Thoughts Before Gay Pride Week

Great Debates
1

In Salon, there is an article discussing the fallout from Andrew Sullivan’s exposure as an HIV positive barebacker. Barebacking, for those not in the know, is the practice of having unprotected anal or vaginal sex. Sullivan, the former editor of The New Republic and a well-known conservative, gay pundit, has always been an advocate of monogamy and critical of promiscuity, so his volte-face in favor of unsafe poz sex is hypocritical, to say the least.

In the Washington Post last week, a survey by the Center for Disease Control and Protection showedthat HIV infection rates among young gay men have risen dramatically, including an alarming 32 percent infection rate among young gay black men, a rate comparable to that in sub-Saharan Africa.

At the same time, here in Metro DC, marchers commemorated the 20th anniversary of the original CDC report of immune deficiency -related disease among young gay men. The Web site mentions demands made on world governments and pharmaceutical companies, but no mention is made of individual accountability for one’s actions.
I am well aware of the suffering of the Third World, child prostitution, the lack of decent medicines and access to prevention information. I’m not talking about Africa, Asia, or Russia, but about the selfishness of gay people who should know better.

I’m a gay man who lived through the onset of AIDS, saw it steal the lives of people who didn’t know they were carrying a lethal virus, watched friends die, and am still HIV negative. But after 20 years, I utterly fail to see how gay men can screw with no thought to prevention and still call themselves innocent victims. We’ve had two decades of prevention information, of safer sex lectures and free condoms handed out at bars and STILL guys are risking their lives and the lives of the men they sleep with. Not only are they passing on infection, but men on protease inhibitors (PIs) are making those drugs less effective by passing on drug-resistant strains of HIV to newly infected men. Do we want to return to the days when there was only AZT?

And yet, on shows like Queer As Folk and in magazines and gay newspapers, we see celebrations of hard muscles and disco music and parties that show gay life as a celebration of shallow hedonism, and nothing of commitment, hard work, and caring for each others’ welfare.

This is Gay Pride Week in the metro DC area. Yes, it’s nice that Will and Grace is on the air and that Vermont has allowed civil unions, but if gay men can’t look out for each other and stop spreading this horrible virus to the next generation, then I don’t see what there is to be proud of.

2

This kind of reckless care-free attitude isn’t restricted to gay folk, though. There’s always going to some people with the attitude of “It can’t happen to me!”, despite constant attempts at education. I just can’t understand how someone can go out and pick up some random person off the street and expect to keep dodging the bullet, but I don’t think that’s representative of everyone – it’s just what you hear the most about.

3

From my vast experience some people exhibit risky behavior while others simply don’t. It’s human nature. Young men, age 18-25, probably represent the largest group of risk takers around. I think they believe in their heart that for whatever reason they can do whatever they want and somehow they will survive. Some take drugs, some drive at high speeds, some have unprotected sex with other men. Logically they know they shouldn’t do it, but once they make the connection they don’t even think about the consquences. Now there are probably just as many males who do practice safe sex, the ones that don’t get all the press. How do you change human behavior? I’m not sure you can 100%. The only hope is a vaccine… IMHO.

4

Hearing you in the back, goboy.

I’m 18 years old, and I don’t remember a time without AIDS. I don’t remember the early paranoia. Hell, I don’t even remember the Regan adminstration.

AIDS is familiar. I feel like my generation views it as something akin to cancer. Gay teens aren’t seeing their friends die off in droves. We’re immortal, we’re young, and in a culture where youth and sex are celebrated… well…

I’ve seen a lot of my gay guy friends come out and become extremely promiscuous. I think that part of it is a backlash to living in the closet and being subjugated throughout high school or however long. The other part is that AIDS is familiar, far away, and not a threat.

I’m expecting to see a lot of my gay guy friends contract the virus before their 30s. It scares me very badly.

5

I seem to recall hearing about a certain (hopefully very small) minority within the Gay Community [TM] that considered HIV infection to be a kind of badge of honor. They went out of their way to get infected with HIV on purpose. Supposedly, the current set of drugs that can treat (not cure!) HIV and forestall or ameliorate the onset of AIDS has something to do with it.

6

One small defense of Andrew Sullivan:

Certainly, he may be vulnerable to charges of hypocrasy because of his frequent lectures on monogamy.

But as a barebacker, it must be noted that a mitigating factor is that he seeks out other HIV positive men as partners. So it’s not like this guy is running around infecting everyone he can find. His chance of infecting someone who already is positive is minimal. (To find out why it might not be zero, throw “aids” and “reinfection” into a search engine. I don’t really have an opinion on that.)

