What’s a book, movie, or TV show that you wish you could experience again for the first time?

The writing prompt sounds innocent enough at first: What is a book, movie, or television show that you wish you could experience again for the first time? It feels like the kind of question people answer with comfort, nostalgia, or fandom. For me, the answer does not live in comfort. It lives in grief, memory, survival, and two films that reached into parts of me I had not learned how to name yet.

My answer is actually two movies. The first is Rent. The second is Torch Song Trilogy, written by Harvey Fierstein. I do not place them together as a casual double feature. I place them together since both of them found me at the intersection of queer love, AIDS, drag, stigma, violence, family, and the kind of loss that never fully leaves the body.

Some movies entertain you. Some stay with you. Then there are movies that seem to know your wounds before you are ready to discuss them. Rent and Torch Song Trilogy did that to me. They did not ask politely. They walked right into the locked room where I had stored the dead, the abandoned, the shamed, the loved, and the names I still cannot say without feeling something crack open.

I wish I could experience both again for the first time, but not in the way people usually mean it. I do not want to erase what I know now. I do not want innocence back. Innocence was never the gift people think it was. I want that first emotional collision again, that first moment when art stopped being art and became testimony.

Rent and the Grief That Found Its Music

I have seen Rent on stage several times in different locations across the United States. I collected DVDs, tapes, and recordings, almost obsessively, so I could compare different performers in different roles. I wanted to hear how one actor carried Roger’s grief and how another shaped Angel’s joy. I wanted to see what changed when a performer leaned into tenderness, anger, illness, humor, hunger, or exhaustion.

That collection was never just fandom. It was a kind of archive. I was watching different people tell a story that had already taken pieces of my life. Every cast made different choices, and every choice reopened a different memory. In one version, a pause could undo me. In another, a song I had heard dozens of times could suddenly feel like it had been waiting years to come after me.

The first time I saw Rent in a theater, it was earth-shattering. I walked in expecting performance. I walked out with ghosts sitting on my shoulders. The show pulled me back into the early days of the AIDS crisis, back to the fear, the gossip, the hospital rooms, the funerals, the disappearing friends, and the silence that settled over communities that had already been asked to survive too much.

I did not learn about AIDS from Rent. I lived through the era it sang about. I lived through the way people whispered about who was sick, who had lost weight, who had stopped coming around, who had been seen at a clinic, who was probably next. I lived through the years when diagnosis could feel like a door closing with a sound no one else wanted to hear.

That is why Rent hit me differently. It was not introducing me to a crisis. It was giving shape to one I had carried. It took grief that had been scattered across years and gave it music, faces, names, laughter, rage, candles, and breath. It reminded me that the people we lost were never just patients, cases, risks, or warnings. They were our people.

The early AIDS crisis was not only medical. It was moralized, politicized, gossiped over, weaponized, and used as proof by people who already hated us. People looked at suffering and saw an opportunity to preach. They looked at death and saw a chance to say, “See what happens?” That cruelty did not die. It learned new vocabulary.

In 2026, I still write about HIV and AIDS stigma, and I hate how familiar some of it sounds. The science has changed. Treatment has changed. Public health messaging has changed. Yet shame still knows how to survive a medical breakthrough. The same old fear still shows up in newer clothes, acting enlightened enough to pass inspection until someone with HIV enters the room and people start revealing what they really believe.

Rent matters to me in that personal, bruised, specific way. It reminds me why I write about HIV, AIDS, and stigma with the urgency I do. I am not writing from distance. I am writing from memory. I am writing from the funerals, from the phone calls, from the empty chairs, from the friends whose laughter I can still hear if the room is quiet enough.

There is a strange mercy in art that lets you grieve without having to explain the whole history first. Rent gave me that mercy. I could sit there and let the music carry what my body already knew. I could feel anger, sorrow, tenderness, recognition, and exhaustion without building a case for why the loss counted.

That first theater experience took me back to people I had loved, people I had known, and people I had lost before the world had decided they were worth mourning properly. Some of them died surrounded by chosen family after biological family had failed them. Some died with their names cleaned up, their partners edited out, their lives made more acceptable for obituaries and church programs. Some died and were remembered fiercely by the people who knew the truth.

That is the room Rent opened for me. It did not make the grief easier. It made the grief audible. For a few hours, the loss was not hidden, not sanitized, not reduced to a lesson, and not buried under polite discomfort. It was there in the room, singing.

