Spreading Calm in a Time of Crisis

Un pète au casque (1997), AIDS Activism, and Rural Southwest France

by Greg Rowe-Pasos

I found the 1990’s video cassette on the floor of my California garage. Soon I’d be living in rural Southwest France where I’d made the film. I sat in my half empty house watching it and crying.

November 2024. Donald Trump had just been elected president. I was not ready to move back to France but did not want to live four more years under his public cruelty as a leadership style.

Forty years earlier, in 1984, I’d pushed open the big wooden door of the American Cathedral in Paris. A much warmer New Yorker, welcomed me with a generous hug. Inside the room were chairs in a circle like AA meetings I’d seen on TV. I felt my heart flutter when I sat down, piecing together this man had just hugged me knowing I’m HIV positive.

In this circle I met people I never would have met otherwise. A diplomat. A model. A steward for a giant airlines. A business executive. A fellow student. There were about 20 of us; all young, gay, HIV positive and terrified to tell anyone. 

Older Jewish heterosexual psychologist, Irv leaned in smiling, looked around the circle and with deep unsophisticated care said: “So who wants to introduce yourself and say why you’re here?”. 

We all knew why. 

We shared our stories. I felt myself get calmer, less alone, less scared. I came back to this circle. Week after week. My secret HIV family meeting to swap news and tears. Brochures. Symptoms. Names of doctors.

I began spending evenings with my new friends. A common enemy and a shared secret built unbreakable bonds between us. In a bar, in someone’s flat or in a hospital ward, we slowly applied the technology of Irv’s circle - (1-Show up for one another, 2- listen, 3- hug, 4- make raunchy jokes to keep depression at bay). It kept us calm while we watched each other get more and more weak. I admitted that I silently wondered who would die next. The others nodded. Some got sick and died in weeks, others took years. Two of us survived. 

It took several years but I decided to leave the world of luxury media where we shaped lofty dreams and entered into a career centered on the practice of sitting with pain. 

The click happened one day in a helicopter en route for a press meal in a Bordeaux château. I looked around at the other lifestyle journalists while rolling vineyards moved up and down below us. An animated conversation about an incredible sauce the night before ensued. My mind was with my friends lying ill in Paris hospitals, possibly dying. Was this really how I wanted to spend the last years of my life?

While on a photoshoot near Bordeaux I had found a crumbling old house wanting much repair. As part of my strategy to stay alive, I spent years living half my week in Paris, half my week in the south renovating, my giant Macintosh on my shoulder.

I decided to move there full time and got a part time job at the regional office of the national AIDS hotline - invented by fellow HIV activists in Paris. I founded my own non-profit, a foundation to offer Irv’s circles in hospitals, NGO’s and LGBT groups. The Department of Public Health, so unequipped to deal with the level of anxiety sweeping the nation, was eager to fund promising programs. 

At the time I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I was not a psychologist. I saw it more like import-export business. I imported something I learned from a New York psychologist in Paris and expanded it in the southwest. 

I set up my office in the chapel of the house and hired people. It worked. Year after year hospitals, NGO’s and local health agencies from Poitiers to Toulouse hired us because our programs helped keep patients and staff calmer, more grounded.

Looking back now, making “Un Pete au Casque” was the finale of that era, a sort of fictitious documentary homage to something that was about to change radically. 

The year was 1997. I’d been HIV positive for fifteen years, probably more. Little did we know the new medications that appeared to be slowly saving my immune system were also transforming how we humans would live with HIV. 

I was attending a meeting at the Department of Public Health in Bordeaux. I hid the purple lesions on my skin beneath long sleeve shirts and kept an extra pair of underpants in my briefcase, in case of an accident.

The theme was World AIDS Day. The usual activists, policy makers, and medical professionals were preparing to rubber stamp the repeat performance of an annual ritual: at the University Hospital auditorium, doctors in white smocks took turns on stage explaining to hundreds of teenagers from local lycées how the HIV virus got transmitted, how long it took for people to get sick, and how not to get sick. The shortest version: if you fuck without a condom, you’ll die. 

There was no real creative discussion. After all, doctors are experts. A hospital auditorium communicates seriousness. Adolescents need to be frightened. 

Fed up with this approach I had a different idea, more alive, less sterile.

Two years previously in 1995, I gave a series of lectures in Bordeaux schools on queer author/playwright Jean Genet. Determined not to bore the students with a history lesson, I told them the synopsis of Genet’s plays then asked them to imagine how they would stage them. The outreach director of the National Theater was riveted. “How did you do that!?” he asked in the car afterwards. “The power of creating stories”, I replied smiling. 

