How Alastair Curtis Is Rescuing the Works of the Playwrights Lost to AIDS

There’s a moment in the short film Sweetheart, written by Alastair Curtis, in which the quietly trepidatious but inquisitive protagonist conveys the silent realization of what a more perfect world could look like. Despite its 18th century setting, his experience is universal, at least for those of us who remember the tidal wave of fear, and then relief, upon entering a queer space for the first time. Curtis is a London-based writer and director whose disarming charm is met by a powerful sense of responsibility. As the founder of The AIDS Plays Project, his mission is to bring new life to works of playwrights who died in the epidemic. Next up is Colm Ó Clúbhán’s Reasons for Staying, running at London Performance Studios beginning on February 27. The busy 28-year-old Brit is hellbent on developing current and future generations’ knowledge of queer history by championing the voices we’ve lost. And yet, it’s never heavy-handed. His work both chronicles the past and showcases the ever-present joy of queerness, from the kooky to the kinky. Between his premiere at Sundance and opening night of Reasons for Staying, Curtis and I chatted about his recent projects, the loss of queer elders, and Park City’s hot tub hangovers.

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MAX MCCORMACK: Alastair, it’s great to meet you. Thanks for doing this with me.

ALASTAIR CURTIS: My pleasure.

MCCORMACK: Where are you right now?

CURTIS: I am in my little garret in East London. I live in a little warehouse situation here.

MCCORMACK: Very East London. Well, let’s get into it. You’re the founder of The AIDS Plays Project. What was the mission? 

CURTIS: I established the project about two years ago, which is crazy to think about because it had very humble origins. As a queer writer and director, I was searching around in the archives and started to collect a series of plays from all around America, the UK, France, and Italy. They were all written by queer writers who I didn’t really know, people like Charles Ludlam, an iconic East Village performer in the 70s and 80s, or Robert Chesley, an amazing San Franciscan playwright who wrote about the kinkiest sex you can imagine. These writers are not really part of our consciousness anymore, and the thing they all had in common was that they passed away from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. The idea was to get some money to put these shows on as readings and see what happens in a very improvisational way. We started that in September 2023 with a play by Charles Ludlam called Camille, which is a Baroque 19th-century French court-set costume drama where everyone is in drag and larger and louder than life. Charles Ludlam originally played Marguerite Gautier, the famous courtesan. I had seen Sue Gives A Fuck, this amazing drag performer, on the Royal Court stage a few months before. She was so iconic and such a fantastic performer that I thought, “You’re the perfect person for this role.” For that show, we expected maybe 70 people to come, but we weirdly sold out. Since then, we’ve just been growing and growing with an audience base that is selling out each of our shows, which we are thrilled by and perplexed by. I think it shows that there is an appetite for this queer history that has been forgotten, obfuscated, or just ignored for so many decades. Our project is really trying to revive that, and then eventually trying to get these plays republished because they’re really good.

MCCORMACK: It seems like you have two areas of focus with this mission: bringing these works to the stage and allowing new audiences to experience them, but also republishing them so that it’s not just a fleeting moment in the theater.

CURTIS: We’ve got to get them into people’s hands. Theater is so ephemeral as an art, and it’s forgotten in an instant. It’s quite expensive to go and see theater today. Putting a printed copy of a play into someone’s hand is a way of safeguarding that writer’s legacy.

MCCORMACK: And I noticed that there are a couple of collaborators that you work with, Max [Allen] and Elliott [Adcock]?

CURTIS: Yeah. Max and Elliott are fabulous costume and set designers who work a lot in East London’s queer community. They work to costume some of our best drag performers, like Ms. Sharon Le Grand, for whom they’ve designed nearly every costume. It’s been amazing working with them because they have a unique theatrical sensibility. Their costumes are inspired by the Coquettes, Ludlam’s ridiculous theater company, as well as Derek Jarman’s camp and trash aesthetic. I also work with Helen Noir, an amazing DJ and composer who has done the sound design for all of our shows. She’s incredibly agnostic about what is considered low and high art, and moving between her influences is very inspiring. And we work with different actors for every show, always trying to work with the most exciting emerging queer talent that we can find in London. This can include activists, writers, and drag performers, as well as up-and-coming actors that we think are really good.

MCCORMACK: I would imagine there’s an insane amount of research that goes into this, even when it comes to just uncovering these pieces. How has that process been so far?

