Posted on 06/01/2003 9:39:23 PM PDT by scripter
The Gift Takes A Hard Look at Contemporary Gay Culture, Where HIV is Sexy and Prevention is Passé
On-screen, four men sit in a semicircle as part of their support group. They've allowed filmmaker Louise Hogarth and her camera crew in to observe them for her documentary The Gift. All the men are over 40, gay, and HIV+. They're not together merely to talk about living with HIV, but about living with cardiac conditions secondary to HIV medications. And when they talk about the image of HIV+ men in their San Francisco community, they wonder why it doesn't look like them.
Hogarth's camera captures posters, which show strapping young men in stylish clothes (when they're wearing any) flashing wide, white smiles, as the support-group members look at them.
"All these guys look healthy," one says.
"That one is making me hard right now," another jokes.
They're not being insensitive or cynical, merely saying out loud something that has been percolating through gay communities for years now: The current prevention strategy for HIV and AIDS portrays infection as being a relatively benign condition, manageable with medication. And in the ads the men regard, being HIV+ looks sexy.
"You never see any advertisements or anything that make it look bad--[they] glamorize HIV," Hogarth says from her office in Los Angeles. Since The Gift debuted this past February at the Berlin Film Festival and opened this month in London, she's been maintaining a steady stream of interviews as she prepares to screen it in the United States. "It's like if you have a family situation, and you have one kid who's sick and all the attention is devoted to him. And you have another child in the family who doesn't get any attention, he's always shunted off to the side. An HIV-negative man would never stand up in a room and say, 'I've been HIV-negative for 10 years.' That would be very insensitive. All the services go to HIV-positive men.
"And nobody dies from HIV anymore because that wouldn't be a positive image," Hogarth continues. "Whenever there's a death, it's never HIV. Forty-, 45-year-old gay men die of heart attacks or liver failure or diabetes or opportunistic infections or side effects from a minor surgery--that's all the result of HIV or HIV medications, and it's never mentioned. If HIV doesn't kill you, I believe that the drugs will."
Handling HIV with mittens crops up in even so-called progressive media. During the opening prologue to a recent episode of Six Feet Under--the HBO series created by the openly gay writer Alan Ball that has been commended for its well-rounded portrayal of gay relationships--a fortysomething character named Robert passes away in the company of friends and loved ones. When his male partner approaches the series' central Fisher family's funeral home, he informs them that Robert didn't die from AIDS, but cardiomyopathy. "His heart was too big," he says, using the cardiac abnormality to characterize the kind of man his partner was in his life--even though anybody familiar with HIV and AIDS knows that the condition can be caused by HIV infection or by superinfections resulting from the sequelae of HIV drug therapies.
"Herb Ritts' death was reported by gay media as pneumonia," Hogarth says. "That's a result of HIV, but [they] never mention HIV. That's incredible.
"It's not like cigarette smoking, where people look sick and are dying," she continues. "You can drive down a street in West Hollywood and see a billboard that says, 40,000 deaths this year from smoking. But you'd never see a billboard saying anything about deaths from HIV."
This reluctance to talk about HIV and the rising HIV infection rates in this country (according to a Centers for Disease Control announcement this past February, infection among homosexual men rose 14 percent from 1999 through 2001) are exactly the situations that Hogarth hopes her documentary addresses and starts to change. She says she's lost many friends over the years to HIV/AIDS, and she'd like to see AIDS organizations stop portraying HIV/AIDS as a chronic, manageable illness.
But she's afraid that this message is going to be overshadowed by her movie's primary subject: the sub-subculture of men (called "bug chasers") who actively seek out HIV+ men ("gift givers") with whom to have unprotected sex ("barebacking") in hopes of seroconverting (turning from HIV- to HIV+).
For two and a half years, Hogarth talked to men in California gay communities who hold barebacking parties, visited Web sites where bug-chasers go in search of gift-givers, and talked candidly with men who purposely sought infection. She contrasts these interviews--with HIV+ young men who have yet to become symptomatic or had to endure the debilitating side effects of years of medication--with men who have been living with HIV for years, examining how each of them conceptualize and talk about the condition.
