CineKink NYC 2009

When young Richard Berkowitz arrived in New York City in the late 1970s, the sexual revolution was at its peak and, in a time when gay men lived and loved with wild abandon, he found and enjoyed lucrative work as an S/M top.

And then he developed AIDS. Transforming himself from sex worker to ground-breaking AIDS activist, Berkowitz collaborated with performer Michael Callen and virologist Dr. Joseph Sonnabend to investigate and bring attention to the illness, and he helped author the first safe-sex manual. But instead of being lauded for such efforts, the assertion that a hedonistic lifestyle was contributing to the transmission of AIDS was denounced as self-hating and sex-negative, as few people--just as they were enjoying new freedoms--were ready to accept that they might be endangering their health with their choices.

With safer-sex practices such a common-sense occurrence for many today, it’s hard to remember that they weren’t always in existence and Berkowitz's influence on our early awareness has been all but forgotten. In the face of this, SEX POSITIVE weaves an absorbing story of an activist hero—and places something we now take for granted in a proper historical context.