It’s the Reagan years… and all of the men in the neighborhood are mysteriously beginning to turn gay. As Robin’s terminally unemployed husband Lenny begins shifting his attention away from the job hunt and towards the local trade(smen), she finds herself having to hit the streets to bring home the bacon. Meanwhile, Lorraine’s husband Ben has mysteriously gone missing and Linnea just can’t seem to find anyone who’ll let her borrow a cup of detergent. And what role does the Gay Neighbor play in all of this?

Commissioned by videomaker John Dorr for EZTV’s inaugural screenings at the West Hollywood Community Center in 1982, Ken Camp’s As the World Burns is an experimental three-part gay soap opera that was made using early consumer video equipment for the low cost of just $75.88 (the 88 cents were for the special effects). A wickedly funny satire on the narrative and aesthetic conventions of soaps, the banality of mainstream gay culture, and America’s rightward shift at the turn of the 80s, As the World Burns is also perhaps the very first piece of media to explicitly reference the the nascent AIDS epidemic.

New digital preservation from videomaker Ken Camp’s personal VHS dub.