The Biggest Threat to the Gay Community -- and No, It's Not Proposition 8
In the spring of 2004, a crystal meth addict slumped into a clinic in New York with lesions and a story about barebacking with several hundred men over that year. At first it seemed like the sad same-old, the kind of case that staggers into AIDS clinics across the world every day: gay man gets addicted to crystal, belly-flops into a culture of raw sex, and seroconverts in a second. Only this case was different. This man had tested negative just six months before - but he was already showing the symptoms of AIDS. It seemed impossible: the virus takes far longer than six months to progress to its late, lethal stages. And it got worse: the virus ravaging his body was so powerful that protease inhibitors didn't work. The doctors tried cocktail after cocktail, but nothing changed. It seemed like this was a new Patient Zero, and super-AIDS - a new, more toxic mutation of the HIV virus, quicker and invulnerable to drug treatment - had arrived.
This was not an idle press scare. Dr David Ho - who had been named as Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1996 for his AIDS research - issued a warning alongside the New York City Health Commissioner that this was "a wake-up call". Tokes Osubu, Executive Director of Gay Men of African Descent, said, "This is the news we have all been fearing." But the worst did not happen. It turned out that the men Patient Zero had fucked were not contracting the same illness - this super-AIDS was not super-transmissible - and eventually he did respond to the drug T-20 and efavirenz. The alarm was switched off. We all went back to sleep.
Today, we are all loudly focusing on the danger from Proposition 8 and its foul theocratic supporters - but this slower threat is swelling alongside it in silence.
Some doctors have tried to warn against this narcoleptic response. HIV physician Dr James Braun warned a recent retrovirus conference that the transmission of treatment-resistant HIV is "a disaster waiting to happen." But the refusal to listen, the determination to keep on barebackin', shouldn't surprise us. The gay community is facing a string of HIV crises - and we are hitting the snooze button on all of them.
The culture of safe sex that emerged in the wake of the first AIDS crisis - when the disease scythed through gay communities in near-apocalyptic numbers - has now melted away. A British survey of over 14,000 gay men in 2003 found nearly 60 percent had unprotected anal sex in the past year. Barebacking has become an accepted subculture. Check out the darkroom of any club and you'll find condomless sex. Click into the chatroom of any pick-up site and there are men - both HIV-positive and negative - advertising for "raw" sex. Websites such as www.barebackcity.com attract hundreds of thousands of hits a day. For the first time since the late 1980s, HIV infection rates are rising among gay men in the US and across the developed world.
The disciples of barebacking acted as though they stand for a masculine rodeo roughness, far better than the prissy girlish fussiness of their condom-waving exes. I logged on to gaydar to ask barebackers why they played Russian Roulette with their cocks. One said, "Safe sex is not real sex, it's pretend sex. The need for the intimacy of actual skin-to-skin contact is primal." Another explained, "It's hotter without a condom. It's just so much better to feel a guy come inside you. Besides, a lot of men can't keep it up with a condom." This backed up the much more extensive survey conducted by the New York psychologist Perry Halkitis. He found that the main reasons for rubber-free fucking were that men believed barebacking was "more intimate", "hotter", "more romantic", and "more butch".
There are other, more subtle reasons for the decline in safe sex. Michael, the webmaster of 'XtremeSex', a barebacking site, says HIV is now "a minor inconvenience" and "not the catastrophe negatives think it is." Some HIV prevention experts have nervously labelled the new treatments "protease disinhibitors", because they have lulled many gay men into believing that contracting HIV is less like getting cancer and more like getting diabetes, just a matter of swallowing a few pills a day. The HIV-positive playwright Larry Kramer is incredulous at this. "I don't understand why some of you believe that because we have drugs, it's worth gambling with unprotected sex," he says. "These drugs are not easy to take. There are many side-effects. I have to allow one day out of every week to feel really shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to require blood tests and monitoring at a hospital, and to have the shakes. I don't enjoy eating any more. Keeping on weight is a constant problem. I have dry mouth. I get up six or seven times a night to pee. Is a fuck without a condom worth not being able to taste food?"
