Hemo2Homo Connection: There Will Be Blood
January 30, 2008
The Hemo2Homo Connection Movie ReviewofThere Will Be Blood
The Hemo2Homo Connection are Shawn Decker and Steve Schalchlin.
The Hemo2Homo Connection’s creators met online in 1996, and posted their first movie review in 1998. Both have been living with HIV for over twenty years, and have annoyed their friends and loved ones for longer than that. Steve Schalchlin resides in Los Angeles, CA. He is an award-winning musician, singer and songwriter. Shawn Decker lives in Charlottesville, VA. He is the author of My Pet Virus.
Hemo: Well hidey-ho thar, thickblood. *tip of the hat*
Homo: I’m glad we’re continuing our blood brother theme for this round of movie reviews. It’s what binds us together, that positoid virus coursing through our veins.
Hemo: It sure is, pahdnur. That, and that ol’ love for them thar movies coursin’ right alongside that virus. And a strut; we both have a certain way of carryin’ ourselves.
Homo: Stop it with the cowboy speak, unless yer lookin’ fer sum Brokeback action, Cowpoke.
Hemo: Read ya loud and clear, pahdnur. *one last tip of the hat*
Homo: Good Lord. This is not a cowboy movie. It’s a BLOOD movie. Well, not really. There was lots of oil but not a lot of blood. They should have called it “There Will Be Gunk.”
Homo: That’s better. It rhymes! (I bow to your superior wordsmanship). But how about “There Will Be Mudslinging”? The story of this Presidential election. Or Britney’s life.
Homo: I’m sorry. I had my hearing aid turned down. What was that again, sonny?
Hemo: What, are you deaf now? Or faking it to get out of doing any work, like the kid in the movie? That good-for-nothin’, lyin’, cheatin’ little…
Homo: OK, OK, don’t get your blood in a clot. I have to say I liked that this movie was very deliberately paced, but still was very gripping.
Hemo: Reminded me of an infusion of factor: it was done slowly, but with purpose. (Check out a fellow thinblood, Drew, and watch him infuse himself here.)
Homo: The lead character, as well-played as he was, still seemed like exactly what he was: an all-bad character from a muckraking novel written in the early 20th century. With not one redeeming feature.
Hemo: Wait, are you kidding? Not ONE redeeming feature?
Homo: No, not unless I missed something.
Hemo: Dude: the guy had two bowling lanes installed in his basement! I’d kill all of my friends and family if I had a bowling alley in my home to entertain myself with. What I’m saying is: if he liked to bowl, how bad could he be?
Hemo: Really? I was trying to bait you into a barroom brawl, pahdnur.
Homo: Okay. That’s it. Now there really WILL be blood. Do I have to get all Rambo on you to shut up that phony cowboy talk?
Homo: I have no idea. I spent the entire movie wondering why that deaf kid was playing with matches.
Hemo: I was on to him. The wonder twins got me. Which is why I have a couple of rules about twins in movies.
Homo: Or c) having sex together in a porn movie (though I had different twins in mind than you).
Hemo: I’d send this one in for more tests. Aside from the mystery twins, I enjoyed watching but- surprise- I wanted way more blood. Which brings me to our next movie review: whaddayasay we complete our January Bloodfest Trifecta with… Rambo!
Homo: Oh Lordy: They were right. Spending too much time with me has made you… gay.
Will Steve see Rambo? Is the Hemo2Homo Connection in danger of becoming the Homo2Homo Connection? Find out, only on the next installment of the Hemo2Homo Connection!
In the meantime, visit Shawn Decker and Steve Schalchlin online.
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The State of the Blog Address
January 28, 2008
Fellow Readers, Bleeders and Greeters,
In Recent times, this blog has seen both good and bad times. From the resurrection of the Hemo2Homo Connection to the mixed results of the Weekend Predictions, you have stayed true and realized that I am indeed a better blogger than Perez Hilton, and that I was blue-hair blogging when he was still eating belly-button lint and paint chips.
But, despite all of that, I know some of you have wondered: can Shawn go on? Will he keep blogging, as he bravely battles his pet virus and delusions of grandeur? And to that I say, with a heavy, thinblooded heart and an unwavering American soul: YES!
A blog’s health does not always correlate with the health of its author. But on my front, I’m happy to say that both are thriving. And as 2008 continues, I will continue to blog about me, me somemore, other people, politics, sports, my pet virus, HIV/AIDS and whatever else I am thinking about when I sit down at the laptop.
So thanks for reading: I hope you enjoy doing so as much as I love to write this junk.
