It's scary for me to realize that AIDS is still such a big issue in my lifetime, even though I (and the rest of my generation) grew up in a world in which the disease is hardly a mystery and its prevention is common knowledge. Depressing, isn't it, to think that we still inhabit a society where even teaching safe sex has to be a battle?
Despite recent breakthroughs, a readily-available cure is still out of reach. This much is terrifying in itself. It blows my mind to imagine a time when AIDS was such a specter of death that it was communicated only in hysteria. I start to compare it to an epidemic I can relate to today, like swine flu, and I instantly feel stupid for even making it. It's much more serious and pandemic, that much is obvious.
So then the question becomes, why wouldn't it still rouse that level of panic? Especially now that we've moved past the naive assumption that it's only a gay man's sickness. Could it be that the generation growing up with AIDS as an oft-cited danger is so used to its presence that they casually dismiss it? The less mysterious it is, the less we're scared of it, which means the less people pay attention to it. This doc seems to come to that conclusion, talking about the early days of the AIDS epidemic almost as if this is an excavation of a lost civilization, but relevant for current times all the same.
Setting up the mood of this distant world of 1980's, Sex Positive starts with an "outtake" of its primary subject, Richard Berkowitz, refusing to answer a question. The camera shakes, the angle awkward... Berkowitz moves around, agitated, telling the off-screen director Daryl Wein that he doesn't want to discuss certain things from his past. It's not a glamorous one. It may be a shameful one. Eventually Berkowitz opens up (revealing his drug use, bath house encounters and stint as an S&M hustler), presumably after Wein persuaded him to. It's a smart and deliberate choice to include that initial reluctance; Berkowitz's difficulty in revisiting that period of his life conveys—at least emotionally—why it was difficult for people back then to accept the necessary progress. There needed to be a persistent instigator.
The topic is a heady one. Wein weaves in and out of various chapters of it, from Berkowitz's history with activism to the gay culture of the time to the scientific research surrounding the HIV virus to the political back-paddling in accepting it as a serious issue. But the film, mostly, is about Berkowitz's unsung accomplishment in being one of the first to suggest that the spread of HIV was linked to reckless promiscuity in the gay community. A theory that proved extremely unpopular among gays—accusing Berkowitz of being a self-loathing gay man—given the free culture they'd fought so hard to achieve. Yet Berkowitz insisted on pushing the idea in order to save his peers' lives.
Years later, Berkowitz is now a broke middle-aged ex-addict living with HIV, hoping that this film would raise more awareness than his out-of-print book. Not surprisingly, he holds a very Democrat point of view of the pandemic. He fought for government funding for AIDS research, and he admits no shame living off of disability checks; even though he himself know it was his own doing. It's nevertheless engrossing to listen to his account of the dark days, helped by archival footage. Berkowitz is such a contradictory character that he makes a tremendously fascinating documentary subject, if not a dubious spokesman. Kudos to Daryl Wein for favoring honesty over message, I guess.
To return to my original point, though: while the fog has been lifted, these days it's been replaced by a fence built by ignorance. The film points out that HIV rates have been on the rise again in the past decade, no doubt due to a barricade against safe sex education in many parts of the country. So what is there to do? Sex Positive reminds us that we are and have never been invincible, and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Which is why it's so achingly eye-rolling for this doc to get an R from the MPAA just for language and sexual discussions.
"Sex Positive" opens July 3, 2009 and is rated R. Documentary. Directed by Daryl Wein. Starring Dr Joseph Sonnabend, Michael Lucas, Richard Berkowitz.