If protease inhibitors have made gay men psychologically down-grade the risk of contracting HIV, then the gay community is snatching defeat from the bubble-butt of victory. Many HIV-positive men who bareback believe they have nothing to lose, since they already have the virus. This is a deadly misconception. They can easily become reinfected with a more virulent strain of HIV that will kill them faster. Positive Nation's treatment director Robert Fieldhouse discovered his first "unequivocal" case of reinfection three years ago when a patient treated for a subtype B infection disappeared on a shagathon to Brazil - and returned with subtype C. "The real nightmare was that his previously well-controlled virus began progressing more rapidly, his viral load shot up and his CD4s plummeted," he explains. "Reinfection can mean your HIV treatment might suddenly stop working and the course of your infection changes from one that is fairly benign to one that is fast processing."
But despite this, anti-condom attitudes are rippling out beyond the barebacking subculture. The HIV-positive gay club night promoter Spike says he has seen "countless" men being shunned for insisting on safe sex in clubs and saunas. He warns: "There is a real danger that the anti-gay press and politicians will seize on these things and use them to attack the gay community. This could set the scene back some 30 years and lead to an explosion in hate crimes. The message we are sending out is that diseases like HIV and Hep C are no big deal and gay men don't have any respect for themselves."
Some of this is happening because well-meaning people have acted from the best of motives. For example, there has been a long campaign over the past decade to peel back prejudice against HIV-positive men. Adverts show them as rippling, testosterone-soaked hunks, and in US ads for protease inhibitors, HIV-positive men are shown rock-climbing, dancing and sailing. But some campaigners believe that propping up the self-esteem of HIV-positive men has actually overtaken and obstructed HIV prevention work. When the AIDS Health Project in San Francisco put up a banner saying 'Stay Healthy, Stay Negative', it was bombarded with complaints from men saying, "I have HIV, I'm healthy, how dare you say I'm not?"
The New York psychologist Walt Odets has been barracked and harangued for warning that "HIV prevention is not supposed to be about making positive men feel good about themselves, it's supposed to be about protecting HIV negative men." Sally Putnam, Nurse Co-ordinator for the AIDS Consultation Centre in the state of Maine, backs this up: "Sometimes I really think we're at fault. If you look at the advertisements for HIV drugs in the magazines, everyone is really healthy. I really wish some people could come and sit in here for a day and observe all the wasting, all the fat bellies. If we had those photos out there, maybe things would be a little different."
And there's yet another good, decent instinct that has had perverse outcomes on HIV prevention. Over the past decade, many people have fought hard to erase the idea that AIDS is a "gay plague" from the public mind. After the nightmare of the 1980s, it's not hard to see why: it was a time when Ronald Reagan's close friend William Buckley suggested all gay men be forcibly tested and HIV positive men have a warning tattooed onto their buttocks (what would it say - abandon hope all ye who enter here?). But Will Nutland of the Terrence Higgins Trust warns that, "We have definitely gone too far in de-gaying AIDS - and the result is it's created a huge funding problem and gay men aren't getting the help they need."
The British Department of Health has recently been diverting a huge amount of HIV-prevention cash to young straight people holidaying in places like Ibiza. It sounds like a good idea - don't the figures show that straight seroconversions are soaring? But if you look at the statistics more closely, you find that almost all the heterosexual HIV infections in Britain were acquired in Africa by Africans who subsequently came here as immigrants and refugees. "Everyone in HIV prevention is very reluctant to say it because we are worried about a homophobic and racist backlash, so we have colluded in this Ibiza-isation of HIV," Nutland says bluntly. "But the result is that money is being wasted targeting very low-risk straight holiday-makers, and high-risk people are not getting the protection they need."
Isn't it better to admit that AIDS is still disproportionately a problem for gay people and Africans and risk the venomous poison this might unleash? The alternative is to let innocent gay people and Africans contract HIV and die because the prevention funds were wasted on people who were never at risk anyway: isn't that the real betrayal?
It is particularly important to funnel new funds towards young gay men, Nutland says, "because we have a whole new generation with no memory of seeing their friends die and a very different experience of HIV." The UK Gay Men's Sex Survey in 2003 - commissioned by the Terrence Higgins Trust - found that one third of 20 year-old gay men do not even know the most basic facts about HIV transmission. Some 51 percent didn't know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if he or his partner has another STD; 31 percent did not know that water-based lubricant reduces condom failure; and, incredibly, 14 percent did not know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if a man ejaculates inside his partner. This is the deadly legacy of the Thatcher-Reagan calls to not teach about homosexuality in the classroom, lest they (somehow) "promote" it.