7

Well, I was under the impression that the OP wasn’t really talking about Mr. Sullivan in particular, but rather using that as a launching point. I too thought that being up front and seeking other HIV-positive partners was being pretty responsible about it. I think that’s a good idea regardless of the methods used, since even so-called “safe sex” still has a degree of risk.

Personally, I consider partner selection to be the best way to manage risk, rather than the use of a condom or not. “Barebacking” is a pretty negligible risk when you and your partners are the next best thing to monogamous anyway, but I’d be extremely reluctant about playing with someone promiscuous, regardless of condom use.

8

There are two main problems with that scene: 1) there is the risk of multiple HIV strains being passed on, creating a “superinfection”; 2) barebackers taking protease inhibitors, like Sullivan, can pass on drug-resistant strains of HIV to their partners, making the few effective drugs we have useless.

I hear ya, Andygirl. I wish I could talk to your gay friends about what it was like to be out when AIDS started happening, when healthy, built guys got sick and died within months and you never knew who would be next, to see a 30-year-old guy with a face blotched from KS, coughing his lungs out with pneumocystis, or going blind from CMV or toxoplamosis.

And how do you know anyone’s past history for sure? People lie. I assume everyone is poz, and act accordingly.
In addition, you don’t have to be promiscuous to catch HIV or any STD. It only takes one slipup to catch a disease. Even modest, non-promiscuous people can pass on
HIV if they’ve been unlucky.

9

As much as you know anything about anyone for sure. There are some people I’ve known for so long, and so well, that I trust them completely.

I tend to consider that promiscuous :wink: I mean, really, “slipup”? “Oh, damn, I accidentally had sex” – I hate when that happens :wink:

10

Manhattan said most of what I was going to say, but . . .

Personally, I’m not offended by suicide pacts. Sullivan’s sex life, although inexcusably hypocritical, doesn’t directly inflict anything horrible on anybody who isn’t willingly accepting whatever increased risk there may be.

I am, however, far less forgiving of the indirect consequences. Even though Sullivan’s partners are happy enough to play Russian Roulette, there’s no guarantee at all that they are in turn careful about asking partners whether they mind the taste of gun metal.

11

Goboy, yes. It goes without saying, or should, that the plague is nowhere near over and that those who knowingly practice unsafe sex are being grossly irresponsible and endangering the lives of others.

However, it’s an error to target “hedonism” per se. To be blunt, hedonism is screwing, but idiocy is screwing without a condom. AIDS is a virus, not a punishment handed down to those who violate the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Screw Around”.

Part of being gay for me - hell, part of being human - is the joy of sex. I don’t want to end up like the title character in Jeffrey, wrapping his partners in saran wrap or requesting their blood work for this month, this week, and this afternoon; or, for that matter, forsaking sex entirely.

We are at risk of making the risk factors for HIV/AIDS look much more simple, read abstract, read removed from reality, than they are. Not having unsafe sex is reasonable; but I’m sure you can understand that having “Quit fucking around!” blared at us from both sides of the table is unhelpful. There are better ways to promote prevention and responsibility.

12

**

It seems reasonable to target behavior that greatly increases the risk of becoming HIV positive. AIDS isn’t a punishment but it is largely the consequence of a certain set of behaviors.

**

There are also other things that make being human so neat, eating for instance. But if you’re not responsible in how you choose your diet you run a higher risk of high blood pressure, diabetis, and various other health problems. Not a punishment but certainly the consequences of ones behavior.

Understanding the risk factors for HIV is fairly simple in North America. Avoiding having “safe” sex with a bunch of partners is reasonable. Going over to someone’s house you hardly know and getting a blow job is a bad decision. Doing stuff like that on a regular basis is idiocy.

But on the other hand arming people with the information necessary to avoid AIDS doesn’t seem to be working all that well. So I suppose it is way more complicated then I think.

Marc

13

While the risk of exposure to other strains of HIV than the one with which you’re infected is one reason to avoid bare-backing, the risk of exposure to other sexually transmissible organisms is another. A compromised immune system doesn’t need any additional challenges.

I too remember the early days - out of an HIV/AIDS conference I attended about 10 years ago, not one of the HIV+ gay men who attended is still living; this has huge ramifications in passing on the reality of the disease to the younger generation of gay men.

HIV is often seen as just another illness these days, and improved treatments have played a part in that perception. Certainly, I know injecting drug users who take minimal precautions about contracting HIV because they don’t expect to be alive in 10 years anyway.

I think that in general a lot of the fear surrounding HIV has diminished, and now that treatments have improved so much education programmes have a somewhat diminished impact on risk-taking behaviour too.

