This groundbreaking documentary about a public health panic offers a dual portrait of Gaétan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant villainized as "The Monster Who Brought AIDS to North America" and San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts, who mythologized Dugas as "Patient Zero" in And the Band Played On. Superb as both original queer history and a corrective to long-held public perceptions, the film shines an empathetic light on a generation traumatized by a virus and by society's blame.

After an unexpected encounter in a public bathroom, Colm — a working-class Dublin family man struggling in midlife, played powerfully by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor — becomes enamored with the charismatic, much younger gay-for-pay Jay. As Colm's personal troubles mount and his interest in Jay grows more complicated, Rialto becomes a deeply affecting portrait of a crisis of masculinity.

The intersection of Civil Rights & Gay Rights—struggles on a national, local, and personal level—we meet three very different activists: Lorraine Hansberry (Samira Wiley), Bayard Rustin (Keiynan Lonsdale), and José Sarria (Jai Rodriguez) and learn about the largest gay rights demonstration in history (and no, it’s not Stonewall…).

For most of the 20th century, being homosexual in America meant you could be clinically diagnosed as mentally ill and subject to drastic medical interventions posing as “cures.” This riveting documentary reveals the inspiring efforts of a courageous band of gay and lesbian activists in the 1960s-70s, who challenged the American psychiatric establishment to remove the stigma of mental illness from the medical books, and by extension, to free LGBTQ+ people everywhere.