But there is another female cause of rising HIV infections among gay men, and she comes by the cutesy name of Tina. The drug crystal meth used to be known as "redneck cocaine", because a hit cost as little as a Big Mac in rural America. In the late 1990s it began to transfer onto the gay circuit party scene in the US, where its versatility was attractive: crystal can be drunk, snorted, injected or inserted anally (it's known as a 'booty bump'). Today it's used by a quarter of gay men in San Francisco, according to some surveys. Tina (also known simply as cystal, or ice) is a fuck-drug: it makes it possible to have sex for hours, even days, and users often say the difference between sex with crystal and sex without is the difference between Technicolor and black and white.
The problem with Tina is it simultaneously makes you incredibly horny and melts away your rationality and cautiousness - a recipe for bareback sex. Mel, a man who contracted HIV while addicted to crystal, explains, "If somebody wants to fuck you without a condom, you just don't care. I did things on crystal I would never do sober, like being gang-banged and doubled-fucked." He's not alone: New York's Collen-Lorde Community Health Centre has found that two-thirds of their patients who tested HIV positive since June 2003 acknowledged crystal use as a factor in their infection. And it's not just the horniness of gay men that has made it spread through our world. Neva Chaupette, a clinical psychologist, explains: "The drug is especially attractive to people who have internalized homophobia. If you're conflicted about expressing yourself in a gay manner, crystal not only gives you control, it just wipes that away."
But crystal meth, when it is twinned with the constant sexual availability of the internet, is a guarantee of rapid HIV transmission. As one journalist puts it, "The internet has turned out to be a higher-risk environment than any bar or bathhouse. Men who meet online are more likely to use crystal, more likely to be infected with HIV, and less likely to use condoms."
In this environment, the potential for a mutated super-AIDS virus to spread is phenomenally high. Viruses are constantly mutating: even today, HIV positive men are immune to at least 35 percent of the available protease inhibitors. A situation where we have central group of men infecting and reinfecting each other through barebacking, with the most virulent and vicious strains of the virus spreading, almost creates a petri dish for incubating the HIV virus. Any mutation will be spread with astonishing speed. Gabriel Rotello, author of Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, explains, "You can't have a core group of people having sex with large numbers of people without amplifying any sexually transmitted disease that enters the system. I don't have any doubt that a resurgent HIV epidemic will hit the gay population in the near future." But he believes "people are not going to modify their sexual habits in ways that are difficult or unpleasant until they see their friends dying again. And to me that's just an unbelievably depressing thought."
The gay community is particularly ill-equipped to deal with these looming crises: the rise of bare-backing, a new and ignorant generation, the growth of Tina, and the deadly prospect of super-AIDS. Peter Staley, a veteran AIDS activist and recovering meth addict, explains why: "The whole basis of our community is very libertarian. The gay liberation movement's primary focus has always been fighting against those who are trying to tell us how to live our lives, so we're very reluctant to tell each other how to live our lives. And rightly so. But I hope our community only takes that so far. For example, if we had been completely libertarian during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s, there would have been no pressure on some gay men to make other gay men use condoms all the time. That was our greatest hour as a community - when we started helping each other, and started expecting that we take care of our own. Now, here we are again, faced with a situation where the health of many gay men is under serious threat. We need to start helping and pressuring each other again."
If we want to avoid a renewed crisis, we have to do something that is temperamentally very difficult for gay people: we have to restigmatise bareback sex and make crystal meth socially unacceptable on the gay scene. For a community whose whole purpose has been stripping away stigma, this will be wrenching - but the alternative may be another mass culling of the gay population. We should not offer disapproval for prurient, puritanical reasons derived from the rotting crrcass of Judaeo-Christian 'morality'; it's simply as a matter of collective survival. As the playwright Jeff Whitty puts it, "I don't care what kind of sex anyone has. That's up to them. But we have a problem. And we need to start dealing with it more responsibly if we don't all want to die. How many times does that message need to be sent?"
