AIDS Educator-Activist Headlines Saturday at NewFest

NewFest is proud to present Sex in an Epidemic, a pioneering documentary by Jean Carlomusto “exploring the personal, political and structural challenges… of HIV educators.”

A longtime feminist and community activist, Carlomusto was at the front lines of efforts to curb the spread of AIDS at the onset of the terrifying new disease; as a career videographer and documentarian, she was in the unique position to interview many of the early important figures in the fight against HIV. It is her own footage, along with archival interviews from the New York LGBT Center, the Lesbian Herstory Archives and other organizations, that lay the foundation for her story.

NewFest spoke to the filmmaker-historian a day ahead of her film’s Saturday screening.

I can honestly say this is a movie that should be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

I agree. The reason I made it is because I wanted to start a larger dialogue once again, because it seems like AIDS and HIV prevention have completely slipped off the map. You know, that wouldn’t be a bad thing if the numbers weren’t rising. In this country we’re getting more than 60,000 new cases a year, and that’s simply unsustainable. I should think by now that the numbers would be less than half of that, but they’re not.

Well, to begin with you call the movie Sex in an Epidemic. A lot of people don’t even view this as an epidemic any more.

That’s completely true. They think the epidemic is in Africa.

Do you think that this complacency stems from the comfort level created by the development of life-prolonging drugs, protease inhibitors and others, over the last 15 years?

It’s partially that. It’s partially that the politics have really moved on. Right now I see how much of the energy is focused on issues of same sex marriage and transgender issues. While I think they’re both very important issues, I don’t think we can afford to be cavalier about HIV. It’s amazing to me. I really don’t think we would even be talking about same sex marriage and transgender issues at all if it weren’t for the real political mobilization that came after HIV. We just wouldn’t be here; the system wouldn’t be in place.

I have always been particularly moved, watching movies like yours, to see how lesbians have been at the forefront in the fight against HIV from day one. It’s ironic, because lesbians are the group least likely, because of the way HIV is transmitted, to acquire the disease. So here’s a tough question. Do you think if the shoe were on the other foot, and it was the women who were getting sick, that the gay men would have come out fighting for you the way you did for us?

It’s a real loaded question, one that I don’t have the answer to. I think they would have…  because the disease occurred first in the gay male population, we saw the fight against AIDS, initially, as part of a larger fight against homophobia in general. We felt like, this is homophobia, and because we’re homosexuals too, we have to do something about it. As I got more involved I saw how things permeated, that is, how a lot of other social ills were exposed (by the AIDS crisis) but I have to say it was homophobia that provided the initial spark to get so many lesbians involved.

Of course, I don’t know if I can speak for all lesbians on that. I think a lot of women got into the movement out of concerns about the health care system. At least that was my take on it at the time. But certainly in New York, people were so scared, so afraid of anything gay. Gay people had become pariahs, so homophobia was a huge concern.

Did you happen to know many people, before you became an activist, who were diagnosed with AIDS?

As I got more involved with HIV, I started to meet more and more people living with it. In the early days, yes, I knew a few people, but I was also aware that the numbers were rising. I started volunteering at Gay Men’s Health Crisis around ’86, and of course I started to meet a lot more guys who were sick; that’s when people were dying a lot quicker. I had about two or three different supervisors at GMHC… Joey Leonte, for example, who’s interviewed in the film, is the guy who hired me. He’s no longer with us. The way things went there quickly because repetitive: people would start to get sick, then a short while later they’d be cleaning out their desks, then a short while after that you’d be sitting at their memorial service. It was horrible.

More about those early days. You provide some fascinating interview footage with AIDS activist Larry Kramer and other gay men whose approach to battling the disease was to get the word out to as many people as possible, and to scare everybody about AIDS. Others, including a doctor you interviewed, said it was better to err on the side of caution, and avoid panic. As an activist on the front line of the fight from the beginning, where did you fall on that discussion at the time?

Simple. Early on, GMHC was following the CDC’s recommendations, which was to limit the number of your sexual partners, to not do poppers, not to go to the bathhouses. That was the early information we were giving out. It was a very, very hard situation to be in at the time. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to make the film. I feel for Larry Mass — the doctor everybody was coming to (for questions about AIDS) at a time when nobody really knew what the truth was. As a physician, he didn’t have a theory that told him, hey, this is a one shot deal — a disease you could get from just one sexual encounter – and that you just shouldn’t have sex at all without a rubber. (Noted AIDS researcher and physician) Joe Sonnabend came up with a lot of that early information, but he had a model that was ultimately false. It was based on bactorialism, but still, were ideas that allowed him to come up with some very useful safer sex guidelines, many of which were still usable even after the HIV virus was discovered.

