40 Years After His AIDS Diagnosis, Filmmaker Tom E. Brown Reflects on Bringing His Life and Work to Detroit
Brown's 'Pushing Dead' set for free screening at Senate Theater for World AIDS Day
When Tom E. Brown was just 18, he was told his days were numbered. Over the phone, in a conversation as abrupt as it was devastating, his doctor informed him that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. Based on the test results, he was given a grim prognosis: a life expectancy of just three weeks to three months. That was 40 years ago. Recalling his reaction to the news, Brown acknowledged that simply hearing this at a young age “messes with your wiring.”
Today, Brown, who since has gone on to become a filmmaker, nods to a process — and not a simple one — of learning to treat his condition less as a battle and more as something to “settle into a comfortable relationship with.” What was then a doctor’s dire prognosis is now, thanks to advances in medicine, regarded more often by both members of the LGBTQ+ community and providers as a status to know and closely monitor — but not despair over.
While this coping strategy has certainly leavened Brown’s outlook, he describes mortality as presenting, quite understandably, a source of ongoing fascination. At this point, its specter rarely rattles him. But there are exceptions, as with the loss of his beloved dog just months ago, who Brown sweetly refers to as his “four-legged soulmate.”
“I’ve always had this thing where I feel like I can handle death better than most. But when my pooch died, I was like, ‘Oh, no, I… I can’t!’ So I needed a big change,” Brown remarks. “I’d been in San Francisco for 30 years, and I wanted to participate in a smaller film community and see if in some way I can help to strengthen the [arts] community here. So that’s my plan.”
By any metric, Brown is already hitting the ground running. He organized a screening of his 2016 feature film “Pushing Dead” for World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 at Detroit’s Senate Theater: a scrappy, volunteer-run space in Southwest Detroit that he reports responded happily and immediately to his inquiry about hosting the event.
Through swift action to collaborate with not only the Senate but Affirmations, Cinema Lamont and the Ruth Ellis Center — all partners in the event — so quickly after moving here, Brown’s investment in finding and building community is clear. Despite the move and its challenges, he seems eager yet calm, showing little anxiety about leaping across the country to establish his artistic footprint in Detroit. Brown’s even gone so far as to buy a house here, having visited the area just once beforehand. He also plans to shoot “American Dog” — a film starring Margaret Cho as a lesbian cop, with Joel McHale and Robin Weigert also attached — over the coming months, and possibly in Metro Detroit. (Financing films has grown more difficult over the last decade’s streaming boom, and sorting a production budget without the state’s long-standing film incentives has proven a struggle).
“I like the idea of jumping into something new without knowing a ton,” Brown observes of his recent move. “It’s kind of like a movie; I don’t want to know much about the narrative, because it’s much more fun to see a movie. So I’ve started my adventure [here in Detroit] without a lot of knowledge.”
Some portion of that comfort likely stems not just from Brown’s time touring with his work (“Pushing Dead” played, according to his count, at least 80 film festivals, granting him an easy facility with getting to know new crowds). But it owes as much, surely, to the ability of both artists and queer people — especially in small and mid-size cities — to bank on their communities as sources of support, even as new arrivals. And Brown seems to have had little trouble getting to know Detroit quickly.
“It’s sprawling, but — I was chatting with a DJ last night — most of the people that I’ve met in the arts and filmmaking community, everybody knows everybody,” Brown notes. “He [the DJ] knew the person I had reached out to at Soho to promote the World AIDS Day screening. So it seems like the active members of the arts community know each other, and I'm excited to to learn more and hopefully be a part of that community.”
“Pushing Dead” displays this same clear investment in the strength of local community. Unfolding as a not-quite-bildungsroman, the film follows Dan, an HIV-positive writer who’s managed his own experience with HIV for decades while scraping by in San Francisco. When confronted with an unexpected disruption in insurance coverage, Dan finds himself forced to choose between an avalanche of staggering prescription bills or considerable risk to his own health. But this doesn’t play like a Ken Loach film; for one thing, actor James Roday manages to imbue the role with a charming-but-prickly half-cynical air, even as he swings from hope to various forms of coping and resignation to moments of being visibly frightened and overwhelmed.