Some campaigning gay groups in the US want to launch an aggressive, full-on campaign against callously risky behaviour. Groups like ACT-UP - one of the first to fight for awareness of AIDS in the first crisis - have mooted tracking down anybody who is deliberately engaging in risky behaviour sabotaging them before they can infect somebody else. This would mean infiltrating websites, turning up at "pos parties" (where men bareback) to ruin them, protesting outside barebacking clubs, and more. Charles Kaiser, historian and author of 'The Gay Metropolis', argues, "Gay men do not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease. A person who is HIV-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person's head." Ana Oliveira, head of Gay Men's Health Crisis, says, "It makes a community stronger when we take care of ourselves, and if that means we have to be much more present and intervene with people who are doing this to themselves and others, so be it."
Larry Kramer is just as emotional, and he believes tolerating the rise of barebacking makes gay men complicit in a slow-motion massacre. "From the first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men have refused to accept our responsibility for refusing to listen. Starting in 1984, when we were told definitely it was a virus, this behaviour turned murderous. I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them? Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. Has it never, ever occurred to you that not using a condom is tantamount to murder?" The British Crown Prosecution Service reinforces this message: four HIV-positive people have been convicted in the past year of "biological GBH" for having unprotected sex with people without informing them of their HIV status. "I cannot understand", Kramer concludes, "how, life having been given back to us again, you treat your life with such contempt."
It will be painful for us to deal with these questions. It will seem judgmental and cruel to seek to stigmatise barebacking and crystal. Many people will demand to know: isn't that kind of finger-wagging judgement precisely what we in the gay community are running away from? We will have to reply: aren't we also running away from a disease that nearly killed all of us just twenty years ago? Is it really acceptable that 4,000 people are seroconverting in this country every year? We all know that many gay men pick up knives and slash their flesh in an epidemic of self-harm. But has it occurred to us that the gay community as a whole might be collectively doing the same thing by normalising the madness of barebacking, of crystal meth, or downplaying AIDS? Of course we don't want to distract energy from the fight against Prop 8's vicious proponents - but if we don't deal with these issues, rising HIV levels and the possibility of super-AIDS will deal with us.
Martin Luther King said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter." For the gay community, this is no longer just a metaphor.
Johann Hari is a writer for the London Independent. To read more of his articles, click here.
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Why are you compelled to set up some kind of opposition between the problem of unsafe sex and the success of Proposition 8? How does it make sense to focus on the minutia of the former without addressing--even blaming--the larger social context represented by the latter?
"Isn't it better to admit that AIDS is still disproportionately a problem for gay people and Africans and risk the venomous poison this might unleash?" The problem isn't one of "admitting" this state of affairs exists; the problem is figuring out why. It's in that sense that your bizarre need to diminish the prop. 8 outrage is maddening. In both America and Africa, natural and healthy sexual expression between same-sex partners is often excluded, stigmatized, denied, or officially forbidden. How can condom availability, purchase, and use flourish in such environments?
As long as myopic critics continue to see only the symptoms and not the root causes, we're all in trouble.
It’s valid to identify the relationship between the cultural ostracism of queers and our self-destructive dysfunctions. But this is chicken and egg talk. Johann doesn't unduly diminish Prop 8 but emphasizes that we tend to champion calls for official ‘respect’ under the thundercloud of more urgent, uglier realities. Like the alcoholic housewife who wouldn’t be seen dead at the Women’s Institute in her puke-spattered nightdress, who bakes a fabulous cake for the fundraiser, but omits to mention the chaos of life behind closed doors and the terrified kids.
Prop 8 is partly a conservative campaign so gays might have the privilege to heteronormalise their image.
I write from London where we are lucky to have equality on this issue, yet the problem of ‘Tina’ and barebacking is growing because many gays are trapped in prisons of addiction and sexual compulsion, lacking information. Not because of legislative exclusion. Because of political pussyfooting - so that those who most urgently require information are sidestepped for fear it might appear they are being 'stereotyped'. And because the 'in-house' elders are above the sheer seediness of it all and are busy off playing house, like their straight mates. Or are themselves in the cage of ‘can’t act my age’ and are the very ones taking our young blood from behind.
There is room for qualifying phraseology on this, if only to hammer a point home, for what good is a fitted suit to a dead man?
Your social critique is as lively as it is biting, and I find myself nodding in agreement with many of your characterizations. But I think you breeze by the "chicken and egg" talk a little too quickly, as if such an analysis were some kind of rainy-day parlor game. It might be that the "more urgent . . . realities" you invoke today will just turn into the same realities of tomorrow unless the culture is changed at a fundamental level.
