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).
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