Positively Yours,
Shawn
The Hemo2Homo Connection: Sweeney Todd
January 25, 2008
The Hemo2Homo Connection are Shawn Decker and Steve Schalchlin.
The Hemo2Homo Connection’s creators met online in 1996, and posted their first movie review in 1998. Both have been living with HIV for over twenty years, and have annoyed their friends and loved ones for longer than that. Steve Schalchlin resides in Los Angeles, CA. He is an award-winning musician, singer and songwriter. Shawn Decker lives in Charlottesville, VA. He is the author of My Pet Virus.
Homo: Hey, Hemo.
Hemo: Hey, Homo. You still alive?
Homo: Wait. Let me check my pulse. Ah, something’s throbbing. Yes, I’m alive! You’re that same thinblood-hemophiliac guy, right?
Hemo: Yup, same thinblood. It’s been 10 years since our first review, can you believe that?
Homo: And they said we’d never make it.
Hemo: Life expectancies of people with HIV/AIDS have gone way up since then.
Homo: And that’s a good thing, right?
Hemo: Yes! But expectancies for honest movie-reviews have gone up as well. So the pressure is on. Why don’t you pick the first review back?
Homo: I love it when I get to be the top.
Hemo: Is that a hole in the bottom of your tub of popcorn, or are you just happy to see me? Either way, I am excited to hear what you have on tap, what, with all the late-breaking technological advances in movie-making.
Homo: I thought our new return to form should start with… a nice, refreshing musical!
Hemo: Oh, dear God.
Homo: After all, being gay and all, homos like me are supposed to love musicals. And why not start with the bloodiest one of all: Sweeney Todd.
Hemo: A musical… with blood? Tell me more.
Homo: Well, see, it’s about this barber in London who slits peoples’ throats out of revenge for some judge stealing his wife and sending him away to Australia or something. (Back then, the worst thing they could do to you was to send you to Australia). After he gets back to London, he meets up with this chick who owns a pie shop, so they create this trap in the floor over the pie shop that sends the bodies down into an oven where they bake the bodies into pies.
Hemo: Fun!
Homo: I should let you know in advance that I’m a bit predisposed to wanting to love this one because it was the first Broadway musical I ever saw. Right in the front loge, looking at the original cast of Len Cariou, who I didn’t know anything about.
And Angela Lansbury, who I did.
Hemo: Wait… you did Angela Lansbury?
Homo: No, thinblood. Try to stay with me here, I’m setting a mood…. where was I…
Oh, yes!
The opening sound of the stage musical was an authentic steam whistle that they got right off a ship. It sent chills up and down my spine and forever turned me into a show queen — as long as the show was about serial killers and whores.
But, God, forgive me, I have a confession to make: I still can’t sit all the way through Oklahoma.
Hemo: I hear ya, thickblood. I rented Rent, and had to stop watching after 6 minutes. I got halfway through the guy on the motorcycle, singing as he whizzed down the street. If you’re on a motorcycle in a movie, you best be firing away at someone with a gun, or shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Or chucking a grenade at robots.
Homo: Actually, you lasted longer than I did. But Rent- like almost all movie musicals- sucked.
(INSPIRED BY HOMO’S WORDS AND THE PROMISE OF BLOODSHED, HEMO MAKES THE THE SPELL-BINDING JOURNEY TO THE THEATRE.)
Hemo: You weren’t lying, this movie is a hemophiliac’s wet dream!
Homo: What did I tell ya? The blood really flows in this one! A Horror movie where everyone sings and many throats are slit.
Hemo: Yeah, and if our little movie review doesn’t bring together the hemophilia and gay communities, than Sweeney Todd most certainly will.
Homo: Amen to that. And you gotta love that scene in the bakery with the disgusting, cockroach pies.
Hemo: Reminds you of hospital cafeteria food, doesn’t it?
Homo: Oh, god. Hospital food with a side course of broad spectrum antibiotics… Good eatin’! Anyway, in that scene, I thought of you and wondered if you’d eat that gunk if there was cheese- your lifeforce- on top.
Hemo: You know what I did eat in that theatre? A black licorice Jujy Fruit!
Homo: So your teeth could look English?
Hemo: The movie- like my mouth- was so damn dark: my method of holding the candy up to the screen to determine its flavor proved to be as futile as resisting the allure of a close shave from Mr. Sweeney, who sang, “I want you, Bleeders!”
Homo: No. No. He said, “I want you, BREEDERS!” Clearly, he was a modern man who realized that Homo Superior kicks ass.