Maybe it's about having a vision for a generation that's not lost, even if it can't be this one.
This whole piece just scared the sheet out of me. It should be posted on every serious news site. Ladies, this is the primary reason YOU SHOULD ALWAYS DEMAND that your sex partner USE A CONDOM. You should also know as much as you can about his/her sexual history or proclivities. There are too many DL people out there.
"YOU SHOULD ALWAYS DEMAND that your sex partner USE A CONDOM"
Out with the old sexual morality, in with the new sexual morality.
Simply one of the most informative and yet, shocking pieces I've read on HuffPo.
I've always felt that the gay rights movement takes the "don't impose your morality on us" deal way too far. I understand not everyone is religious, or thinks the same way about stuff, but at a certain point you have to get over your pride and realize that, even though it's your own life, you may not always know how to best live it.
The gay community is always about social acceptance and equality, but they seem to only want equality when they think someone is handing out pats on the back. When it comes times to confront their demons, it's deflection, it's defensiveness, and it's all this parsing of the issue...al
I don't blame them for wanting to get rid of bigotry, but at the same time, they can't expect bigotry to go away all while giving them ammunition. Believe me, straight people know about the more debased aspects of gay culture, and that can give some of them pause on the acceptance front. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT SOME STRAIGHT MEN AND WOMEN DO IT TOO...FOCU
HIV/AIDS is serious, and I don't care whose "feelings" get hurt by activism meant to do away with it. We all have to swallow our pride sometimes, and it's their time.
We are not the only ones who need to "swallow some pride." Drugs, HIV/AIDS, promiscuity and unsafe sex are not just a "gay" thing. We gays have been fighting tooth and nail to just get basic help to fight all these problems, to be fed BS about sex education, condoms don't work, and no sex till marriage when marriage is denied us. I think you people in the straight community are as much a problem in this as that TINA these people are abusing. We do want help. we do ask for it, but all we get is finger wagging and fairytale mythology. Yes this does apply to you as much as us, yes this boils my blood as much if not more than you. No we are not all dumb, but we are all in this problem together. We need better health care, we need condoms in prisons, we need to be able to form monogamous relations without fear of being killed, or thrown out of our jobs or house. I would like to open an office to help my fellow gay men, but to do so my county blocks my way. Not in my back yard, we will not have such a thing. WELL YOU DO. and until you get out of the way, or at least give us a hand. This will not go away. I want help. I am pleading for real help. I am not getting any.
Thanks for pointing out the irony that we are expected to "maturate" our attitudes about sex while our attempts to form binding, monogamous relationships are being denied and invalidated.
Well said. Thank you.
First of all you are confusing morality with religion. One can be moral with out consulting a mythical god.
Secondly if not for gay activisim in the 80's treatment for AIDS would have been delayed for years and untold thousand more would have died.
Thirdly while I can only speak for myself as a gay man I'm not looking for a "PAT ON THE BACK"
I'm looking for equal treatment under the law!
Also we need to be teaching our young people about safe sex, that means all our young people the gay as well as the straight.
Why "Tina"?
Bring back the '60s slogan "SPEED KILLS".
(CONT)
I'm wondering if we have really underestimated the role addiction has played in this. I do not know how the gay community has responded to the need for gay-focused treatment facilities and rehab programs, but 25% is a staggering figure.
Perhaps another explanation to this lack of fear is that the risk of contracting HIV is obscured by the success we've had in treating it (thanks, in part, to the efforts of pharmaceutical companies who advertise their "compassion"). We see only "healthy" faces of those who are positive, and we have watched them age, year after year, without a telling sign. Is HIV an epidemic we can all "live with" now?
This article was difficult to read on so many levels and it elicited a different reaction from me every time I read it (and I've already worked through some of the more stupid ones). Thanks for such a thought- (and emotion-) provoking read.
