"Sex Positive"

By David Hudson on 06/12/2009

[Updated through 6/14]

"At age 51, flat broke and getting by on disability and handouts from former clients, Richard Berkowitz is the pioneering AIDS activist most people have never heard of. That includes most other advocates now working in the field." Ella Taylor for NPR: "One virtue of Daryl Wein's sympathetic but searching documentary about this unsung hero of the 80s safe-sex movement is that it seeks to uncover all the reasons for Berkowitz's plight, including those that don't shine a favorable light on a man the director clearly admires.

"[W]ith his combination of self-effacement and daunting confidence, Berkowitz easily commands the screen throughout its short running time," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet director and editor Wein smartly doesn't use Berkowitz, a groundbreaking writer and safe-sex spokesman who contracted HIV in early eighties New York, as a mouthpiece for an agenda-driven doc; rather he presents the debates surrounding safe-sex discourse, and its connection to scientific theories surrounding the virus itself, as integral elements in Berkowitz's biography. In a sense, Berkowitz, who's all at once wily, compelling, articulate, and sardonic onscreen, is the hook: once we're sucked in, though, we learn a great deal about the history of the epidemic, and the various responses to it, presented in a sharply linear fashion."

"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," finds Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "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."

For Keith Uhlich, writing in Time Out New York, "the film is founded on shaky, near-exploitative ground, something mirrored in the agitated handheld camerawork by Alex Bergman and in Berkowitz's offhand comment about the good this film could do in encouraging safe sex. He seems to have signed on for a lump-in-the-throat infomercial, not realizing that he's instead being given a most astringent dressing-down."

In Slant, Bill Weber notes that the film begins "its history in the West Village of 1979, and hence functioning as a sort of East Coast sequel to 'The Times of Harvey Milk'... If Berkowitz's prostitution- and drug-filled biography isn't enough to disqualify him from a future 'Milk'-style biopic, he hasn't had the luck to be a martyr." Still, "'Sex Positive' gives voice to an aging, largely forgotten band of survivors who call, wearily and without an abundance of faith, for a renewed fight for life, sex, love."

Melissa Anderson notes in the Voice that the film "does a good job of capturing (though, dizzyingly, not always with a tripod) the internecine struggles among gay activists that played out on Manhattan public-access TV and in the pages of the New York Native during the first years of the pandemic."

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden argues that it's "only at the end" that "its agenda as a polemic against societal amnesia becomes apparent. Noting that in recent years HIV infection rates among gay men have begun to climb, this sad, useful film sounds an alarm about the return of unprotected sex among young gay men who believe that contracting the virus is unlikely."

"Why hasn't safe sex education worked?" Peter Martin at Cinematical: "Several interviewees take stabs at answering that question, without coming to a satisfactory conclusion or pointing the way to improved education."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Wein "about his discovery of Berkowitz's story, the blurring of documentary and fiction, and why he was recently sitting naked on a unicorn."

Update, 6/14: Gary Goldstein profiles Berkowitz for the Los Angeles Times.

[Photo: "Sex Positive," Regent Releasing, 2008]

Tags: Daryl Wein, Richard Berkowitz, Sex Positive