In my years of sitting in circles I had heard stunning stories I wanted the world to hear. I knew I could combine personal storytelling with the scientific information needed. To my surprise the Department of Public Health agreed to fund this new strategy: film instead of a meeting. But I did not have a plan. I wrote a vague enough grant proposal to give myself creative room to breathe. 

High quality video made reproduction costs much lower than film. But small-minded, rural attitudes had me eliminate the idea of interviewing real people. I weighed intimacy-killing blurry faces and digitized voices against the sense of disloyalty I felt if I hired actors. I knew they would not physically convey the reality of many people with AIDS.

An article I tore out of The Financial Times’s theater section kept poking the screenwriter inside me. It lived on my desk for months. The critic described a play that “rivaled” any they’d ever seen on the East End. Public health authorities hired a theater company to produce a play. The goal: to help people understand why a schizophrenic man stabbed someone in broad daylight on a London tube platform.

But queer Yorkshireman Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads”, a series of monologues for the BBC was the deciding inspiration. He used local language, humor, timid self-disclosure and deep human complexity that made even the least likable person endearing. His characters from rural Yorkshire, structurally resembled the deeply intimate phone calls I’d receive at 3AM on the AIDS hotline in the southwest. 

I sat down to write the film by starting with the character “bibles”, a screenwriting strategy where the author writes the life story of each character. My screenwriting professors at the Cinématheque française would have argued that characters are meant to inhabit a pre-determined plot. The plot was simple. I asked each fictitious character to tell me their experience of the AIDS epidemic as we entered what my body was telling me was a pivotal moment and history hadn’t yet recognized it. 

- First came Cathie the modest but brazen small-town girl, trained to be a nursing aid, mesmerized by her encounter with a fierce gay man, unashamed to share his stories with her.

- Then came Betty, the wife of a busy Parisian businessman, an immigrant woman who moved to the countryside to die, then to discover life again with new pills.

- From my research I knew men who worked seasonal jobs in local beach towns and did not identify as gay had higherlevels of HIV infection. So I invited one of them in. His name was Alex. Nature was how he wanted to heal.

- And finally in came Bernard, a local farmer. A naive observer. The second son. A man who yearned for more than what he got. I wanted to see how he responded to the beauty of meeting someone who had looked death in the face and somehow didn’t die.

None of them was real. All were inspired by years of support circles, hotline calls, hospital visits, and stories people had trusted me to carry.

Armand Eloi, actor and theater director, enthusiastically accepted my request to direct the actors. Jean Simard, film professor at the Bordeaux École des beaux-arts accepted to be behind the camera. They found actors and tech people. Our budget was meager but most said they were motivated to be part of something deeply intimate on the topic of AIDS. One actor confided: “It’s so unusual to perform a text written by someone still alive.”

Filming lasted three days in the old home I had restored and that now had been sold. The year before making the film, my doctor told me to fly to the United States and tell my family I had less than one year to live. I came back to discover my partner had sold the place where I was planning to die. 

The new owner agreed to let a crew of a dozen people use the place for filming. The first day of filming, I drove through the gate, eager to watch the first takes, then froze. The costumes, voices, make-up — everything felt wrong. Before I opened my mouth to direct it all, I stopped, took a breath, and asked myself the question I needed: “Is this my project or ours?” The answer came immediately. I returned to my car and came back for dinner with the crew.

The night we introduced the final film to the public at the Bordeaux Centre d’arts plastiques et contemporains (CAPC), I stood at the dais and thanked everyone then left once the auditorium grew dark. Covered in sweat, my stomach trembling, a low voice whispered in my ear “Who do you think you are?”

The following year I presented our work at the International AIDS Conference in Geneva; by 1999 I closed the foundation and started a new life in San Francisco.

Since returning to France in 2024 I’ve shown Un Pète au casque to several groups. Nearly every time the same exchange occurs:

“Greg, how did you get people to be so candid on camera?”

“Remember I told you they’re actors?”

“Oh yes. Such good acting.”

They never say “Such good writing.” Eloi, the director once told me: “The ultimate compliment is when the writing disappears.”

That disappearing act is now the center of my work. Propaganda and care are both a sort of slight of hand that works the same way — the body believes before the mind has checked the source. I spent that era learning to make anxiety disappear from a room, so people could think. Today I study the same mechanism in language and AI: what happens when an exchange is built to help us think rather than keep us afraid. The virus now is different — carried by clicks, algorithms, rage, and loneliness — but the labor is the one I've always done. The model is: the Republic funds the circles, the hotlines and the films to do the emotional work she cannot do alone. Together we spread calm. Calm as civic infrastructure.