Matt Wolf | Another Hayride / 2021 [documentary]

healing without a cure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Wolf (director) Another Hayride / 2021 [18 minutes] [documentary]

 

For those of you who never experienced rural life in mid-century US, a hayride, as described by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “pleasure ride usually at night by a group in a wagon, sleigh, or open truck partly filled with straw or hay.” In the small town in Iowa where I grew up, church groups commonly brought together young teenagers in such a festive evening, which involved some controlled flirtation perhaps between the sexes, but mostly consisting of a possibility of open-air if bodily contained conversation.

      Its later urban meanings take the term in all sorts of sexual directions, the most common being a sexual meeting up in a hayloft or barn between boys—just a couple or even more. But for me it also connotates the idea of being “taken” for what appears will be a pleasant ride which quickly becomes something far more nefarious and unpleasant. It might promise a pleasant social engagement but just as suddenly involve a robbery or even a rape for the naïve individual who has willingly agreed to take the journey.

      It’s ironic, accordingly, that such a term might be used by self-help guru Louise Hay, who in the mid-1980s, when gay men suddenly began dying from a new disease not yet fully comprehended and basically ignored by city, state, and the national authorities. Even most doctors could not yet fully explain the causes of or full effects of being HIV-positive or having contracted a full-out case of AIDS. Believing it to be a contagious epidemic or a disease that struck down only sexually active gay men, friends and family often turned away from those who stricken, family members often becoming aware of their son’s sexuality only through the pronouncement of what was generally perceived as a death sentence. As Albert J. Bresson’s film Buddies makes clear, by 1985 New York City was only beginning to have opened up AIDS clinics, which makes clear throughout the rest of US there was virtually no one to turn to.

       Matt Wolf’s truly informative documentary takes us on the real “hayride” journeys of Louise Hay, evidently a well-meaning woman, a former model, who felt that she had herself been cured of cervical cancer just by ridding herself of bad thoughts and focusing on forgiveness and love, along with good nutrition and other home-healing remedies. Already in 1976, she had written a pamphlet on her self-cure methods, Heal Your Body, listing different ailments and their supposedly metaphysical causes. And by 1984, just when gay communities were truly beginning to have to face the concerns of AIDS, she published You Can Heal Your Life, which quickly became a bestseller.

    Wolf’s film recounts how Hay immediately began to focus on helping members of the gay community at such a terrible moment, meeting with a few young men in her home, describing the sessions of her West Hollywood, Los Angeles home as “hayrides.”

      Without any medical possibilities of a cure, gay men begin to invite friends, even those not currently HIV-positive, to what Wolf’s film’s narrator, David Ault, describes as something that seemed close to a religious or church event. The narrator, having recently moved from a small town to Los Angeles and feeling quite alone, suddenly runs into an old school friend on Melrose who asks what he’s doing Wednesday night. “And I thought he was inviting me to church. Truth be told, I had enormous crush on him.”

       Before long her hayrides had expanded into large gay gatherings of 600 individuals with her leading healing sessions, with Hay arguing—just as she later did on talks shows with Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue—“I don’t heal anybody. That’s not what I do. I just provide a space where we can uncover how absolutely wonderful we really are. And they are able to heal themselves.”

        The narrator admits that he was immediately “hooked,” discovering the true meaning of cultivating your own family. He points out that, at first, he found it very empowering because if he could possibly, through his own thoughts, have given himself AIDS, then he might also be able to take it away.

        In times of desperation, logic was tossed out. Hays continued to argue against the current medical opinion that AIDS was simply fatal. She insisted that “we know that not to be true,” without providing, of course, any evidence of long-term survival other than those of her “hayride” who had felt stronger for periods of time, lasting even years. One figure, whose disease had evidently been reversed, did appear with her on her talk shows.

       The new age guru spoke primarily of the limitations of the mind, and the body to mind relationship, issues that have long been known to be actual factors in the longer survival of ill individuals. She spoke, moreover, authoritatively with a reassuring and motherly voice. In her signature method, the “mirror work,” the individual peering into the mirror while repeating “I am willing to change,” the very same exercise that the gay guru of Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995) imposes upon his suffering disciples.

         Yet, watching her lift so many people out of an unprecedented despair, “a pandemic, a violation of humanity,” the narrator notes that it found it impossible not to admire Hay’s work. “Your savior is right here in the mirror,” repeats Hay, seemingly giving her “disciples” all the power. And how can one not be touched by seeing young handsome men realizing how many times they’ve told themselves to “hurry up and die,” finding new hope in Hay’s approach. The narrator became swept up in what he himself jokes was Hay’s “New Age boy band,” an act that proceeded her own entry into the auditorium, a technique well known by self-promotion evangelists as early as the 19th century and used in the 20th by figures such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple McPherson. The narrator is further involved in that Hay became just like a mother to him, noting that he’d never had that kind of parental love before.

         As The New York Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer put it, if it hadn’t been for AIDS, Louise Hay would be just another woman teaching workshops on how to love yourself. And gradually as even her gay advocates began to perceive, their peers were still dying in large numbers. The film’s narrator remembers attending 70 memorials in a single year. All the self-healing in the world wasn’t stopping the horrific march of the dread disease.

         Even the narrator finally admits that there as a vast difference between “curing and healing,” and whatever pure intent Hay had in helping the community she couldn’t stop the medical realities which she had herself denied.

         One gets the sense, however, that even Wolf’s revealing documentary dares not explore the evils that Hay truly committed, that in partially blaming the victims themselves for their own disease and asking them to cure it, she deflected the attention these same individuals and others might have put into forcing the government to more fully fund research and demanding the medical profession become more transparent in their efforts to find a cure and resolve their seemingly unresolvable fears. Despite laying on a hospital bed dying, the focus of Bressan’s remarkable 1985 film Buddies was not self-blame, but justifiable anger that led to protests that might, in turn, lead to action which could help to save other lives. Upon the hero’s death, his new buddy, takes the first train to Washington, D.C. and, placard in hand, marches before the White House, an act that may have seemed meaningless, but in reality was the beginning of what changed everything.

         Hay died in her sleep in 2017 at age 90, without perhaps ever coming to terms with the fact that had she spent even 1/3 of energy she spent looking into the mirror by looking into the eyes of men like Reagan and promoting the activities of groups such as ACT UP she might have truly benefited all those sad young dying men.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).