The Gift

The documentary is about deliberately contracting HIV. The practice appeared among a small number of gay men. Among themselves they called the infection a gift. The film follows two people who made that choice. One of them is Doug Hitzel. The young man moved from his home town to San Francisco. He was looking for a community he could belong to. He went down this road because he did not find it. The documentary gives what he says without cutting it. Specialists are interviewed alongside him. The psychologist Walt Odets sets out his view. Men with and without HIV speak as well. The film discusses how the illness came to be treated as ordinary. Doug Hitzel speaks in the sixty two minute documentary. It is an American production Louise Hogarth finished in 2003.