Just as Cindy Patton's landmark 1990 book Inventing AIDS was as much a theory book about how medical "knowledge" is constructed socially and politically, The Gift is a movie about how social group attitudes influence public policy. Its main concern isn't bringing scandalous bug-chasing out into the open, but to examine how the current culture could result in the chilling irony of calling HIV "the gift" in the first place.
"I would like, hopefully, for the people in charge of prevention to realize that their strategies were developed for short-term," she says. "And they were very effective for the short-term, but now we have a long-term health crisis and we need to rethink the strategies and not just put our heads in the sand and attack the messenger, which is what they did with the Rolling Stone guy. They really went on the attack."
She's referring to the Feb. 6 issue of Rolling Stone, in which writer Gregory A. Freeman's "In Search of Death" article appeared, which presented interviews with men who had sought out HIV infection--including one young man Hogarth also interviewed, Doug Hitzel. The article was a tad salacious, but only because the subject--gay men trying to get infected--seemed so unheard of.
The story caused a flurry of activity once it appeared. The Drudge Report turned its contested statistics--i.e., that 25 percent of new infections are caused by bug-chasing--into a headline banner, and everybody from Newsweek to conservative queer writer Andrew Sullivan labeled Freeman and Rolling Stone sensationalistic.
It's understandable why. Public discussion of HIV/AIDS has been drastically reduced since its politically sexy heyday in the late 1980s. Now, even though AIDS/HIV prevention and management hasn't changed that much since the advent of safe-sex campaigns and AZT drug cocktails, the topic has drifted out of the view of straight media, while gay media toe a party line established almost 20 years ago.
No wonder the media freaked out about the Rolling Stone story; it wasn't what everybody was already comfortable with. Conservative straight media find bug-chasing morally reprehensible, gay media think it portrays a bad image, and liberal straight media feel it might sound mean to attack HIV+ men.
The ire the article drew was misplaced, though. While that 25 percent stat has been vehemently and thoroughly disproved (most contend that the rate due to bug-chasing is much lower), what has thus far been lost in almost all the coverage so far has been that number's greater significance. Whatever the rate of new infections caused by gay men seeking seroconversion, it still means that an overwhelming number of sexually transmitted new infections among gay males is caused by--as Dan Savage pointed out in his Feb. 20 Savage Love column--"gay male stupidity, recklessness, naiveté, and bad luck."
And unlike new HIV/AIDS drug therapies, which take millions of dollars and years of research to develop, stupidity, recklessness, and naiveté can be corrected right now. All it takes is for people to start talking about HIV/AIDS risks again.
"And that's the whole intent, especially for gay men, because they don't discuss it at all," Hogarth says. "The HIV rates in this country are way up. It's way up in the black community. It's a waiting avalanche that's waiting to come down. A lot of people don't test anymore, so you need for them to get sick [for the infection to be discovered], which takes about 10 years. And that's not the truth. We have to start telling the truth. And that would be the best thing that could come of [the documentary]--that people would start talking again and become aware of the risk."
explain the details man. C'mon.....you've put so much thought into the ethical theory behind
Last attempt: T If the answer is no then everyone should just shut up...hetero is okay, cousins are okay, polygamy is okay, bi is okay; gay is okay, 13-year olds are okay, and one or one-hundred-at-a-time are okay, et. al. However, if a society decides that certain rules about who does whom when and where is functional and perhaps even necessary, all that is left is to decide is Van & Katherine Jenerette
Bug chasing isn't exactly a huge movement. What would you have said BEFORE the almost completely trashed Rolling Stone article?
Bug chasing may not be huge but it surely shows some homosexuals are just that much more confused. They are so caught up in their sexual behavior they appear to be mentally unstable.
You mean, that you know of.
I find it quite bizarre as well that anyone would seek out such a disease.
"The Rolling Stone article was probably wrong on the 25% figure but not the fact that some homosexuals chase after a deadly disease."
Not probably. Definitely wrong, even as a ballpark figure.
