PETER ADAIR: Faces of an Epidemic

PBS’ documentary series “P.O.V.” kicks off its fourth season Tuesday with “Absolutely Positive,” a look at living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“Absolutely Positive” is directed and narrated by award-winning San Francisco filmmaker Peter Adair (“Word Is Out,” “Stopping History”), who also is HIV positive.

After interviewing 120 people, Adair and his producer, Janet Cole, asked 11 people with HIV to share their lives on camera. The witnesses include Doris, a soprano in her Baptist church choir who discovered she was HIV positive when her baby son was diagnosed with AIDS; Gregg, a gay San Francisco-based model, and Juan, a young husband and father who was infected by his late first wife, a drug addict.

Adair talked about “Absolutely Positive” with Susan King.

When were you diagnosed as HIV positive?

I think it was four or five years ago. I am never good at remembering, especially that date.

Janet (Cole) and I had done a lot of AIDS films. When you get tested in California at any public test sight, you had to look at a video on what the test meant and what the virus meant. We did that video and we had done a lot of others.

After about the third video, I thought maybe I should get tested. It was a particular horrifying experience because I had to sit there and look at my own film. It was the ultimate indignity. And then I knew all the people at the test site, so I knew the person who gave me the news. I think it’s better to hear from a friend, but I felt much worse. I could just see by the look in her face what the news was right away. I assumed I was positive, but it’s different when you hear the news. It was pretty horrible.

Did you withdraw?

Yeah, I actually got sort of dizzy for a while and disoriented and then very emotionally cut off. Now, gay men who test positive are likely to know many other gay men who are positive. Back then, not that many people who tested were open about it, even to friends.

I called a friend and said I have been tested and feel terrible and he said, “So am I.” And then we said maybe we should start a support group. We decided each of us would call three friends and ask the friends if they knew anybody (with HIV). Then to our horror, all of those six people were positive. They all joined this group, which is still going on. It’s called The Virus Club and our motto is “Dying to Get In?”

I think the idea for the film happened when we did a training and HIV testing tape for a sexual disease clinic. For that film we shot a number of people who were HIV positive talking about the experience. Their stories were interesting.

About a year later, I realized that there is a big film here. It was clearly a film that would be useful to people. I went to the AIDS Health Project, for whom we had done some AIDS-related films. They gave me seed money.

We began doing pre-interviews. We interviewed 120 people from all over. We get home video cameras and get them in the hands of people in the field, usually home video amateurs, or drug workers in the Bronx, or just friends who are smart and know interesting people. They did those interviews.

The interviews serve many purposes. It’s a fantastic way to inform yourself. By listening to 100 people talk about this predictment, I learned a lot.

It’s also a way to do a screen test. Out of the 120, we picked 11 whom we thought were the most interesting on camera, which is why they are more interesting than the average talking heads.

Were any of your subjects reluctant to open up on camera?

To some degree or another they are all performers. They are very effective in front of the cameras. But it was more difficult for some than others. And when we did the pre-interviews, in every case, the researcher said, “This is just a research interview, but if they do a big film would you be willing to be in it?”

The exception was Doris, the black woman. We had wanted very much to get a black woman and had numerous failures, way over a dozen. They would agree to be pre-interviewed, then they changed their mind. And it became clear that there is utterly no support (within the black community). But with a gay man there is plenty of support in the community.

We actually found Doris through a therapist. We did a pre-interview and she was sensational, but then it was four months before she agreed to be in the film.

She had a hard time. But she is so smart, she really began to realize, correctly so, that she had to come out about the disease, and if she was going to survive the disease she had to come out about it.

Ultimately, I think it’s going to be very beneficial for her. The church has not rejected her and she now is doing public speaking for the disease.

“P.O.V.’s” “Absolutely Positive” airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. on KCET and KPBS.