CURTIS: The process is really humbling and, at times, exhausting. The initial stage involves reading, reading, reading to find the hidden gems. We’ve probably uncovered around 150 plays by 40 to 50 writers. Then I get in contact with the archives organized by the executors to see if there are performance rights. The play we’re about to do, Colm Ó Clúbhán’s Reasons for Staying, doesn’t have a definitive edition. It was never published before, so it exists only in manuscripts. I interview loads of people who were lovers, families, or friends of these playwrights. Those conversations really make all of our work worthwhile because they are very generous with their time and input. We try to involve them in the project as much as possible because really, the project is a ruse, an excuse to have a conversation with our queer elders, which is something that I don’t get to do very often. To be a part of their world, and to hear from them how catastrophic the AIDS crisis has been and continues to be is deeply humbling and touching.

MCCORMACK: I would imagine. If you’re looking at over 100-plus scripts, what are you looking for? What’s resonating with you to bring to the stage? 

CURTIS: One of the factors is just that it has a festive quality that can come alive in a room of people. We just did a play in October called P.S. Your Cat is Dead! by James Kirkwood, which is a play that’s a little more well-known in the US than in the UK. It bombed on Broadway because it was seen as “homosexual wish fulfillment.” And obviously, hearing those words immediately perked up my interest, so I read it and thought, “This is absolutely stunning,” and for the very reasons that it was despised in the press. It feels like a piece of soft erotica. When we put it on stage, we took out a lot of the stage directions which kept the two men apart—this burglar and the person he’s robbing. The story is a slightly crazy one about a writer who is broken into for the third time, catches his burglar, ties him up, and then proceeds to fall in love with him. I knew immediately that a play that is so gleeful in its homosexual wish fulfillment would go down very well with our audience. I think that applies to all the plays that we do. I try to veer away from things that are very earnest, or things that the National Theatre or the Royal Court or Broadway could probably do better than us. I’m also looking for figures in the past who’ve made a demonstrative impact on queer culture in a way that has been criminally overlooked. Colm Ó Clúbhán was an incredible gay activist in London. He was part of the South London Gay Liberation Front, a squatter in Brixton, campaigned against homelessness, and was involved in many of the very early LGBT centers there. For me, he is an unsung hero of gay London culture, because he’s Irish. Same as Robert Chesley, who’s this brilliant sex-positive activist who was photographed with his lesions showing. There were photographs of him with his dick out, very erect, and covered in lesions, which were a telltale sign of Kaposi’s sarcoma, printed on the front page of the San Francisco Bay Times, and they changed attitudes towards gay men living with HIV/AIDS and having a sex life. 

MCCORMACK: So it’s 2025 and with the advent of PEP and PrEP, for future generations, the AIDS crisis will become more and more distant. Is that something that’s driving you? To ensure that it’s still a part of the conversation?

CURTIS: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’m really of the opinion that the AIDS crisis is not over. We’re still looking for a cure. I am 28 years old and I know very few queer people that I can look to as genuine role models who are of the generation above mine or two generations above mine. There’s a book called All My Teachers Died of AIDS by Sam Moore, one of my friends, and that book really gets to the heart of the fact that there is a trauma that is experienced by our generation of younger queer people. We have very few elders to look up to, and thus we have very few adoptive families to be part of. I feel like that gap is where the project tries to sit, a bit of a salve to the trauma of what it’s like to grow up in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. I feel very strongly that the AIDS crisis is not in danger of receding, per se. It’s haunting us all.

MCCORMACK: Yeah. If we talk about the queer coming of age narrative, so much of that is centered on adolescent heartbreak and coming out, but I really feel like phase two is learning one’s history. There’s a very strong queer canon of folks like Larry Kramer and The Normal Heart. Is there more to be done in terms of encouraging that curiosity and research?

CURTIS: I think it’s imperative for all of us to do that research. We shouldn’t look to Ryan Murphy to direct us to the next bit of forgotten queer history, in the same way that we shouldn’t expect the National Theatre of the UK to uncover a hidden queer gem from the past. I think we should have a compunction to go back and search for context, which is necessary for change. We’re at a moment when everything in the world is darker, bleaker, and more frightening for people like you and me than it has ever been before, and the only way that we can really build strength to face that is to recover bits that are forgotten. That curiosity is a survival instinct, not a simple, anodyne history lesson. It’s a way of building a structure in which you can live more safely. And this is particularly important if you don’t come from a background that is hospitable to queerness—I mean, how else do you find out how to live? I do like Ryan Murphy, let’s say that.

MCCORMACK: What does that look like?