"Bug chasing may not be huge but it surely shows some homosexuals are just that much more confused."
Well, I have to half agree with you. I think anyone who attempts to contract such a thing is delusional.
"They are so caught up in their sexual behavior they appear to be mentally unstable."
Well keeping in mind that this only applies to a small number of gays, I think the question is why they seek it. I haven't seen the documentary, but I suspect it has something to do with the politicization of AIDS since it is mainly known as a "gay disease".
Not every report I've read states the 25% figure is definitely wrong, but probably wrong, which is why I used it that way.
From the article:
"And that's the whole intent, especially for gay men, because they don't discuss it at all," Hogarth says. "The HIV rates in this country are way up. It's way up in the black community. It's a waiting avalanche that's waiting to come down. A lot of people don't test anymore, so you need for them to get sick [for the infection to be discovered], which takes about 10 years. And that's not the truth. We have to start telling the truth. And that would be the best thing that could come of [the documentary]--that people would start talking again and become aware of the risk."
And that's why I want GLSEN and other groups out of the schools. Not even the gay community is talking about the severe health hazards of the gay lifestyle, yet we have GLSEN in the schools and gay groups saying it's okay to be gay without a single reference to the severe health hazards.
No I don't, but until extremely recently we didn't know of any reports saying that gay men chased HIV. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
"Not every report I've read states the 25% figure is definitely wrong, but probably wrong, which is why I used it that way."
Ok, well my anecdotal experience is telling me that 25% is completely out of the park. That article makes Jayson Blair look like a credible journalist.
"And that's why I want GLSEN and other groups out of the schools."
You want them out of the schools for not telling people that promiscuous, unprotected sex is dangerous? That's true for everyone.
"Not even the gay community is talking about the severe health hazards of the gay lifestyle"
You mean, the severe health hazards of promiscuous, unprotected sex.
"have GLSEN in the schools"
First of all, show where GLSEN is "in the schools".
And you won't find any mentally stable person chasing after a deadly disease.
Ok, well my anecdotal experience is telling me that 25% is completely out of the park.
You're probably right. The 25% figure is probably wrong, but the main story line of the Rolling Stones article and the Acting Up article is that there are some homosexuals chasing after a deadly disease. The film documents this tragedy.
We don't have heterosexual groups in the schools telling kids to try dangerous sex acts or that it's okay to try dangerous sex acts without discussing the severe health hazards. We don't have heterosexual pride parades. Heterosexuals don't base their identity on their sexual behavior.
AIDS is a gay disease, and one of the goals of the film is to get the gay community, and perhaps others, talking about it.
You're being intellectually dishonest here. GLSEN is definitely in the schools and you know it. Did you even try looking at the GLSEN site? Click here for a Google search, if you dare.
creating safe schools for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender peopleBut no, they're not in the schools. </sarcasm>
GLSEN Encourages Teens In Anal SEX "Don't give up."
That goes without saying.
"We don't have heterosexual groups in the schools telling kids to try dangerous sex acts or that it's okay to try dangerous sex acts without discussing the severe health hazards."
I had sex ed not THAT long ago, in hyper liberal NJ. It was hardly a homosexual indoctrination effort. In fact, they mentioned that some people were homosexual... and that was IT.
"We don't have heterosexual pride parades."
Of course not. Heterosexuals don't have a history of being discriminated against.
"Heterosexuals don't base their identity on their sexual behavior."
Why would they? They are the majority. Still, people who base their ENTIRE identity on anything are boring. Most gay people don't do that.
What exactly are you including to mean "IN" a school?
Those pushing the gay agenda base their identity on their sexual behavior. That's really sad. And I want it out of the schools.
What part are you objecting to? Safe?
Anyway, READ the site... GLSEN itself is not involved with schools. They have recommendations on reading material and information about how students can start gay/straight alliances.
How does that make them part of any particular school?
I just was made aware of this thread via:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1495739/posts
I generally don't post to old threads, but I'll make an exception here, to place something in the record:
Anyone who thinks GLSEN is benign can put "fistgate" in a search and have their eyes opened.
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