by Douglas
Messerli
Jamal
Caesar (screenwriter and director) Posi+ive / 2009 [8 minutes]
If there was ever
a film in which you almost felt that the homophobic villain received his due,
it would be Jamal Caesar’s 2009 short work, Positive. Yet no one wishes
that anyone might have to suffer the dread results of becoming HIV-positive,
even at a time when there are drugs to help protect the infected individual
from suffering AIDS.
Tony (LoDeon), a furious young black man,
has evidently received the address of where his young brother has spent the
night, and is determined, since it apparently involves sharing the bed of another
boy, to correct the situation and alter his brother’s gay behavior.
Elena (Taina Elena) attempts to stop him,
to make sure that he knows what he’s doing, but Tony proceeds, forcing his way
into Stefan’s (Daniel Dugan) apartment past his elderly mother (Sonseray Reed)
to discover his younger brother Jamie (Jabari Brisport) in bed with the other
boy.
Jamie keeps trying to insist that they
were simply laying together, not engaging in sex, but Tony cannot comprehend
that there might be a difference until the others finally reveal to him that
Stefan is HIV-positive, and that not Tony also might be infected.
There is something almost anti-gay in the
fact that director Cesar has used this disease to revenge homophobia, as if all
the lies about AIDS being a gay disease and that even coming into contact with
a gay man might infect others were truth. By 2009 we had long realized that in
some countries, females were more commonly the carriers than males, and that
HIV as transmitted sexually by both men and women, not simply by gay men.
Yet, as I suggested in my first sentence,
there is something satisfying that such hatred, in this particular case, ended
in the infection of a man who mistakenly presumes he is safe from such a
disease because he is straight.
It might have been far more interesting, however,
if we had seen some of the incidents that led to these violent few minutes
which built up such utter fear and anger in Jamie’s older brother? Had Jamie
been sexually active for some while, with Tony attempting to control him. Was
this simply a sudden discovery which resulted in such a mad rush to protect his
sibling? And who is Stefan, and how has Jaime come to know him? And finally,
why is he in the bed of a man who is HIV-positive? We can certainly
imagine all sorts of scenarios, but it would help us to know who these
characters are in order to understand their behaviors.
Los Angeles,
September 8, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).
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