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Some of us are not panicking about continuing HIV infections among gay men. We do not experience them as a crisis or believe they are evidence that something is terribly wrong in gay male cultures. They do not make us feel shame or embarrassment about gay men as a class or diminish our achievements of the past fifteen years in responding to HIV/AIDS. We do not believe they indicate the ethics of sexual liberation are misguided. This does not mean we are unconcerned about gay men's health or do not believe there are problematic aspects of the various subcultures comprising gay communities throughout the nation.
By considering gay men's sex thoughtfully and without knee-jerk condemnation, many of us are accused of encouraging or romanticizing unprotected anal sex. Anyone who fails to fall into line and spout the hollow rhetoric of the new gay moralizers is seen as an advocate for HIV transmission...
The crisis construct that underlies much of the panic over sex and drugs in gay communities must be understood in its historical context. The narrative that has taken hold in the mind of America claims gay men in the mid-1980s made dramatic changes in their sexual practices in response to the hazards of AIDS. Once the
alarms were sounded, men called the party to a close, stopped much of their promiscuous sex, and focused on taking care of their sick friends and building community health organizations. Safe sex education is credited fully with bringing down the rate of newly infected men in the mid-1980s.
The narrative goes on to explain that gay men behaved themselves throughout the 1980s but, as the epidemic proved tenacious, began to "relapse" into unsafe practices as the 1990s dawned. Thus a "second wave" of gay AIDS cases emerged prominently on the scene, composed predominantly of young gay men who somehow had not been successfully reached with effective safe sex messages.
In Reviving the Tribe, I critique this narrative and insist this is a romanticized, sociologically and historically unsound explanation that, while satisfying many gay men's need to appear as the epidemic version of the teacher's pet, would come full-circle and cause tremendous damage. Instead, I argue the mid-1980s was a conflicted sexual wasteland, brought on by the shock of the epidemic on our communal psyche and body politic, and triggered most intensely by men's personal experiences with deaths and the arrival of mass HIV testing in 1985. Men did not simply stop having unprotected anal sex and begin using condoms; they ceased most of their sexual activity and entered an era that included long periods of celibacy, intense binges of sexual release, and withdrawal into supposedly monogamous relationships. Infections fell off for two primary reasons in addition to the
advent of safe sex education: (1) men had much less sex; (2) a large portion of the men who enjoyed getting fucked had already been infected.
I do not subscribe to the view that a second wave of gay AIDS has emerged in the 1990s. Instead, infections occurred throughout the late 1980s, albeit at a reduced rate due to the saturation of the gay male population that occurred earlier in the decade, and the infections of the new decade should have been anticipated as younger men entered gay communal life...
Can't prevention leaders find options other than the crisis construct to use in generating interest and involvement by gay men? Is it possible to be satisfied with the gradual diminution of HIV rates in successive gay mate generational cohorts? Or is total elimination the only goal that will satisfy us?
It feels difficult to balance a sense of sadness that any gay men continue to become infected in the 1990s with the reality that plagues do not end suddenly and swiftly. I
continue to believe that displacing the uptopian vision of prevention is critically important to the well-being of gay men...
If we created the narrative of gay heroism in the 1980s, fabricating politically useful explanations for the decline in new infections in order to win public sympathy and gain funding for AIDS services, we should not be surprised that it has come around to confront us
just a few years later. If a vaccine or cure had appeared, perhaps a rethinking of the epidemiology of the 1980s would not have been necessary. Without such assistance, the
heroic narrative of the first decade of AIDS couldn't help but be transfigured into a demonic narrative in the second decade.
Don Shewey and
Eric Rofes at Pasqua in the Castro, February 1998
Many people, clinging to the "Best Little Boy" story of gay communities in the 1980s, cannot fit gay men's contemporary sex and drug-use practices alongside that rapidly fading narrative. Those who have resisted romanticizing gay men's response during the early years of the epidemic and avoided seeing gay men as the superheroes we became through the lenses
of the media, are more likely to consider current patterns of drug use and sexual activity without shock, horror, or blame for any particular subcultures. This is one post-AIDS perspective on continuing gay male HIV infections: we are neither untouched, wracked with horror, or filled with shame when we hear of incidents of unprotected anal sex that occur between partners of different antibody statuses. Instead, we see our aim as diligently and gradually reducing the level of HIV infection over a period of decades. We are in this work for the long haul and bring a balanced perspective to our review of epidemiological data.
Part of this post-AIDS perspective involves a commitment to supporting both the
health of the community and the continuing diverse ways gay men construct their sexual identities and practices. While some would consider these as paradoxical or contradictory aims, I see them as interrelated. Thus it is critically important for people committed to the continuing centrality of desires, bodies, and masculinities in gay community life to create a broad and sex-positive gay agenda of health and wellness ... We have spent most of the past two decades attempting to balance concerns about sexual health with the enactment of desires. We are unwilling to sacrifice either, though at times we are willing to creatively modify both.
Those of us defending gay male sex cultures are not indifferent to HIV-prevention efforts. Many of us are leaders in both areas. We know that effective prevention is built on sexual empowerment and believe that decades of public health research show that tactics of guilt, fear, and repression exacerbate public health crises rather than deter them. It is precisely because many people have become frustrated with HIV prevention and feel at a loss to chart new directions for our work that the time is ripe for an escalation of support for coercive measures to stop gay men's sex.
Those standing up for sexual freedom are neither lost in a romanticized vision of the golden age of the 1970s, nor dick-hungry men who are selfishly seeking more power and more privilege, as our critics have claimed. We have been condescendingly characterized as immature children who haven't grown up and who need to get with the times, put our pricks back in our pants, and apply our energies to the real challenges facing our communities, like gays in the military and gay marriage. Yet even a cursory look at the histories of our movement will show that sexual liberation has been inextricably bound with gay liberation,
the women's movement, and the emancipation of youth. Among the most effective ways of oppressing a people is through the colonization of their bodies, the stigmatizing of their desires, and the repression of their erotic energies. Continuing work on sexual liberation is crucial to social justice efforts.
Those taking action to monitor, de-track, and resist the emerging sex panic find ourselves increasingly at odds with mainstream gay efforts to present a sanitized vision of our people and replace butch/femme dykes with Heather and her two mommies, and kinky gay men with domestic partner wedding cakes. Can we not advocate for a pluralistic queer culture in which we affirm everyone's right to self-determination in the ways they organize their sexual relations and construct their kinship patterns?
... Regardless of perspective, all should:
1. Stand up firmly against any efforts that mobilize arms of the state to restrict the right of sexual and reproductive self-determination. Do not invite the police, public health officials, or the media to monitor and close down gay sex spaces due to continuing HIV infections.
2. Refuse to cast off any section of our community in order to gain privileges and social acceptance. Demand a continuing commitment to a pluralistic vision of community. Resist scapegoating subcultures you do not know and understand.
3. Try to understand the historic role sex cultures have played in the formation of queer identities and communities and resist seeing them simply as an unfortunate by-product of antigay oppression. Are our sex cultures evidence of our historic stigmatization, abuse, and reprobation? Or, to borrow James Baldwin's language about a different matter, can they be understood as "cultural patterns coming into existence by means of brutal necessity," and can they be seen as strategies for survival?
-- Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures
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