24th Day

The other day, I went to El Futuro, a local Latino gay men drop-in center to watch a video. The movie was 24th Day, by Director-Tony Piccirillo

The story revolves around the relationship between Dan ( JAMES MARSDEN ) who finds himself out drinking one night were he meets Tom ( SCOTT SPEEDMAN); both end up getting drunk and decide to continue the revelry at Tom’s apartment. There everything changes suddenly: Dan realizes that he’d been there five years before ... but he does not remember anything. Tom on the other hand remembers everything from that night. Becoming uncomfortable, Dan decides he wants to leave. But this meeting was not an accident, Tom had been planning it since his wife died three weeks before in an accident after finding out that she had contracted the AIDS and that Tom, without knowing it, had transmitted it to her. Now Tom, who is not homosexual and who just has had a slip-up in his marriage, meets the only person who could have contracted it to him. Tom ties Dan and extracts blood. Dan insists that he has always practiced safe sex and he is not positive. Tom assures him that if the tests comes up positive, he will kill him.

After the viewing, we had a discussion and I was reminded of this quote from the Russian author, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, who said:

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself.