...The Gift

our motives

Denial = Death

Director Louise Hogarth wanted HIV/AIDS back in the headlines, and she didn’t want The Gift to go unnoticed. As she embarked on the project, she remembered a remarkable documentary she had seen at a festival a few years earlier, and she lamented that she was only one of a handful of people in the audience.

“The film was called Undetectable. It was an outstanding and incredibly important film about HIV/AIDS. The film followed five people with ‘undetectable’ viral loads for three years, in which time three of them died. The filmmaker spent many years making the film, and people were dying, but nobody was seeing it,” said Hogarth.
Hogarth wanted to make sure her film did not meet the same fate. She wanted to peg her documentary on something sensational - something that would get people talking about the increasing rates of infection of HIV and the need for new prevention strategies. In her research, she ran across the phenomenon of “bug chasing” and “gift giving” – the deliberate infection of HIV. It was an extreme example of AIDS/HIV messages gone wrong. This would be her vehicle.
She found many men who were eager to talk about the phenomenon. She found articles, Web sites, clubs, and a wealth of information and resources on the topic dating back to the mid to late 1990s, and she was amazed that the subject had not yet come to the forefront in the gay community. It seemed this was a reality that the community wanted to deny, just as they were denying the reality of AIDS/HIV and the failure of safe sex education.

Statistics show that 60 percent of cases of new infections are among gay men – despite the fact they make up only 5 percent of the population. These numbers made it clear to Hogarth that safe sex messages were not getting through to this at-risk group. In her research, Hogarth found a prevalence of the attitude that the answer to HIV/AIDS is simple – take a pill. It seemed that many gay men, particularly younger gay men, were unaware that the drug cocktails can cause serious side effects, including death. Many also did not know that they could be infected or re-infected by a drug-resistant strain of the virus and that drugs might not be an option. Many thought that once they had the virus, they could have unprotected sex without worry that they could get any sicker.
Hogarth was shocked and saddened by she learned. She knew she needed to get out the truth about HIV/AIDS. She wanted to re-start discussion about AIDS that she hoped would spark a re-launching of the prevention movement. She knew she would face opposition from those who were invested in the prevention movements of the past and those who supported the pharmaceutical industry, but the issues were too important to ignore.

“AIDS was viewed as a short-term health crisis in the beginning, and the early strategies worked. Everyone was terrified of getting it. The prevention efforts were successful and the infection rate was reduced significantly, but then people stopped talking about AIDS. They viewed it as a treatable, management disease. The pharmaceutical ads and the safe sex campaigns inadvertently glamorized and eroticised HIV/AIDS. People started to believe that getting HIV/AIDS was ‘no big deal. Nobody wanted to admit that prevention efforts in the gay community were failing, and that the answer to AIDS/HIV isn’t drugs; the answer is keeping people uninfected,” said Hogarth.

Hogarth felt an imperative to act as she witnessed the international implications of American prevention messages being exported to other countries. During a recent trip to Africa, Hogarth discovered that the same safe sex campaigns used in America were being used in Africa resulting in women there deliberately seeing infection from HIV positive men. Also during her visit, she was shocked to find that barebacking “gift-giving” parties were taking place just miles from her hotel in Johannesburg. The glamorization of HIV was spreading globally.
“Without shame and blame, I wanted to explore the story of what went wrong with our prevention efforts and how we arrived at this place where people didn’t care if they got infected. I wanted to delve into the isolation of HIV negative men and the guilt of AIDS survivors that leads them to want to be HIV positive. The issues are complex, and the solutions are not easy, but we cannot begin to address them until we stop denying them,” said Hogarth.

With a dedicated crew of hard-working professionals and volunteers, Hogarth set out to present The Gift. With a grant from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and donated office space, Hogarth self-financed the project which took two and a half years to complete. The film premiered at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival where it made international headlines for its cutting-edge content and challenging message. The film is currently showing to standing-room-only theatre houses at film festivals across the US and around the world.