Opening on Friday in New York and expanding to other cities through the rest of the month in concert with Gay Pride, Daryl Wein’s Sex Positive is a documentary portrait of Richard Berkowitz, an early AIDS activist who helped to invent the concept of safe sex. Working as a team with writer/performer Michael Callen and doctor Joseph Sonnabend (the three collaborated on the groundbreaking 1983 pamphlet “How to Have Sex in An Epidemic: One Approach”), Berkowitz fought, largely without fanfare, to spread the word that a number of lifestyle factors (particularly, drug use and condom-free promiscuity) were responsible for the rapid-fire spread of AIDS through urban gay male communities. At his most active as an activist, Berkowitz was widely criticized (those who didn’t essentially accuse him of being a buzzkill tried to use his night job as an S&M hustler as evidence of his lack of credibility), and today his 2003 book Stayin’ Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex is out of print. Wein’s film thus seeks — and mostly succeeds — to canonize Berkowitz where history has failed to.
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Are you a supporter of gay marriage?
“I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.”
Why doesn’t it interest you?
“The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.”
–From Questions for Gore Vidal in The New York Times Magazine, 6/15/08.
Amen, sister. One of the perks of being queer is that you’re not expected to engage in unnatural acts like high school proms and monogamy. So in honor of the hedonistic right to our own guilt-free, queer Mardi Gras, here are some subversive suggestions that will get you in the mood and take you back to that more innocent, less commercial “Over The Rainbow” time.
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