cowen reveal that when they asked why, in two years and fourteen drafts they had never received one memo about Victor, they were told it was because he dies, so he was seen as getting what he deserved.

The writers also had to fight Standards and Practices to have an optimistic ending. They refused to show Michael dying at the end because they believed that, as a doctor in the movie tells Michael's mother, all AIDS patients had left was hope. In the end, NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff ensured that director John Erman got to make the picture he wanted.

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