A few thoughts:
It seems that many people think of "unsafe sex" as a choice, an entitlement, and a "private" matter. Have we confused promiscuity with unsafe sex? We are also presuming that these choices are uninformed ones (and why would "we" be the only ones in the dark on this issue). According to the statistics cited, some choices ARE uninformed, but mostly in their approach to "safer" sex. Refusing to wear a condom, to me, sounds more like a form of defiance rather than a consequence of ignorance. Gay activists know this, and are right to want to stigmatize this behavior. In doing so, we also have to be careful not to infringe upon the rights of people to sleep with whomever (or how many ever) people they CHOOSE, as long as they are safe. I'm not sure we, as a community, are clear on this distinction, yet, especially when it comes to the fight for marriage equality. (CONT)
Someone asked why so few replies to this post. Stigma. Those uninfected are now labelled "clean' and those infected are, by extension "unclean". This is the view people have. They think if they can't tell by looking then a potential partner is "clean". This is a disgusting way to treat people. Why would anyone speak up, or write, when everyday they are pointed to in some way and called something less-than-human?
the suppression of stem cell research and AIDS vaccine research by the BushAdmin has been nothing short of pure evil cruelty.
I suspect we are about to see great advancements in science and medicine under the ObamaAdmin
Don't forget about "abstinence only" so-called education. Not only for the U.S., but for other countries seeking aid from the U.S.
Frickin' Ridiculous.
Abstinence-only as a program might not be the most desirable, but I think some people could use a little abstinence. Obviously telling people about condoms isn't enough because, well, you see how prevalent HIV/AIDS still is in a community that should know all too well the dangers they face.
See K.J. Dwyer's Profile
Excellent piece.
I was living in NYC during the advent of the AIDS crisis and remember how the New York Times didn't put it on the front page until well into epidemic. Reagan never said the word AIDS until something like 1985.
I remember going to see The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's amazing play, at the Public Theater and the sense of dread we were all experiencing at the time. I remember, too, ACT UP and its amazing political strategy of demonstrations that forced media attention and expedited drug trials and wound up speeding up an otherwise slow bureaucratic process by years, saving thousands of lives in the process.
I remember, too, "no glove, no love," the AIDS Walks, the Quilt, the friends who died and the friends who survived, and the amazing celebration at the discovery of the protease inhibitors.
This is our history. We know that we have the tools to confront these issues head on and change risky behavior. We did it before and we must do it again.
The point about a new generation who has no real connection to the AIDS crisis is key. Every day, thousands of young people sexually awaken and we cannot assume what they know. It's time to redouble our efforts and employ those proven strategies and press for new ones.
a teacher in Laguna Beach, CA., lost his job in 1981 for mention AIDS to his Health class
And, return Sex Education to the schools. Its hard to teach prevention of pregnancy or disease when you can't talk about anything but abstinence. To teens, of all people!!
I have heard straight men utter the same excuses for not using condoms. Its as if they are in denial about how HIV is spread. The scary thing is, its usually the people who dont regularly see doctors and get tested so they can never know how many people they infect before they end up in ER and practically dead.
Super AIDS sounds really really frightening. I have never heard of this, so thanks for writing this article. People should be alarmed. The first thing that comes to mind is after 20-30 years, has the virus mutated??? OMG Holy Jesus. I was a prepubescent child when people started first talking about AIDS. Between HIV and nuclear holocaust, I thought I'd never live to see 30. I'm 35. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I will pass along this article to everyone I know. Thanks again.
Great piece of writing. One point of question: Are not the arguments against Prop 8 and for the rights of gays to marry not diametrically opposite of the free-wheeling lifestyle described in this piece? At the very least, it's bound to be confusing to the non-gay public and likely resulted in some votes for Prop 8. I truly hope the gay community can work through this challenge.
I do know that marriage and promiscuity don't go well together for heterosexuals. While I have never cheated on my wife of 16 years, I truly believe that the free-wheeling so-called sexual revolution of the '70s' that I guess I was a part of in my early adulthood left me with with a type of disconnect in my "intimacy wiring" that I have had to work through with my beloved wife. Though I would like to think that I was not really ever a womanizer, I did experience quite a lot of what, in retrospect, more often than not amounted to mere sport sex. Often great fun in the physical sense, but ultimately desensitizing in terms of true intimacy.
Regardless of a person's sexual preference, I would earnestly recommend a temperate approach to sex, not so much for moral reasons but for psycological reasons, and of course, for health reasons, as well.