While this might sound weighty, the film is both leavened and deepened by the fact Dan’s story isn’t the only one it aims to tell. The movie's world is realized by a vivid cast of supporting characters, each working from a tonal palette that seems to reflect Brown’s level, good-humored outlook — and his sense of proportion.
“That’s just the way I write. I start to fall in love with every character, and so I want to give each character a story or an arc,” says Brown of the film’s ensemble approach. “Not to give away any spoilers, but there’s a mugger and he’s got a bit of an arc. [Even with] these small characters, you get to see a little change in them.”
Most prominently, the film features Robin Weigert as Paula, Dan’s close friend, aiming to support him while working through struggles of her own in her personal life. (While most famous for playing Calamity Jane in “Deadwood,” readers may know Weigert better for her firm, indelible and nuanced performance in various therapy scenes opposite Nicole Kidman in “Big Little Lies”). Here, Weigert is granted the space to be buoyant, to act “bigger” — and she does a great deal with a challenging, often off-kilter comic role. (Brown notes that Weigert will be present for a Q&A at the Dec. 1 Senate Theater screening, in addition to starring in “American Dog”).
She’s joined, too, by the tireless actor-producer Danny Glover, a staunch supporter of both independent film and LGBTQ+ rights. Brown met Glover prior to shooting near the head of a San Francisco Equal Rights March. Here, Glover plays Bob, Dan’s friend and boss, with characteristic warmth – even as he works through marital struggles with his wife Dot (played gamely by Khandi Alexander).
In surrounding Dan with a vivid cast of supporting characters, though — all on trajectories Brown considers closely linked — “Pushing Dead” sidesteps the quasi-religious, agonistic focus on individual suffering typical of so many HIV depictions. Instead, it’s framed as one of many ongoing struggles a person — of any orientation or gender experience — might confront and hope to find a way of coping with in their day-to-day living. The result is a careful balancing act, examining how Dan’s burdens play out alongside his friends’ ones — situating them all in relation to each other while sapping none of them of their sense of weight.
But in a quite deliberate way, that balance always feels a little tenuous. Vivid dream sequences with gothic overtones (and effects work from the celebrated Phil Tippett) lend a fantastical quality to Dan’s experience of harsh bureaucratic, romantic and health-related realities — as they do, too, to Paula’s parallel romantic struggles. Frazer Bradshaw's dusky cinematography lends shading to the film’s tone and overall sense of warmth.
When asked why he wants to share the film now — a plan that began before we knew this year’s election outcomes — Brown suggested that the film and the dialogue it hopes to engender would be “needed” and important to share, whatever the result. It would be important, he felt, not only to further a conversation around experiences with HIV, but also to share a film with a gay protagonist he considers “accessible” to people from all walks of life. That hope for dialogue is rooted not in wishful thinking but in his own extensive experience of traveling with and showing the film.
“We took this film to small towns in Kentucky and Louisiana and it was kind of amazing. The wonderful thing for me as a filmmaker was to see that people appreciated it in these small backwater towns in the same way that they appreciated it in New York or San Francisco,” he says. “We did some small towns in Florida and it felt like it was actually bringing people together.”
“It's nice for me because World AIDS Day was started as a Day Without Art,” he goes on. “It’s now morphed into a day where someone like me had an AIDS diagnosis when I was a teenager, and I'm [now] about to celebrate 40 years — it's nice that people like me are still alive and showing art.”
“Pushing Dead” will play for one night at the Senate Theater at 6424 Michigan Ave., Detroit. Doors, concession and a bar open at 5:30 p.m. and the screening begins at 6:30 p.m., followed by a 8:20 Q&A with Tom Brown and Robin Weigert. Admission to the event is free.
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