In Matt Nadel’s Cashing Out, queer people with AIDS in the 1990s are presented with an intriguing option: to “cash out” their life insurance policies and take an immediate payout that presumes they won’t live long. What initially serves as a money grab for those seemingly taking advantage of the sick and dying becomes more complicated when some of those patients end up living many more years.
Awards Buzz spoke with Nadel about his own personal connection to this history he didn’t know and how those who defied the odds have gone on to make an incredible difference:
“There are people who are betting that you won’t survive and you get to take advantage of the positive side of their bet, and then also you do survive. I look at somebody like Sean Strub, who’s one of the participants in my film. He used the money from selling his life insurance policy when he had a two-year life expectancy to start a magazine called POZ, and that magazine was the first source of information by, for, about the HIV-positive community, which was especially important for people outside of New York, LA, and San Francisco, where they had more established communities of HIV-positive people. People all over the country relied on this magazine to feel like they were part of a community, like they weren’t alone in their HIV status, and he was only able to pour that investment back into his community because he got ahold of this money, but then he lived. So he’s been able to see this creation flourish over decades. POZ remains in print. Sean remains an amazing force for good in the world, not just for HIV-positive people, but he was the mayor of his town in Pennsylvania for eight years, and I think he lives a very special kind of life because he understands that his survival not only isn’t guaranteed, but was literally bet against.”
He underscored the relevance today of this conversation:
“We’re seeing millions of people have their healthcare premiums, health insurance premiums skyrocketing. More than a million people have been kicked off of Medicaid since Trump took office this time around, and they understand what it looks like to have to figure out how to survive when the government just turns its back on your basic needs. I think it’s hard to watch Cashing Out and not come away feeling like there is a major deficiency in the social safety net of this country and in the healthcare system, that we are as rich a country as we are, and yet we don’t have anywhere near as universal healthcare as many of our peer countries do. It’s not only queer and HIV-positive people, but people of color, disabled people. There are all sorts of ways that our identities get weaponized against us to deny us benefits, deny us what we need to survive.”
Cashing Out is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Short and streaming via The New Yorker.
