by Chael Needle

When I heard the title of one of the films that took top honors in the Rap-It-Up/Black AIDS Short Subject Film Competition (RIU/BASS), Walking on Sunshine, it reminded me of a mid-eighties pop hit by Katrina and the Waves of the same name. My memory didn’t need that much of a jolt—the song has been recently revived on television commercials. I hear it almost every day and every day I tune it out. What seemed vibrant now seems empty, unimpressive. Kind of like AIDS media coverage. AIDS still makes the news, though now less frequently and in a more muted way than before. It’s like a song that once meant something. That’s one of the points of Tracy Taylor’s Walking on Sunshine.

“The film starts off with all of this fear,” says Taylor, describing how two sisters were impacted by the late eighties’ media coverage of AIDS. Flash-forward to today, however, and they are quite unaware that they, as black women, are part of one of the largest identified groups contracting HIV in the U.S. The characters Jenna and Sunshine, played by Taylor and Jossie Harris Thacker, are “putting themselves at risk while [AIDS awareness] is not out there in the world the way it was when they were children.”

Sympathetic to the characters she created, Taylor, who moved from Chicago to Los Angeles four years ago to pursue acting and filmmaking, remembers that she was sixteen when Magic Johnson came out about his positive status. “I was so affected. I kept crying and being very upset; my mother kept saying, ‘You don’t even like basketball! Why are you so upset?’” Taylor says. But Taylor had an image of Magic Johnson as someone that HIV didn’t happen to: “It brought it home to me and made me start thinking in a different way, when I became sexually active, about what I was and wasn’t going to do. At the time that Magic got it, I still thought: If you get HIV, you die. As time went on, and all the new medications became available, in many ways AIDS awareness seemed to get quieter.”

That was then, this is now. Browsing the Internet in the not-so-distant past, Taylor came upon statistics about African-American women contracting HIV at rates that rivaled all other identifiable groups and was sobered by the fact that if she didn’t know then other women probably didn’t know as well. It was then that Taylor realized that safer-sex education is not a one-time inoculation. The movie became a way to get the message out: “Let me tell the story of someone who could be you, your sister, or your friend—this can happen.”

And that sensibility is what Jossie Harris Thacker infused in her character, Sunshine, a woman beaming with affection and sexual happiness, more delightful than dysfunctional. “She was really born this way, a free-spirited sexual person. It’s a positive thing—a way to connect with other people. There was a time when we could be free-spirited because AIDS wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t alive yet. It hadn’t been born yet in the States.” Though Sunshine has many sexual partners, Thacker didn’t want to portray her as a “bad girl, a fast girl” so that people could assume they knew why she got HIV and dismiss her rather than identify with her. This message is also borne by Jenna, who is in a monogamous relationship but finds herself facing the same sexual-health questions as her sister.

Thacker, who made her start as a Fly Girl on In Living Color and as a dancer with Janet Jackson, was all-too-familiar with AIDS before she became involved in the project: her sister was friends with artist Keith Haring, who died from the disease; she lost friends she knew from the New York City house club scene; and her cousin is currently struggling with full-blown AIDS. She feels for him, “constantly having to go to the hospital, constantly dealing, having mood swings, denying that he’s sick and not feeling like taking his medicine. We’ve been through that as a family.” But she realizes that “there are a lot of people who don’t know anyone [who is positive]. Or like the character, you just think that it will never happen to you. Or to us, as black people or straight people.” For her, like Taylor, the “face” of AIDS in the U.S. primarily belonged to white, gay men. Or, as the characters in the movie joke when they ponder if Jenna’s boyfriend, who repeatedly shies away from sex, might be gay: They’ve been reading too much E. Lynn Harris. AIDS is not just about gay, or bisexual, or down-low; the sisters have to confront the fact that AIDS can be all-straight, too.

It’s a tall order for a short film, but Taylor manages to deftly comment “on the black family, how their family handles the situation, the media, growing up, and male/female relationships.” Taylor is more than satisfied about the end product: “I’ve always said that I wanted to make movies, but I also want to be a role model; I want to help people. Who knew that the first time out, that is exactly what I get to do?”

One would be hard-pressed to make the case that Black Entertainment Television (BET) is part of the media brown-out that Walking on Sunshine addresses. In 1997, under the corporate leadership of Robert L. Johnson and Debra L. Lee, the team at BET rallied behind AIDS awareness as its core focus. The message is simple—Be Safe; Wrap It Up—but not the creativity of its delivery. Partnering with the Kaiser Family Foundation to create Rap-It-Up, the public education media campaign has made young people aware of sexual health issues, including HIV/AIDS and STDs, by mixing hip hop and safer sex through PSAs, a hotline, on-line content, and grassroots components such as teen forums, mobile HIV testing events, and a middle and high school AIDS curriculum. And, of course, programming dedicated to HIV/AIDS—twenty-one full-length specials, many of which are made possible through funding from Kaiser.

Launched in January 2004 with the help of the Black AIDS Institute, the latest offering is the Black AIDS Short Subject Film Competition. About two years ago, when BET was honored as part of the Black AIDS Institute’s Heroes in the Struggle tribute, that organization’s executive director, Phill Wilson, bent the ear of Kelli Lawson, BET’s executive vice president of marketing and communications, about an idea he had for a short film competition that would energize up-and-coming black filmmakers to express their visions of how AIDS was affecting African-American communities. Lawson says of their meeting the day after the event: “Phill said, ‘I really need [a network] like BET to support the effort and to really make it sing.’” A year, nearly 500 entries, and fifty-one judges later, the music is loud and clear. Ten semi-finalist scripts—which covered everything from HIV and the down-low, the impact of AIDS on the family, and gay issues—were narrowed down to two winning scripts that spotlit women and HIV: Tangy’s Song!, Michelle Taylor and Paul Grant’s documentary of a gospel singer who is pregnant and living with HIV at the age of twenty-two, and Walking on Sunshine. The films will be tagged with Rap-It-Up’s toll-free number for people interested in finding the nearest testing site or to request Rap-It-Up’s safer-sex brochure.

Even as the credits roll, nobody seems content to rest. Both Jossie Harris Thacker and Tracy Taylor want to do more to help fight AIDS. And Kelli Lawson confirms that the film competition will return for next year; materials should be on the Web site in January for those interested in applying. Kelli Lawson says that BET is also looking to do some shows in Southern Africa and one on hip hop and sexuality, as well as a special-event show around National HIV Testing Day in June. “We’re very proud of the work we’ve done, but we know it’s not finished,” attests Lawson. “There’s still much more that can be done.”

Learn more about BET’s Rap-It-Up HIV/AIDS Public Awareness Campaign and its resources by logging on to www.rap-it-up.com or phoning its toll-free hotline (866) RAP-IT-UP. Tune into BET on December 1, World AIDS Day, to catch Walking on Sunshine at 11:30 p.m. (ET); on December 5, Sunshine and Tangy’s Song will be broadcast back-to-back from 3–4 p.m. (ET). Check the Web site for future rebroadcasts.

Chael Needle interviewed Nip/Tuck’s Jessalyn Gilsig for the October issue.

December 2004