cast + crewDaryl WeinDirector Richard BerkowitzCast Dr Joseph SonnabendCast Don AdlerCast Susan BrownCast Demetre DaskalakisCast Richard DworkinCast William HaseltineCast Larry KramerCast Ardele ListerCast Francisco RoqueCast Daryl WeinProducerDavid Oliver Cohen
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.
Fast-paced and largely fascinating, Sex Positive has built-in value as a work of historical propaganda, but there’s a fascinating series of ironies at its core that transcend its obvious demographic. Most notably: though Berkowitz is initially super reluctant to talk about his hustling, when he finally does he makes the case that what he was doing was therapeutic for both sides, a way for gay men to work out the fears and anxieties of living “in a world at war” against them, within the safe space of sexual fantasy. It becomes another way to help the community, another form of activism. And of course, the more conventional forms of activism that Berkowitz was involved with didn’t pay a salary, so hustling was necessary to support it. An interesting commentary on what we value and what we pay for.
Weaving archival video and new talking head interviews (sometimes professionally staged with lighting and a fixed camera, sometimes shot with home video indeliberateness) into material from Berkowitz’s own archive (including personal photos and handwritten logs indentifying and describing the proclivities of each of his johns), Wein’s visual style is inconsistent. Sex Positive too often looks like something hastily thrown together, which belies the built trust evident between the filmmaker and his subject. Over the course of the film, Berkowitz moves from refusing to discuss certain specifics — his drug use, his hustling — to spilling in great detail on the same subjects. Wein is never seen on camera, but occasionally he’s heard; the cumulative sense is that the director wore down Berkowitz’s defenses much in the same way Berkowitz and crew helped to make condom use ubiquitous: by persistently showing up.
