Landing in the queerguru office this morning was a new extraordinary short film from the documentaries division of The Guardian Newspaper in London. We intended to take a quick glimpse and come back and watch it later, but it was one of those remarkable stories that begged for our immediate attention, and so we viewed it there and then.

It’s the story of John Kapellas a 63-year-old openly gay man who for the past 10 years has had to live in complete darkness. Ten years ago, probably as a side effect of some of the aggressive HIV medication he had to take for years, he discovered he had a rare condition where he is allergic to the entire spectrum of light.  If he is exposed to any source of light he starts to burn, blister and break out in rashes.

He lives in San Francisco in an art studio that has been converted into one enormous dark room, and he relies on an ex-lover and his adult children from a marriage before he ‘came out’, to do errands and bring him food. Every Thursday he throws a dinner party when close friends join him in the dark so that he is not completely cut off from the outside world.  

In this fascinating documentary by filmmaker Jason Hanasik,  Kapellas intriguingly displays a genuine upbeat attitude about his circumstances and gets his enjoyment from his art, playing his piano and his early morning walks all wrapped up before dawn breaks.

He candidly explains that when one of the baffled doctors prescribed a drug for him made him feel quite manic, he started drawing large pictures out of a whole series of circles on his walls to both calm him and ease his pain.

Kapellas has had a life full of trauma, none bigger than losing most of friends and lovers to the AIDS pandemic, and so he uses this enclosed small world as a place of reflection and this seems to provide him now with a great deal of peace. 

The video of How To Make A Pearl is below, and you can also read John’s description of living in darkness in The Guardian’s Weekend magazine.