Hemo: I googled it: it is “BLEEDERS”! He sang the line in desperation, because it’s really hard to get a hemophiliac to sit down for a straight-razor shave.
Homo: You hemos are such pussies. But you are learning, young one. Forget about shaving: I’ve always wondered about airport shoe-shiners. Do they use a rigged-up chair like Sweeney Todd, to help back up the U.S.’s policy that foreign positoids can’t enter the country?
Hemo: That’s some last line of defense. If one of us gets through, we are berated into getting that shoe shine. From the Jamba Juice to the Cinnabon, scantily-clad federal agents flirt, saying things like. ”I just love Fins! But your shoes…”
Homo: Are you sure you’re not gay? We should install one those chairs in the Oval Office, to dump useless humans into the White House’s basement oven. It gets triggered whenever the Prez signs legislation that says “HIV POZ PEOPLE CANNOT ENTER THE USA!” Just as he dots his “i”… **SCHLUMP**
Hemo: I like that. Let’s rally the AIDS community and have that chair waiting in January 2009 for the next president. And no more long hiatuses for us, Homo.
Homo: Indeed, thinblood.
Hemo: As for Sweeney Todd, I give it my highest rating: an Undetectable Viral Load. It really got my juices flowing! What about you, Homo?
Homo: Let’s see: blood, revenge, disgusting meat pies, Sondheim music, and great art design? Sweeney Todd deserves two bloody stumps up. Well done!
Hemo: So I guess I’ll see you next time at the movies…
Homo: And the pie shop!
Hemo: Or at the hospital?
Homo: …just not at the shoeshiners.
Hemo: Definitely not.
ON THE NEXT Hemo2Homo Connection Review: THERE WILL BE BLOOD… stay tuned!!!
Don’t forget to visit Shawn Decker and Steve Schalchlin online.
Phelps to Protest Ledger Funeral
January 24, 2008
So Fred Phelps, the guy who’s been trying to commit suicide via someone else’s hand for years now, is now taking his AIDS-funeral and soldier-funeral protesting ways to another demented level.
Word is he’ll be protesting Heath Ledger’s funeral. You know, because he acted in a movie and played a gay character. If you watched the movie, you’re probably going to burn in Hell, too, by Phelps’ estimation.
And I’m not entirely convinced that he’s not a shock-comedian, that he’s doing some kind of Borat schtick. You know, some people think Andy Kaufman didn’t really die…
Positively Yours,
Shawn
PS… I’ll probably be paving my own way to hell when I post the Hemo2Homo Connection review of Sweeney Todd… tomorrow! Yes, tomorrow!
Remembering Renfro
January 23, 2008
He’ll quickly be forgotten, especially after yesterday’s tragic news about Heath Ledger, but I wanted to take a moment to write about Brad Renfro, who passed on January 15 at the age of 27.
He was the child star who got his big break in The Client, but I knew him from his role in the 1995 movie, The Cure. No, it wasn’t a biopic on goth-rock icon Robert Smith, it was a buddy tale about two kids- one a positoid, one a negatoid. They are 11, and Renfo plays the part of good kid, befriending the ostracized positoid. Of course, I can relate on some level since I was 11 when I tested positive. It’s a nice little movie about two boys trying to find a cure in the pre-protease era. And, though I haven’t seen it in about ten years, I’ll be revisiting it soon.
I never met Brad Renfro, though I did have the pleasure of IM’ing someone who was pretending to be Renfro about ten years ago or so. That’s how I found out about the movie, The Cure, as well as a little bit about Brad Renfro by proxie via some demented superfan posing as him. Of course, the real Brad is gone, but his work as it pertains to raising awareness about HIV should not be forgotten.
Positively Yours,
Shawn
Norris Blows Huckabee’s Vice Prez Hopes
January 22, 2008
The media likes to take a statement, blow it out of proportion, and repeat it a thousand times. This happened over the weekend when Chuck Norris said that he believes that John McCain is too old to be president.
I’ve written on here a little bit about the Norris-endorsed Huckabee, and his ’92 comment about isolating people with AIDS. Well, I also wrote last year about McCain’s statement from 2007, in which he was “stumped” when asked if condoms help prevent the spread of HIV.
Oh boy.
What the media isn’t going to do is explore Norris’s comment on a different level: by saying he doesn’t think McCain would make it through a four-year term, is he, in effect, threatening to kill President McCain?
