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Fales Library: Richard Berkowitz

Collected by: New York University

Archived since: Aug, 2016

Description:

Richard Berkowitz (b. 1955) is a gay American author, AIDS activist, and former sex worker. He graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in communications in 1977. While at Rutgers, he wrote for the campus newspaper, The Daily Targum, and organized the first gay rights protest in New Jersey in 1976. After graduation, he attended New York University's (NYU) Graduate School of Film for one year. He moved to the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and worked as a sex worker, specifically as an S&M dominant, between 1978 and 1982. In the late 1970s, Berkowitz met Dr. Joseph Sonnabend while seeking treatment at the Gay Men's Health Project clinic in New York City. In 1982, Berkowitz was diagnosed with AIDS. In laying out treatment options, Sonnabend shared his multifactorial theory of AIDS, which held that AIDS was caused by repeated exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), in particular cytomegalovirus, and semen. This theory was in opposition to the more widely held theory at the time that a single, new infectious agent was the cause of AIDS. Berkowitz felt that gay men needed to know their risk of contracting AIDS and Sonnabend offered to introduce him to another of his patients with AIDS, Michael Callen, who was also interested in spreading this information to the gay community. Together, the three men are credited with creating the concept of safe sex. Berkowitz and Callen formed the support group Gay Men with AIDS and began writing about the multifactorial theory, AIDS, and safe sex. They wrote We Know Who We Are, a warning to sexually active gay men with AIDS in New York, (published in the New York Native in 1982) and the first safe sex guide, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, published in 1983. They began making television appearances; speaking to support groups, legislators, and others; writing about AIDS; and were founding members of the People with AIDS Coalition. Callen died in 1993 from AIDS-related complications. Sonnabend co-founded the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983, and continued writing about AIDS issues and serving in private practice until his retirement in 2005. Berkowitz continued to write about AIDS, safe sex, and gay rights issues throughout the 1980s and into the 2000s. He returned to sex work in the late 1980s, promoting himself as a safe sex S&M dominant in Florida and New York. In 2003 he published his autobiography, Stayin' Alive, and in 2008 was the subject of Sex Positive, a documentary written and directed by Daryl Wein.

Subject:   Arts & Humanities

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Title: Richard Berkowitz

URL: https://richardberkowitz.com

Description: Richard Berkowitz is a writer and activist best known for the 1983 booklet 'How to Have Sex in an Epidemic', intended to provide sensible sexual health advice for gay men living through the AIDS epidemic. The site, Berkowitz's personal site, hosts and promotes his writing on safe sex and Berkowitz's experience of New York's LGBTQ culture in the 1970s and promotes Daryl Wein's 2013 documentary 'Sex Positive', which details Berkowitz's safe sex activism since the 1980s.

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