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“Bodies of Knowledge”
Recently some have argued that, since significant new HIV infection occurs among gay men, we should abandon current safer sex strategies and supplant our diverse sexual landscape with a new, unified communal norm: serial monogamy. People turn their guns on monogamy’s greatest enemy: a core group of “multipartnerists.” They are said to pose a danger to all gay men because they occasionally carry infection beyond the core. This attack ignores individual lives. In an age when many consistently practice safer sex, the rate of partner change no longer determines infection rates. For the epidemic, the relevant activity is unprotected anal sex between partners of different serostatus. Effective AIDS prevention has to target individuals and their situations rather than membership in a group that has to be identified differently in an age of safer sex. To scapegoat a core group invites measures to eliminate its activities -- measures that curtail freedom and waste prevention resources.
It’s my experience that multipartner sex can be compatible with, even foster, a healthy sexual ecology. For more than a dozen years I’ve been a more-or-less promiscuous practitioner of my version of safer sex, a personal expansion of the hoary old slogan: “Come on me not in me.” In my sex life I stress non-penetrative sex acts, wear condoms for my infrequent anal sex, do not use condoms for oral sex but do not take ejaculate into my mouth. This will seem unacceptably risky to some gay men and unaccountably stodgy to others; I support them all in their right to make their sexual decisions and ask that they refrain from interfering with mine. I’m middle-aged and remain HIV-negative. Though I’m not immune from an occasional, short-term, low-grade AIDS-induced panic, fear has ceased to be the primary reason I keep safe. Applying the lessons that community activism taught me, I now have sex to promote personal, partner and group well-being, and persist in believing that the best long-range prevention, supporting habits to be maintained over a lifetime, will be fueled by desire rather than fear.
No one can make a blueprint for something as fragile and subject to flux as a sex act is. During this epidemic my personal sexual lexicon has been consistent with health and pleasure, but I don’t elevate it to a universally-applicable law. Safer promiscuity is not the right prevention strategy for every gay man. But many men have practiced it successfully throughout the epidemic, men for whom multipartnerism has not been a threat to safety but a source. I resent the call by gay journalists to close down the very establishments that enable our practice of safer sex. In Stonewall’s home, New York City police have for the past three years regularly infiltrated and closed gay cinemas, bars and clubs in the name of safety.
Yet public gay sex today is overwhelmingly manual or oral, and in many sex clubs an unspoken taboo curtails anal sex without condoms. For some men, closing these spaces eliminates a communal inducement to safety and moves sex to an arena that’s risky for them: a strange bedroom. Community norms can promote safer sex; communal sex is one way. And when safer sex becomes the norm at a commercial establishment, it can promote safer sex in other contexts. Closing sex spaces has interfered with my own practice of safer sex and diminished the pleasure I share with dozens of other gay men in any given year, interactions that I and they cherish, interactions that strengthen the web and fabric of gay New York City.
During this epidemic every sexually-active gay man has attained a body of knowledge. Hundreds of thousands of gay men have altered their sexual expression to devise safer models that more nearly meet their needs than monogamy could. Pooling these bodies of knowledge would be a more effective prevention project than eliminating the promiscuous. AIDS prevention today needs to speak to young gay men who have no direct experience of AIDS, to older men who no longer fear the disease, and to men who live beyond core gay neighborhoods. More than emergency measures, today’s strategies have to exploit the hope engendered by more effective AIDS treatments and help men integrate low-risk sexual activities into lives they actually want to live.
Like earlier generations of gay liberationists, I acknowledge the genuine power of multipartner sex. In a quest to subvert the current order, some queers have found a polygamy of potential -- that anyone might be anyone else’s lover -- a useful tool for opening up the airless, asocial closed circuit of the state-sanctioned couple. I shudder at the notion of a queer nation reduced to such couples in the aggregate. So I issue a challenge to my fellow sexual libertarians, irrespective of serostatus.
Time is past due for a prevention activism to augment our treatment activism and transform all our sexual spaces. Gay male sexual culture will be healthier when it’s infused with a sense of community, and every individual gay man shares in the well-being of every man he has sex with and, by extension, all gay men -- and better sex for our tribe than a series of fear-induced marriages. But unless we go out and claim our public sexual space, forces from inside and outside our community will work to take it from us. We libertines know, sexual health is a lot more than freedom from a pathogen. Safer sex is unsustainable unless it engages individuals to make personal decisions that promote their sexual pleasure, which, in a time of plague, will be the project of a new AIDS prevention activism.
-- Jim Eigo (1998)
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