Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - July 3, 2009
David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Those who fail to learn from history ... And you know the rest. Except it is rather stupefying to realize that far too many people seem willing to unlearn the lessons of the early years of AIDS and HIV.
Back in the early 1980s, virologist Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, performer Michael Callan and former hustler Richard Berkowitz tried to teach gays that the transmission of AIDS could be prevented by something called "safe sex." They also argued that the more sex partners one had, the greater the risk of contracting HIV. Their efforts, recalled in Daryl Wein's superb new documentary, "Sex Positive," were either ignored or energetically repudiated by those gays who believed that "safe sex" was "sex negative" and, thus, contrary to their right to live their lives as they wanted.
Wein tackles an incredibly complex array of issues surrounding HIV, focusing largely on Berkowitz, once a nice young Jewish kid at Rutgers who found a lucrative career as an S&M hustler before becoming an activist and co-author, with Callan, of the first booklet promoting safe sex.
Footage of gay life in New York in the early years of the epidemic seems almost quaint, in a kind of sad and horrifying way. But the film's real knockout punch is that today, 28 years after doctors identified the presence of something they called "gay cancer," many people are still ignoring the need for safe sex, or think, somehow, that the new drug regimens for AIDS have somehow made safe sex unnecessary. The media haven't always alleviated the lack of information, or the proliferation of misinformation about AIDS: The film notes that a recent report about the alarmingly high number of gay men in New York City who have HIV merited only a couple of paragraphs in a news roundup in the New York Times.
As for history, the fact that the infection rate is so high among young gay men suggests that failing to learn is not just a question of being doomed to repeat the past, but, in fact, of being doomed, period.
-- Advisory: Contains brief nudity, sexual scenes, graphic language
E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.
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