The AIDS Crisis Never Left My Writing

The reason Rent still follows me is tied to the reason HIV and AIDS remain part of my work. Once you have watched a community lose people in waves, you never hear the language of stigma the same way again. You learn to recognize the small cruelties before they become policy, family rejection, medical neglect, or public silence. You learn that disgust often presents itself as concern.

People speak about the early AIDS crisis as if it belongs entirely to the past. They frame it like a chapter already closed, a period of ignorance now corrected by science, activism, treatment, and time. That version is too clean for me. It leaves out how much harm survived in attitudes, jokes, dating habits, health care access, criminalization, family shame, and the quiet assumptions people still make about who deserves compassion.

I saw what stigma did when it was loud. I saw it in slurs, sermons, headlines, rejection, fear, and blame. I see what it does now when it is more careful. It hides behind “personal preference,” “concern,” “values,” “risk,” and “lifestyle.” The packaging changed. The wound is old.

Rent forced me to admit that I was carrying more than memory. I was carrying an obligation. If the dead cannot correct the record, the living have to. If a society tries to turn people into cautionary tales, somebody has to pull them back into full personhood. Somebody has to say they were funny, messy, sexual, stubborn, brilliant, scared, loyal, petty, talented, beloved, and human.

That is why seeing Rent for the first time again would mean so much to me. I would not be chasing novelty. I would be returning to the first moment when the stage made my private grief public without exploiting it. I would be going back to the moment when I realized my writing about HIV and AIDS was not just political or educational. It was memorial work.

Memory is not passive. Memory demands labor. It asks us to say names, preserve stories, challenge shame, and refuse the neat little lies that make other people comfortable. Rent gave me a theatrical form of that labor. It said love was there. Friendship was there. Art was there. Sex was there. Fear was there. Death was there. Life was still there too.

That balance is what broke me. The show did not pretend the crisis was anything less than devastating. It did not reduce people with HIV and AIDS to suffering machines either. They still desired, argued, flirted, created, failed each other, forgave each other, and made something like family in the middle of collapse. That felt true to what I had seen.

The first time I experienced that truth in a theater, it landed with force. It told me grief could have rhythm. It told me survival could be messy without being meaningless. It told me that queer people had always turned rooms into sanctuaries when institutions left us outside.

That is not a small thing. That is not entertainment alone. That is a record of how people loved under pressure.

Torch Song Trilogy and the Drag That Raised Part of Me

Then there is Torch Song Trilogy. That film is near and dear to my heart in a way that still feels difficult to fully explain. It touches drag history, queer performance, chosen family, romantic longing, violence, rejection, motherhood, shame, and survival. It does all of that with Harvey Fierstein’s voice at the center, a voice that sounds like it has smoked grief, swallowed camp, and refused to apologize for either.

I connected to the drag element immediately. As a former performer and lifelong supporter of entertainers who practice the art of female illusion, I know drag is never just costume. It is craft, timing, nerve, memory, defiance, comedy, illusion, commentary, and self-disclosure. A performer can step under a spotlight painted, padded, cinched, and jeweled, yet the real act may be the truth they smuggle into the room under all that glamour.

I have watched drag evolve across decades. I remember when many people treated it like something to be dragged out once a year for Halloween, laughed at, misunderstood, then shoved back into the closet with the wigs. I have watched it move from bar stages and community halls into mainstream television, global fandom, RuPaul’s Drag Race, international franchises, and political battlefields. The rise did not erase the danger. Visibility can bring applause and a target at the same time.

That is one reason Torch Song Trilogy remains so emotionally charged for me. It captures drag before the broader culture knew how to consume it, brand it, legislate against it, celebrate it, and misunderstand it all at once. Arnold’s performance life is funny, sharp, vulnerable, and wounded. The stage gives him command, but the world outside still tries to deny him tenderness.

Drag has always carried that tension. The performer may be adored at midnight and disrespected in daylight. The crowd may laugh, tip, cheer, and clap, then vote for people who want that same performer erased from public life. The makeup comes off, but the risks do not.

I saw that truth in Arnold. I saw the performer who could command a room yet still ache for love. I saw the person who could make people laugh and then go home with loneliness sitting at the foot of the bed. I saw someone who knew how to be outrageous on stage and painfully sincere in private.

That kind of representation meant something to me. Arnold was not presented as a punchline who existed for other people’s amusement. He was not reduced to sass, spectacle, or tragedy. He wanted what so many people want: love, home, a child, respect, and the right to live without being treated like his desires were absurd.