I hope people are not relating a free wheeling lifestyle to being gay and I hope that's not the reason they have for supporting Prop 8. That really annoys me to pieces.
there are conservative gays and free-wheeling gays ... just like in the hetero world
Simply one of the strangest articles I have read in years. While embracing the old liberal morality of ‘it’s natural, so what?’, it is nonetheless a call for a new morality and set of rules and regulations regarding sex, particularly in the homosexual community. Oh, it isn’t called that of course. But that’s what it is. It is yet one more whimpering whisper of the post-sex revolution admitting that maybe, just maybe, there needs to be some standards - dare I say, morality - regarding sex. I doubt it will work, of course, since you can’t build a world view based on ‘no rules, just right’, then try to lay down a new set of rules. ‘Condoms? Like eating steak with a mouth full of Novocain. And in any event, only about 98% effective. Russian Roulette with a hundred chamber gun and one bullet is still Russian Roulette. So why bother?’ Telling anyone otherwise is simply imposing your morality on them. Besides, who is anyone to tell anyone that sex should have rules, standards, morals, or anything else? What goes on in the bedroom is nobody else’s business, remember? Sorry, this is the Frankenstein monster that the sex culture created. Now the question is, when will Victor learn his lesson, and will it be too late if he does? We’ll have to wait and see while the body count rises, and the dreams and hopes of tens of millions more fade away.
To think that an embrace of gay sexuality is to embrace a culture of "no morality" is to not understand gay sexuality nor gay people. There is no reason to think that gay people do not have a moral sense regarding their sexual behavior - although it may not be your morality.
Condoms. They are good. Use them. Period.
Great article! I too remember the HIV crisis of the '80's. Unfortunately, Americans as a whole are really somewhat ignorant when it comes to ANY 'dread disease'. Take Polio for instance. I was among those who got vaccinated in the 50's--both kinds of vaccine-oral and injection. Polio SEEMS to have 'disappeared', but I have at LEAST two friends who are living with the residuals of having contracted polio when they were younger. Same thing with smallpox--it's making a comeback now, after having been nearly eradicated world-wide after W.W.II. We really only made a DENT--actually more like a 'ding' in the level of misinformation about HIV-AIDS during the '80's and '90's. I used to do HIV education as part of a drug rehab. program. I KNOW how much ignorance came in the door--and how much, even after education and discussion, went out the same door. And the tip of the iceberg was merely BRUSHED when it came to unprotected sex or barebacking or using 'enhancments' like crystal meth or poppers or whatever else seems to be 'necessary' to engage in unprotected, anonymous sex. It's all related folks! Everything from Prop.8 to the rise of HIV infections---and it is NOT pretty.
Sure, meth and poppers. But don't forget the most easily accessed drug to loosen ya up.... ALCOHOL. May not be an "enhancement" of sex, but it surely enables people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
Much of this, here in the US, CAN be attributed to the institutional discrimination in the form of same-sex marriage bans. I know what many people will say, "that's complete BS". Yes there are always going to be those seeking instant gratification (just like there is with heterosexuals), but there are also those (which are of the majority) who wants to have a long-term stable relationship and not just a symbolic relationship, they want one that is equally recognized like that of their siblings and their parents relationships.
Am I condoning the actions of these individuals who partake in risky behavior? Absolutely NOT. But I can sympathize with them. Are there those who simply don't care? Absolutely there are. But it is not my job to judge, but I do educate when I am given the opportunity. I was a caregiver for 5 years and left the profession due to the dozens of HIV/AIDS patients that passed away, I simply couldn't handle being around so much death. My psyche was literally on the brink of collapse. And several of those patients used the argument that if you are automatically going to be stereotyped, you might as well make the most of that stereotype, and I have the feeling that is what is taking place now. Either way, it is still sad. I really wish the gay community in general would start looking out for each other to put an end to the spread of this disease.
Your point is completely valid...
I think that our relationships need to "evolve" into marriage to create a new collective consciousness that focuses on the worth and merit of our relationships. Gay marriage is not just an "endeavour," but a social and psychological movement that will help maturate our experiences and beliefs about sex, love, and family (e.g., more baby strollers in the Castro). Many of us are there already, hoping the state doesn't nullify our marriages, but I just would like to see more "diversification" promoted and protected.
If a gay person wants to expedite his death through risky behaviour because no other behaviour is expected of him, it means we need to continue to push even harder for the validation of dignity and respect that comes from the institution of marriage.
Maybe, but the people who want to be in a stable, monogamous relationship probably are in one. Not everyone, straight or gay, wants to be married.
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