Happy “Fathers” Day

[Yeah, I meant to post this on Sunday. Stuff happened. Sue me.]

There’s no apostrophe in Fathers here, because I’m not referring to our country’s second Hallmark holiday Father’s Day. (The day that on Facebook is equal parts “I love my dad!”, “I hate my dad!”, and “My dad is dead.”) Instead, it’s the day that the first segment of Leo Herrera’s The Fathers Project went live. The tagline is simple, as taglines usually are: “Imagine a world where AIDS never happened and our heroes lived. Who would they be? Who would we be?” The film is speculative fiction and faux documentary about a queer utopia that would have arisen if not for the plague that we’re all still suffering. I was an early, though small, supporter because Leo’s art is stunning, clear, sexy, deeply moving, and wondrously gay. Part 1 is even better than I imagined it might be, and I burst into tears about 15 seconds after the prologue ended and the Part 1 officially began. Even though I had imagined a world without AIDS (and without Prop 8, Matthew Shepard’s murder, conversion therapy, and so on) seeing it dramatized with the giddy beauty of Leo’s images was, well, not too much, but it was a lot. It needs to be seen. Also: Help Leo make more.