About The Real HIV/AIDS Buyers Clubs

Focus Features’ Dallas Buyers Club continues to perform strongly in theaters, moving up to #10 on last weekend’s list of top grosses as the release widened to more than 650 houses. Focus writes:

Jean-Marc Vallée’s DALLAS BUYERS CLUB dramatizes the story of Ron Woodroof (played by Matthew McConaughey), a real man who, after being diagnosed as HIV+ in 1986, did everything he could to stay alive. In the process, he helped establish the Dallas Buyers Club, a group that skirted existing rules and regulations to get drugs and supplements previously unavailable to people with AIDS. Woodroof’s story is only one among many in the fight against AIDS. To give some additional context, we’ve assembled some articles and videos to give a larger sense of the fight. In “New York City Buyers Club,” Derek Hodel, the former Executive Director of the People With AIDS Health Group, provides a fascinating history of the Buyers Club movement. In three video profiles, Derek Hodel, along with two other members of People With AIDS Health Group — former office manager Robert Vazquez-Pacheco and board member Michael Spiegel — provide a personal remembrance of their own fight against AIDS. And in “Art Against AIDS,” we’ve put together a slide show of amazing AIDS activist art, some of which appears in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB.

Click over here to see the other clips of these pioneers.