Dallas Buyers Club is the latest and largest in a growing number of period and documentary films about Aids in America. It envisages a time in the 1980s when people living with HIV/Aids existed in a socio-political combat zone in addition to the battles being waged in their own immune systems. Dallas Buyers Club is allegedly a different kind of Aids film: a gritty ‘true’ story of a working class, faggot-hating cowboy with Aids. But with its straight, white male protagonist’s arc from bigotry to tolerance, it has the same liberal humanist formula as Philadelphia did in 1993, is far less bold and just as didactic.