'Sex' Ed

After dragging Michael to two "1980s New York films" on Friday night, it was a bit of a hard sell to get him to another one -- especially one that dealt with the early days of the AIDS epidemic here in the city. But by the time we walked out of Daryl Wein's gripping new documentary, "Sex Positive," there was no question we'd both been changed forever. Imagine if you will suddenly finding out a major person in the history of your community was mysteriously missing from the history books you read. (Oh, wait. Ninety percent of the people I know didn't even know who Harvey Milk was when "Milk" was about to come out last year -- maybe this isn't as hard to imagine as I thought.)

"Sex Positive" tells the fascinating story of Richard Berkowitz, the controversial gay activist who went against the grain in the early days of AIDS by publicly acknowledging that promiscuity and related drug use was killing us. He and his cohorts, Michael Callen and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, were dubbed "the Jerry Falwells of the gay community" and were shunned for saying what many knew was probably true. It's fascinating and literally made me squirm in my seat to watch old clips from 1982 in which Larry Kramer -- sounding ridiculous but doing the best he could knowing that the only way we could get ANYONE to care about AIDS was to make it seem like it could happen to ANYONE, anywhere -- looks a reporter straight in the eye and says it's completely normal for "all average people in cities" -- not just gay men -- to have had 700 or 800 sexual partners, while Berkowitz calmly airs our dirty laundry and calls for behavioral changes. In 1983 Berkowitz co-authored (with Sonnabend, Callen and Richard Dworkin, Callen's lover) "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach," which is widely acknowledged to be the first "safer sex" material on record. While it's understandable that gay men who had fought for so long to have the sexual freedom they were finally enjoying would be resistant to what was being said, it's also frightening when you learn how long it took to get this life-saving information into the mainstream. (Berkowitz & Co. further made enemies when they were initially reluctant to accept HIV as the cause of AIDS.)

But as time went on and attitudes changed, Callen -- whose pleasant demeanor was the antithesis of Berkowitz's in-your-face approach -- would become a well-known activist and beloved singer in the a cappella group The Flirtations before dying in 1993 (they even named a major LGBT community health center here in Chelsea after him), while Berkowitz's life -- already complicated by his on-again, off-again career as an S&M hustler, spiraled out of control after years of addiction to crack cocaine.

Someone in the film says that people should know who Richard Berkowitz is because "he made safe sex sexy." Having come of age in the 1980s and lived to tell about it, I couldn't agree more. I've done work for numerous AIDS organizations over the years and have never heard his name mentioned once. Let's hope this film changes that.