On his new album, High Drama, pop star Adam Lambert covers hits by other artists, including Culture Club’s 1982 smash “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” The American Idol alum’s next project also finds the LGBTQ icon delving into the past while breaking new creative ground. He stars in this year’s Fairyland, an AIDS drama set mostly in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco.

Produced by Oscar winner Sofia Coppola and directed by Andrew Durham, Fairyland premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. There’s no word yet on when the film will get a wider release, but Lambert has been discussing the film while promoting his new album.

If Fairyland sounds familiar, perhaps POZ readers recognize it as the title of Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir. The book details her sometimes troublesome upbringing by her gay father, Steve, in the bohemian Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and then her experiences leaving for college and living in France before returning to San Francisco to care for her dad, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992.

Fairyland: a Memoir of my Father by Alysia Abbott

Shortly after the memoir was published, Abbott and Whitney Joiner, who also lost a gay dad to AIDS, launched a group called The Recollectors to create a community of now-grown children who lost parents to the epidemic and want to share their experiences. Abbott and Joiner were featured on the June 2015 cover of POZ.

That POZ article ends with Abbott describing a dinner she had with Coppola, who had optioned the book for a film. Eight years and a second pandemic later, Fairyland is finally making it to the big screen.

Coppola recommended the film project to her photographer friend Durham, knowing that he, like Abbott, was raised by a gay father in San Francisco and took care of his dad as he died of AIDS.

The film stars Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, Cody Fern (of American Horror Story fame) and Lambert as men in Abbott’s orbit; Nessa Dougherty and Emilia Jones as the child and young adult Alysia Abbott, respectively; and Geena Davis as Steve Abbott’s mother.