That desire felt radical. It still does. Queer people asking for ordinary love have always been treated like we were making outrageous demands. We ask for family, and people hear politics. We ask to grieve, and people ask whether the relationship was legitimate. We ask to raise children, and people act as if care, stability, and devotion suddenly require a committee hearing.

Arnold’s longing was familiar to me in a way I could not ignore. It carried the ache of every queer person who has had to prove their love was real to people who never had to prove their own. It carried the weight of every chosen family built after rejection. It carried the exhaustion of wanting a life that did not require translation.

Arnold, Alan, John, and the Grave I Still Visit Inside Myself

The relationship between Arnold and Alan is where Torch Song Trilogy reaches into the deepest part of me. Their love is tender, awkward, funny, human, and fragile. It does not feel like a polished fantasy made for approval. It feels like two people trying to hold something real in a world that keeps reminding them reality may not protect them.

Then Alan is murdered in a gay bashing. The film crosses a line there that I still cannot watch from a safe distance. Arnold’s grief over Alan’s grave feels too real, too close, too familiar. It is one of those scenes that does not simply make me cry. It rearranges the air around me.

John, the love of my life, was not murdered in a gay bashing. I need to be precise about that. His death came through suicide after a family member made a comment about his sexual orientation, his relationship with me, and the family we were creating together. That comment did not act alone, but it became part of the final weight. It helped push him into a darkness he did not survive.

I say his name on purpose. John. I say it for myself, for my son, and for the few others who know that his life was more than the way it ended. I say it to keep him from being reduced to a wound. He was a person I loved. He was part of my home, my future, my family, and the version of myself that believed love could still build something lasting out of danger.

The parallel between Alan and John is not exact, but grief does not need exactness to recognize kinship. Alan’s body was taken through violence. John’s life was taken by shame, cruelty, and despair sharpened by someone else’s words. One was public brutality. The other was private collapse. Both came from a culture that taught queer people our love was disposable, ridiculous, sinful, embarrassing, or doomed.

That is the part people still do not want to face. Hate does not always arrive with fists. Sometimes it arrives as a joke at the dinner table, a sermon, a family comment, a sneer, a slur, a cold silence, a refusal to acknowledge a partner, or a sentence tossed out by someone who gets to sleep afterward. The person who hears it may carry it for the rest of the night. Or the rest of their life. Or, in John’s case, not much longer.

Back then, we were not expected to fall in love and have families. We were expected to have shame. We were expected to keep things quiet, accept less, apologize with our posture, and pretend half a life was enough. We were expected to understand that our partners could be erased from family conversations and our grief could be treated like an overreaction.

That is why I will not soften the word “faggots” in this story. That word helped kill the love of my life. It did not float in the air as mere language. It landed. It cut. It carried the permission structure of a world that had already told John, me, and so many others that queer love was something to mock before anyone had to honor it.

People who have never been hunted by a word often lecture the wounded about tone. They want the story clean. They want the grief dignified. They want the slur replaced with something less abrasive, as though a softer word could make the history less brutal. I refuse that bargain.

The word belongs here since it tells the truth about the weapon used. It was used in homes, schools, streets, churches, bars, barracks, locker rooms, courtrooms, and family systems. It was used to mark us before people knew our names. It was used to teach children fear before they had language for desire. It was used to turn love into a liability.

When Arnold stands at Alan’s grave, I see more than a character mourning a lover. I see every queer person who had to grieve without the full protection of public sympathy. I see every partner pushed to the edge of the funeral program. I see every chosen family member who knew more truth than the relatives standing in the front row. I see myself with John, trying to hold love and rage in the same body.

That scene is one of the reasons I wish I could experience Torch Song Trilogy again for the first time. Not for the pain alone. Pain by itself is not sacred. I would want to experience again the shock of being seen so plainly. I would want that first recognition back, the kind that hurts and heals in the same breath.

Queer Family Was Never a Consolation Prize

One of the strongest threads connecting Rent and Torch Song Trilogy is family. Not the greeting-card kind. Not the kind that gets sentimental in public and cruel in private. I mean family built from necessity, loyalty, survival, and love chosen again and again.

Queer people have always made family under pressure. We made family in bars, hospital rooms, apartments, activist groups, performance spaces, recovery rooms, protest lines, kitchens, borrowed couches, and late-night phone calls. We made family from lovers, ex-lovers, drag mothers, best friends, elders, roommates, children, mentors, nurses, and the one person who showed up when nobody else did.