CURTIS: I think it means going to your nearest gay bar or lesbian bar or queer space and having a conversation with someone who is maybe double your age. A lot of the project has grown out of conversations with queer elders who’ve said, “Do you know this writer? Oh, I used to sleep with that writer.” Or, “Oh, do you know about the scandal involving that writer?” That constellating quality of queer culture is one that I find deeply exciting. 

MCCORMACK: Tell me a little bit about this upcoming production. Reasons for Staying actually also addresses some contemporary societal issues. Is that something that makes you specifically enthusiastic about this piece?

CURTIS: I think several things drew us to Reasons for Staying. First, the fact that it’s unpublished and hasn’t been seen for 40 years. It’s also incredibly rare to find queer Irish writing from that period. Colm’s voice is truly singular. I was fascinated by its depiction of Ireland’s hidden histories, especially of those who left Ireland from the ’50s through the ’80s seeking sexual freedom or access to abortion. Colm, as a gay man in his 30s, created a character very similar to himself in Cormac, someone in their 20s who left Dublin to be openly queer in London. The empathy in the writing really moved me, particularly in how it portrays the budding friendship between Cormac and Maeve. Maeve has come to England for an abortion and feels deeply betrayed by Ireland. Both characters, essentially refugees from Ireland, have faced significant anti-Irish discrimination in England. They share a sense of rootlessness, of belonging in neither place. We’re all refugees from wherever we’ve come from. To me, it feels like a very timely play. We’ve also introduced some songs of the Brixton Fairies, this radical performance troupe from the ’70s and ’80s. There’s one song in particular about castrating chauvinistic straight pigs, which is a song that I think we can all still get behind.

MCCORMACK: Yeah, definitely. Add it to my Spotify playlist. On the subject of where one comes from, where did you grow up?

CURTIS: I grew up between Northampton, a little town in the Midlands, and the Isle of Portland, which is this very, very small little isle off the south coast.

MCCORMACK: And what was your experience like growing up?

CURTIS: Well, the only queer person I knew was probably Graham Norton on TV. And that was something that defined my childhood, as far as queerness. It was something that other people were, but you should not be. I came to London to try to find a sense of community that I probably couldn’t find at home, and it’s that childhood experience that drives me so much to seek queer elders.  I am looking for an ancestry in which you can be happily queer.

MCCORMACK: I heard that you just got back from Sundance.

CURTIS: I did, yeah. Sundance was amazing. It was frighteningly cold and very busy. I still feel quite sick after all the hot tubs. But it was great fun. It was my first ever film festival.

MCCORMACK: You premiered a short film called Sweetheart, right? I got the chance to watch it.

CURTIS: Oh, sweet.

MCCORMACK: It was amazing. I want to go to a Molly House. I would love for you to explain what a Molly House was.

CURTIS: Of course. Molly Houses were queer social spaces in London. There were about 25 of them that we know of, but probably many more, at the top of the 18th century. They were for queer people to socialize, to drink, to make merry, to fuck, and to participate in these rituals, which included marrying each other in brilliant drag and pretending to give birth to wooden dolls, which would then be baptized and given names in a twisted riposte to the nuclear family, or an embrace of it. We started the film about a year and a half ago now, and it was really thrilling to bring it to Sundance. As a short film, lots of film connoisseurs and film bros come and see it. Our opening shot, as you probably remember, is two butt cheeks blown up large, sort of an anal sex jump scare. And you could feel the audience in Salt Lake City on the big multiplex just breathe in. That was probably the greatest delight of making the film, feeling that reaction in the audience. Half of them were thrilled, and half of them went, “Oh my god, what are we doing here?”

MCCORMACK: Well, the first scene certainly sets the tone, but it’s quite a different tone throughout. There’s so much going on. There’s this experience the main character has of that first time you walk into a safe space.

CURTIS: Definitely. The intention was always to try and create a film that felt contemporary, but was set in the past. Eben [Figueiredo], who plays Thomas Neville, embodies that experience so well. He goes into a queer space for the first time and sees that actually queerness is not only a sexual experience, but is a social experience too, and can be a social identity. Luke [Wintour], the director, and I wanted to recreate the feeling that we first experienced many years ago of going to Adonis or the Divine for the first time and expressing desire openly, but at the same time navigating this complex of internal insecurity and shame in order to try and be part of it. Even though everyone’s in corsets and ruffs and codpieces, this is what it looks like to go clubbing today as well.