We all look back with pride, now, at a lot of the anti-AIDS activism, and the protest actions conducted by ACT UP, Queer Nation, and other groups back in the day. But there was a real controversy surrounding that kind of aggressive approach to demanding funding for HIV at the time, that I don’t think younger people really understand. There were big differences within the gay community as well as to how the fight against AIDS should be approached.

In New York, most of the controversy centered around the St. Patrick’s church action (On December 10, 1989, approximately 5,000 members of ACT UP and WHAM protested outside of the cathedral, while 43 people disrupted mass, in a demonstration against Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor’s public stand against AIDS education and condom distribution in public high schools, and abortion.-Eds.) The media clamped on to it in a way that never really went away. Initially they had been kind of supportive, or at least were getting there, but things started to turn when they started to document the outrage that a Catholic mass had been interrupted.

Television stations all over the country ran that story, and the reaction to it, for days after the incident.

Yes, and it certainly raised questions about what kind of approach we should be taking within the group as well, even within ACT UP and other political groups. People were wondering if we went too far. I’ll never forget Ray Novarro, an activist at the time, who said something important: that we shouldn’t let the media redefine this event. That action happened at a time when the church was taking a very political stand that was destructive and was killing people; the gentleman who knocked the host out of the cardinal’s hands was a Catholic who had grown up in the system, and that is where he took it (his activism.)

Taken in context, it makes a lot more sense as an act of protest, whether you agree with what the guy did or not.

That got a lot of play. But one thing that I liked about that action, which didn’t get a lot of play at the time, was the fact that it was co-sponsored by WHAM, the Women’s Health Action Mobilization. They were really great about talking about women’s issues. On a larger scale, I thought their presence there was a great example of some of the types of bridge-building going on.

You make an interesting point in Sex in an Epidemic: that, for many men affected during the early days of AIDS, sleeping around meant much more than just having a good time. It was almost a political act, for those who grew up during the repressive 1950s.

That’s a big part of what the film’s about. As a documentarian who interviewed all of these guys… after HIV was discovered, and people could all agree what the basic outline for promoting safer sex should be, groups like GMHC spent an awful lot of time bringing in some very creative folks figuring out how to drive the safer sex message across. So, you had somebody like Raymond Jacobs – he was this fabulous theater queen who had been in the original cast of Hair, and used to talk about dancing naked on stage – who pioneered how to talk about prevention. So he produced this film called Chance of a Lifetime (1985). The tactic was not to scare people so much, but to simply talk about sex, in a non-judgemental way. Because once you start talking about sex, you realize there are a lot of different ways to have it. That’s the part of the discussion that I really got into, as a lesbian. What I appreciated so much was the fact that this stigmatized population was going back to what created their identity – their sexuality. They were saying, hey, let’s talk about it, let’s figure out fun ways to make it safer.

I’m not romanticizing it. We would even sit around in groups and a facilitator would say, ‘Okay, let’s name every sex act we can think of that doesn’t involve sucking or fucking.’ All of these fascinating things would come up, like shrimping; I would think to myself, oh my god, what is shrinmping? (Laughs) Yes, it’s sucking on toes and it’s safe. (Laughs) But I consider such discussions to be very enlightening. There are all these different sexual modalities that were shared during these discussions, which became a very important part of safe sex education. And you know, these things were just as important for women, which I realized right off the bat, having come from a feminist background. But these early sessions were just as important for gay men, because, at the time, the nightlife and bath house culture didn’t allow for discussions of these different shades of sexuality.

Is there anything in particular you want audiences to think about while viewing Sex in an Epidemic?

I’m really interested in promoting a historical bridge from the past, in a way that shows our history is on a continuum, and that the kind of work you see in my film is still being done today. (That kind of work) needs to be amplified, and we need to go back, constantly, and think about the tragic about of loss we suffered, and out of that loss, what was gained. We gained a lot of momentum for gay rights from that period of time, and that alone should make us at least knowledgeable about the state of HIV prevention.

Evans Forlidas

From our film guide: An engaging and illuminating documentary about the history and evolution of safe sex in the face of a deadly epidemic. Mostly New York based subjects including Act Up activists tell the extraordinary story about how out of a time of panic and chaos came the invention of safe sex, and the subsequent difficulty in publicizing it as a concept because of political opposition. Q&A with Filmmaker. Saturday June 5, 3PM.