As grateful as I am to the director Matt Nadel for making “Cashing Out,” a vital and outstanding film about a terrible time, it also made me angry—angry about an epoch in our nation’s history that fewer and fewer people know about, which is to say the AIDS crisis, and how it affected gay men, their chosen families, and the economics of death. In the early to mid-nineteen-eighties, many young and middle-aged gay men were living more or less hand to mouth; if they were infected with AIDS—which was generally a death sentence until 1995 or so, when protease inhibitors began to make a radical difference to survival rates—their already precarious economic circumstances were upended, and so there was the ruin of their bodies, and the ruin of whatever infrastructure they’d managed to build during their too brief lives.
But then a relatively new industry sprang up: viatical settlements. A company or a private investor would pay a percentage of the value of a person’s life-insurance policy (and would continue to pay the premiums on it), in exchange for being named the policy’s beneficiary. In other words, if you were dying of AIDS and had life insurance, you could get immediate cash to cover your medical costs or finance your dreams. (“Viaticum” is Latin for “money for a long journey.”) People went on extended holidays or bought cars, or just lived their last days with a modicum of comfort and grace that they wouldn’t otherwise have had; some were able to leave a little money to the people who had stood by them throughout. For the investors, however, death equalled profit; the question was how much longer you’d live—and how much they’d have to pay in premiums—before they’d get their money.
Part of what makes “Cashing Out” so poignant is that it doesn’t turn away from the pain. As DeeDee Ngozi Chamblee, a transgender elder who founded LaGender, Inc., an advocacy group for trans women, says toward the end of the documentary, “The one thing that connects us is pain.” The central story in the film concerns Scott Page, a gay man who helped broker viaticum deals. Coming out in the late seventies was difficult for Scott, whose shrink tried to convince him that he wasn’t gay. After some time in the military, he met a man named Greg, who, he soon discovered, had AIDS. (It’s lovely to hear Scott talk about what attracted him to Greg; you can feel how alive Greg was to him, and always will be.) The resourceful Scott figured out that if he helped Greg to sell his life-insurance policy, Greg would be able to have a few things he’d always longed for before he died, including a house and a golden retriever. Greg belonged to an AIDS support group, and other members, following his lead and sometimes with Scott’s help, began to do the same thing.
Nadel then introduces another layer to this story: his father, Phil, was one of the buyers of those insurance policies. Nadel, who is openly gay, muses on how the deaths of gay men subsidized his easy, happy childhood. But, of course, after a while, the bodies stopped piling up as gay men with AIDS started to live; those who had invested in death were left with receipts they could not cash in. Nadel is evenhanded with these two sides of the narrative, but, ultimately, the film leaves us brokenhearted at the thought of how much it took, and how much it cost, emotionally and otherwise, just to stay alive.