You have to take the most dangerous man alive seriously, because everyone knows that Norris would handily plow through any security measures: judo-chopping secret service agents, scaling walls and hanging onto the wing of Air Force One. All in an attempt to get one shot at the Prez.
McCain is leading the Republican pack, but if I were him I’d think about dropping out of the race. Of course, Norris blew any chance of Huckabee getting an invitation to fill the Vice President slot on a McCain presidential ticket, didn’t he?
Positively Yours,
Shawn
DON’T FORGET: The dramatic return of the Hemo2Homo Connection… the Sweeney Todd Review in 6 days!
Hemo2Homo Connection Comeback?
January 18, 2008
I can’t contain this announcement, it’s too huge. My movie-reviewing partner, Steve Schalchlin, and I have to come to the conclusion that the AIDS community doesn’t need new drugs: it needs us.
Reviewing movies.
Unfamiliar with the Hemo2Homo Connection? The premise is that it’s two guys with AIDS: one gay, one straight. A deadly virus and a love/hatred for movies the only thing in common, they strive to make sense of their own lives and the iffy decisions of Hollywood.
Steve- one of the first AIDS bloggers- and I started it as a joke 10 years ago. In My Pet Virus, I made a snarky little comment about how Poz Magazine and The Advocate rejected our bids to grace their fine publications with our wisdom/movie reviews. In the book, I included our review of The Hours.
After that, the H2H Connection went into hiding… until the world was ready for us again.
Which is now.
But before you get too excited, here’s a behind the scenes look at the last time The Hemo2Homo Connection plotted a comeback. Steve had made a Gmail Doc file, which is what I’m asking about in the text below. There is also reference to Steve’s show, The Big Voice, which was going to NYC at the time.
_______________________________
11:16 P.M. October 17, 2006
Running With Scissors
Reviewed by the Hemo2Homo Connection
HOMO: This is a magical way for us to write together. First, we login to the world’s richest conglomerate. Then, selling our souls to the “man,” we pretend to be all rebel by slamming their filmic product with our superior minds. I mean, what else is there to do?
HOMO: You want to know the definition of a skeptic? Someone who is really pissed off that they aren’t you. As for my wad, I prefer Juicy Fruit.
HOMO: Well, if Mister I’m A Published Author can get to the movie despite his furious book tour, I’m sure I can find my way. (harrumph).
So will there be an actual comeback? Can The Hemo2Homo Connection stay on track and inspire a whole new (and old) generation of positoids with internet connections? Stay tuned to find out!
The Host is Wrong?
January 16, 2008
The new host of The Price Is Right is Drew Carey.
I’d been dreading Bob Barker’s imminent retirement since the 4th grade, and about a year or so ago I sensed the inevitable a few months before the announcement. I posted a blog on MySpace, a survey of sorts, to try to find a proper replacement for Mr. Barker.
I forget who all the nominees were, but I do remember that Ric Flair won the survey in a landslide. His energy would have been contagious, and I think we all missed out on something really special.
Instead we got Mr. Carey.
He’s not the champ.
Of Plinko or wrestling.
I chose not to rush to judgement on this matter, and give the guy a couple of months to get the hang of things. But it’s not helping. Bob aged like a fine wine, going from suave lady’s man to endearing grandfather figure with a mid-90′s sex scandal.
Drew? He’s got some zingers, but he lets those zany audience members run roughshod over him. Flair wouldn’t just stand beside them and laugh, he’d chop their chest to a bloody pulp.
Of course, I know CBS wouldn’t give a wrestler the gig for liability issues. But at the very least they could have gotten the right Carey.
Imagine Mariah Carey hopping into one of those hottubs with one of the models? Or Jim Carrey talking out of his ass and doing plastic face? Or how about John Kerry, painstakingly explaining every nuance of each game in four-hour episodes?
Last week my t-cells reached their highest level since my diagnosis twenty years ago. As the lives of people with HIV are extended by ever-improving HIV drugs (including universal access to life-saving medications and daytime game shows), their demands from pop culture fixes will become greater and greater.
And without a capable host of The Price is Right, is life really worth living?
Positively Yours,
Shawn
life in photos
I am frightened by ceilings. A terrible phobia to have.
Today's assortment of treats: tea for Gwenn, a mocha for me and a cookie to share.
My buddy Sharanya preparing my mocha with just an extra dash of love.
Hanging on wall in our guest bedroom. Couldn't agree more!
Speaking About Sexual Health
Since 2000, Shawn and Gwenn have been speaking about sexual health together, sharing their personal story and empowering others to be safe. If you are interested in having them speak at your event, fill out the Contact Us form.
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