SEX POSITIVE
As we look back nostalgically on the 1980s, many may conveniently forget about the explosion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the resulting toll it took on the populations of major cities like New York and San Francisco. Sex Positive is a small focused documentary about Richard Berkowitz, a gay activist and how he , along with Michael Callen and AIDS researcher Joseph Sonnabend, introduced the concept of “safe sex" or how to continue to have sex and stay alive.
I happened to be in New York City around the time, having arrived loaded down with dreams of living a fabulous life. I spent a lot of time in and around the dance world and in that way bumped right up against the crisis as it was unfolding. Not being a gay male, I didn't feel the sense of anxiety in the same way, but the sense terror around sexuality did spill over into the straight world, at least for me anyway. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that a friend of mine took his own life when he discovered he was HIV positive, someone caught in a deeply closeted life.
For me learning about Richard Berkowitz, about someone who was where I was at thesame time but living an entirely different life was both a reminder and an eye opener. We all know what "safe sex" is now, even if it is not routinely practiced anymore. But in 1982 this concept was revolutionary. After all, we only just started, as a society, discussing sex openly and there was and still is a lot of resistance to talking about it honestly as opposed to creating fantasies and desires around it. The film, with Berkowitz doing most of the talking, exposed me to a world I wasn't privy to: that of the heavily sexually active urban gay male world, where even before the virus began to wipe out a large swath of the population, various STDs and infections were common among the highly active.
Berkowitz is a curious and deeply interesting figure around which to spin a documentary. He is from a suburban Boston, like me, and from the kind of progressive Jewish family that talked about social justice at the dinner table every night. He talks about how he figured out he was gay, and how he became an activist at Rutgers in response to harassment on campus. He is also honest about the many years he spent working as a SM sex worker, with some analysis of why he thinks he was attracted to that world. Berkowitz later became seriously addicted to drugs and I would say this is one of the only points of confusion about the part he played in the movement to educate and combat AIDS.
In the end the film reminds us how far we have come since those frightening days, when you never knew who might get sick and die from day to day, particularly if you lived in a urban center. We now see that different people respond differently with the virus, some living long lives, some dying quite quickly. Clearly what Berkowitz, Callen and Sonnabend did in those early days, introducing the possibility of preventing the disease by changing behavior was and still is important and needs to stay in the forefront of the discussion as infection rates seem to be going back up. And there are still populations where infection rates are increasing because there is dishonesty and denial about homosexuality within those communities. Berkowitz talks poignantly about the self-hatred resulting from intolerance, as a motivating factor in self-destructive sexual behavior. When I went to my friend Kenneth's funeral, no one talked about what really killed him, except for just a few of us. Fortunately we don't live in a world that is as completely blind but as we have seen this year in California, for example, there is still a lot of people who still need to be enlightened.
Directed, produced and edited by Daryl Wein; produced by David Oliver Cohen; director of photography, Alex Bergman, music by Michael Tremante. Released by Regent Releasing. Running time: 75 minutes.
With: Richard Berkowitz, Susan Brown, Sean Strub, Richard Dworking, Larry Krame, Ardele Lister, and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend.