MCCORMACK: I don’t know if you’ve ever spent time in Provincetown in Massachusetts, but—

CURTIS: I haven’t, but I really want to. Top of the list.

MCCORMACK: Best place on the planet for queer everything. Queer beaching. You’re eating seafood. I mean, it’s just so fucking charming. There’s a famous, very historic tavern called the Atlantic House, or A House, that you can tell was maintained for over a century, but it’s very recognizable despite the otherworldliness. You seem very interested in the idea of historical preservation, and the book in the film is almost a character in terms of how it’s so central. Can you talk about that a little bit?

CURTIS: That’s lovely. I hadn’t really thought of it in that way. The book is an act of wish fulfillment because, of course, they couldn’t write down their names because doing so would potentially incriminate them and lead to death. So the marriage of sweetheart Thomas and sweetheart Samuel, or the baptism of Thomas Neville, these were encoded in written form. As it says at the end of the film, we only know of these Molly Houses through court trials, which invariably ended with queer people being pilloried, executed, or imprisoned. The only way we know about this culture is through its collision with the law. So I really wanted to show the community telling its own story through that book, in contrast to the actual history, where their stories were told by people who despised their very existence. I wanted to create a vision of what it would look like if the archives were actually owned by the people whose lives they contained. I’m really glad you picked up on that moment because it felt crucial to me, even while being perhaps the most anachronistic thing about the film, because that written record could never possibly exist. It was too dangerous. But as an artist, I’m fascinated by recycling those stories from the past.

MCCORMACK: The film ends by providing the audience with some historical context, including the years in which these Molly Houses existed, and they only existed for 15 years. What were those 15 years like?

CURTIS: Those 15 years were a period of remarkable flourishing of a queer underground. Much of what I know comes from Rick Norton’s historical research. This was a moment in history when queer culture began to exist in an organized way, as far as we have a record of. The fact that there were 25 Molly Houses in London, with a population of just 500,000 people, is quite a ratio, probably more queer spaces than we have in London today. We’re not even certain about the makeup of these Molly Houses. I keep saying men, but we know of at least one trans person from that time, Princess Seraphina, who was part of that Molly House. What I find most fascinating about these 15 years, just before the massive crackdown on what they called “perverse” or “deviant” sexuality, is that this culture actually flourished, until it confronted the law. As for why it flourished at that particular moment, I don’t think anyone really knows.

MCCORMACK: In terms of mounting this project and the film, how long did it take to get the financing? 

CURTIS: We’re associate artists at London Performance Studios, a space in South London that advocates for queer artists and performers who might not fit traditional theater spaces or art galleries. They’ve given us a home for two years, and we’ve started touring around East London. Now we’re looking to tour more widely, hopefully including New York, since our work really resonates with people there. The funding comes mainly through donations and charity. Unsurprisingly, we don’t get much government grant funding, so we often operate on the margins. We’re fortunate that the East London queer community, specifically people like Max and Elliot and Sharon Le Grand, feel connected to the legacy of the Molly Houses. We filmed near Brick Lane, where a Molly House likely existed historically. Working with an entirely queer cast and crew, people went above and beyond to help. It’s crucial that these projects exist at a grassroots level, led by working class queer people. 

MCCORMACK: It must be compelling, considering how the pendulum swings. There’s been progress in both the medical community and society at large, and then Trump freezes international aid for HIV medicine around the world.

CURTIS: Absolutely. We landed at Sundance just one day after Trump declared there are two genders, while our film shows there are many more than that. We premiered at a particularly striking time. Though it’s not much better for us Brits. Similar challenges are coming our way in four years.

MCCORMACK: Well, fuck that guy. You’re building up your army. What’s next for you with the pendulum swinging right globally? I imagine you feel a sense of urgency.

CURTIS: Absolutely. I really want people to experience The AIDS Plays Project, not just because the plays are good, or because the actors, designers, and sound design are wonderful, though they are. There’s something special about being in an audience of nearly entirely queer people of all ages. Someone at Sundance who’d seen one of our shows told me our audiences are some of the most cruisy they’d ever been in, which I was thrilled to hear. Now I understand why there’s always a queue for the toilets during interval. So I hope we can go stateside, bring in more writers, and work with more performers to resurrect this work. Whatever the future holds for The AIDS Plays Project, I know it’s important to maintain that feeling, and I want to be in that audience. Otherwise, you just curl up and cry and shout.

MCCORMACK: Bring it to Bushwick.

CURTIS: Oh, please. I cannot wait.