Filmmaker Peter Adair on Being HIV Positive

On Sunday night, HBO presents a new TV version of Larry Kramer's 1985 play. Kramer himself wrote the adaptation, which stars Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.

In Dallas Buyers Club, Leto plays Rayon, a transgender woman who is living with HIV and a drug habit. Rayon becomes an unlikely friend to Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a rodeo cowboy who starts smuggling HIV drugs from Mexico in the 1980s after he's diagnosed as HIV-positive and given just a few weeks to live.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. He has a new autobiography, My Lives. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.