That kind of family was never a consolation prize. It was not second best. For many of us, it was the first place we were seen clearly. It was the place where nobody needed the edited version. It was where partners were partners, grief was grief, love was love, and survival did not require a permission slip.

Rent understood this through the chosen family formed around illness, poverty, art, and love. Torch Song Trilogy understood it through Arnold’s longing for home, parenthood, dignity, and a life that did not end at the edge of other people’s approval. Both works knew something many outsiders still miss: queer survival has always been communal.

John and I were creating family. That is the part that still burns. We were not playing at love. We were not performing some temporary rebellion. We were building something. We were imagining a future inside a culture that kept insisting people like us should not expect one.

A family member’s comment helped destroy that future. That is not dramatic phrasing. It is the plainest way I know how to say it. People often underestimate the harm of rejection until someone dies from it, then suddenly everyone wants a softer explanation. They want mental health discussed without the social violence that helped shape the crisis. They want suicide separated from the shame machine that cornered the person.

I cannot separate those things. John’s death changed my entire life. It still impacts me every day. Grief did not move out after the funeral. It changed addresses inside me. It learned my routines. It shows up in my writing, my memory, my parenting, my politics, my anger, and the tenderness I still carry for queer people trying to love each other under pressure.

That is why these films are more than favorites. They are emotional documents. They help me make sense of personal history that was never fully personal. My grief belongs to me, yes. It belongs to John too. Yet it exists inside a wider queer history of stigma, AIDS, violence, drag, rejection, chosen family, and survival.

Why I Would Return to the First Wound

To experience Rent again for the first time would mean returning to the moment when I realized a stage could hold my dead without exploiting them. It would mean hearing those songs before I had built defenses against them. It would mean feeling again that first terrible recognition that the grief I had carried privately had a public echo.

To experience Torch Song Trilogy again for the first time would mean meeting Arnold and Alan before I knew how hard their story would hit me. It would mean watching drag, love, humor, family, violence, and mourning collide without bracing myself in advance. It would mean sitting once more with the shock of seeing queer grief treated as real grief.

I know both experiences would break my heart again. I know Rent would bring back the faces of friends lost to AIDS, friends I still miss, friends who deserved more time and less judgment. I know Torch Song Trilogy would bring John close in a way that hurts. I know Arnold at Alan’s grave would still take me somewhere I do not visit casually.

I would still go back.

There is a kind of pain I do not seek, yet I respect it when it arrives honestly. These films do not wound me carelessly. They press on places already scarred and remind me that scar tissue is proof of injury and survival. They do not ask me to pretend loss became beautiful. They ask me to tell the truth about the love that made the loss possible.

Shared grief is one of the ways queer memory stays alive. We remember through stories, shows, songs, drag numbers, names spoken out loud, articles written late at night, lovers kept alive in conversation, and films that refuse to let the record be cleaned for comfort. We remember since forgetting has always served the people who harmed us.

Rent and Torch Song Trilogy still live in me for that reason. They remind me that AIDS grief, drag history, queer family, gay bashing, slurs, suicide, stigma, survival, and storytelling are not separate subjects in my life. They are connected. They sit at the same table. Some days they argue. Some days they hold hands.

John sits there too.

So do the friends I lost to the virus. So do the performers who taught me that survival could wear lashes and still tell the truth. So do the queer elders who built rooms for us before the mainstream found a way to profit from the culture. So do the people who never got an apology, a cure in time, a safe home, a loving family, or a grave where their full truth could be spoken.

That is why I would experience these two movies again for the first time. Not to escape my life. To return to the moment art helped me understand it. To feel again the first impact of stories that did not flinch from what queer people had lost, created, endured, buried, and loved.

Some films entertain us for a night. Some become part of the way we remember our dead. Rent gave my AIDS grief a sound I could recognize. Torch Song Trilogy gave my queer grief a face, a grave, a mother’s argument, a lover’s absence, a performer’s armor, and a language sharp enough to tell the truth.

I wish I could experience them again for the first time. I would cry again. I would ache again. I would probably leave the room quieter than I entered it. And somewhere in that quiet, I would say John’s name, remember the friends AIDS took, honor the drag performers who made survival visible, and remind myself why I keep writing.

For memory. For survival. For storytelling. For every queer person who was told to carry shame instead of love. For every person we lost before the world admitted it had blood on its hands.