viewer reactions

zThe Gift

.A Documentary by Louise Hogarth

The bottom line is that your creation was a vehicle of truth, a truth that both comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Bravo for you Louise! May you wear the vehement protests of your detractors as badges of honor and strength. For too long the gay community has raised hedonism to a religious level of worship.

Long before AIDS existed the seeds of plague were sown into the consciousness of gay men in the form of low self-esteem, internalized homophobia and a thanatological wish that would have made Freud wince. Some gay men have bought into a limiting belief system that is killing them from the inside out. ... We, as gay men, desperately need to confront why we are killing ourselves and members of our own tribe. It goes deeper than self-hatred. There is a spiritual root behind barebacking, AIDS, internalized homophobia and many other components of gay culture. What we have in the case of barebackers, in part, is a collective death wish of a chilling magnitude.

Barebacking has become a somewhat socially tolerated euphemism for slow suicide. It is clear that the level of self-hatred is so powerful that suicide in the form of AIDS is preferable over living and confronting ones issues. When life becomes so painful and intolerable then death is the only answer in the mind of a lost soul who is steeped in self-denial. It is a way of pressing the cosmic reset button and exiting a life of suffering while assuming the role of victim or victimizer. "I won't allow this virus to capture me. I will capture it first." This thought is ironic since they do wind up victims, not of the virus, but of themselves and their devastating choices. Their choice to be a “bug chaser” goes beyond a fatalistic attitude. It very conveniently gives the one who has seroconverted the license to be sexually irresponsible in a Peter Pan like way.

There is something very demonic and demented about this line of pathological logic. It also inevitably does not work since they will only return to learn the lessons that they did not master during this lifetime. ...

Another thing that I loved about your film's brutal honesty is that it raises more questions than it answers. For example, now that gay men know more about barebacking what excuse is there for their looking the other way. If there is a barebacking party house in town why aren't we picketing in front of their house 24 hours a day with signs exposing the murder and suicide that is taking place for all to see. We feel far more comfortable with laying the blame at the feet of the government or the pharmaceutical companies or some other external source than we do with taking ownership over our own actions as a first step in establishing dominion over this epidemic.

I now undersigned the deeper meaning behind the title of your film. It is called "The Gift" because your film is a gift that the wise man can keep. It is a gift that promotes life and does not steal it.

Wishing you peace and continued success in your endeavors,

George Tower
Miami, FL