I love Philadelphia. But working on this episode made me sit with something I'd been carrying for a long time without quite naming it. That film came from a moment when queer culture was still in the middle of processing an enormous wound. The AIDS crisis had devastated a generation, and Philadelphia was part of the work of trying to make sense of it, to make straight America see what was happening.
My gay youth, from about 21 to 27, was full of movies like that. Someone was always scared of HIV or dying from it. Sadness was baked into almost every gay story I saw on screen. Revisiting Philadelphia for this episode reminded me of how far we've come since then, not just in medicine, but in how we tell our own stories. We've earned the right to tell more of them, and different kinds of them. That progress is worth naming.