14

Um, according to the Canadian AIDS Society, as reported by Séro-Zéro and the CLSC Métro HIV/AIDS Intervention Program (Montreal AIDS information, testing, and support programs), blow jobs pose a low risk of HIV transmission (“some isolated cases reported”) only if the person getting blown ejaculates in his partner’s mouth. Blowjobs with a condom and blowjobs without ejaculation in the mouth pose what they describe as a “theoretical risk”, meaning that no cases of such transmission have ever been reported.

As I say, then, identifying risk factors is not as black and white as it may seem. Moreover, insisting that people restrict their sexual lives (as opposed to their sexual repertoires) seems to me to be a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, that’s been the primary strategy of AIDS activism to this point; and you’re right to notice that it hasn’t worked.

Therefore, maybe we should be looking at more accurate examination of risk factors, and ways of presenting education on risk management and expanding a safe sexual repertoire, rather than continuing with the blanket, moralistic pronouncements which have shown a low rate of success.

15

You’re one hundred percent correct, of course; I’ve said as much in other threads that it’s not who you do so much as what you do. Sex is a joyous thing, and I’m not in any way advocating not enjoying another man’s body. But I do think that a)fucking without rubbers is bad–even if the other guy is begging you to bareback, it is wrong to endanger another man’s health, ; and b)it’s possible to have a healthy, pleasurable sex life without acting like Messalina on poppers.

My beef with gay hedonism is that, like Peggy Lee, I keep asking, “Is that all there is?” Circuit parties and late nights at Badlands (our DC dance place) are all well and good, but parties do not a community make.

and, MGibson, the risk from giving a blow job is pretty low; the risk from getting a blow job is negligible.

16

I watched a TV news segment on the recent news of the rise in HIV infections. (Of course I think the news that gay black men have an even higher rate is old news by now.) In defense of TV coverage, or at least what I was seeing…they did discuss the possible causes for increased infection rate. (Not sure that I agree, or especially “like” their reasoning.) The doctor or expert (please don’t ask me who) ventured the guess that people had become incautious because of the temporary reduced rate of infection and the use of more effective drugs. Gay men in recent years have not had to witness the wasting away of their friends like in the early days. The “cocktail” has kept more people reasonably healthy for longer periods of time, something like that. Sort of an “out of sight, out of mind” thing. Looks like it might be time to remind people that AIDS is a still a fatal disease.

Needs2know

17

Now that’s damn true. Gods know I have no beef with parties. (I’ve been around too many people who natter on about how they’re so sick of the bar scene but whoops, you see them at Unity every weekend; besides, a girl’s gotta have fun.)

Mostly, I’m upset at the idea we’ve somehow gotten that it’s a good political move to take apart all our Queer institutions and support networks before we’ve gotten our rights.

Every one of the other three guys living in my apartment right now have had really troubled lives, and all four of us are living in straitened circumstances. Except for me, they’ve all learned through bitter experience that they can’t trust their own blood and kin to be there for them in desperate times. So we have had to forge our own family; and we’d no sooner turn one of us out for not being able to pay the rent than we would our own brother or sister. That’s community.

The other week in Montreal, two thousand gay and straight people got together and trooped out to a quiet little suburban neighbourhood, and held a sort of impromptu protest march in support of a Queer artist and his lover who were being harassed in their home by homophobic neighbours. That’s community.

In the past, because we pulled together and fought for one another, we have gotten more rights in thirty years than some liberation movements have done in a century. It’s important to remember that. Solidarity is powerful!

Which is why whenever I read some neocon blithering about how they’re over being gay and how they’re over their need for support structures and how by extension everyone else ought to be too, I get a jaundiced expression on my face. I was chatting once with the guy who wrote the “Over the Rainbow” column in the more stuffy of McGill’s undergrad weeklies. He had had an idyllic gay childhood with parents who accepted him utterly. I can only assume he decided that everyone else had such a childhood too and that nobody needed to be supported anymore.

I wanted to slap him and say Guess what, girlfriend, gay kids kill themselves fourteen times more often than straight kids and I think there’s a REASON for that. Which I more or less did during this interesting period when his column would appear and then my longish, rebutting letter to the editor would appear in his weeks off :slight_smile:

Liberation has been a double-edged sword. Some groups of Queer people - the ones with power both within and outside the community - have apparently gotten a fair percentage of their rights and have decided that the same must be true for everyone else and that people who haven’t yet are marginal whiners. Out is a fashion magazine now. The Advocate is all marriage-boy scouts-military-marriage-military-marriage-marriage, and if you’re lucky, the guest columnist MIGHT mention gay youth suicide, or trans rights, or something a little more urgent in their last page. The only place I’ve found decent Queer news and analysis is XY, for gods’ sake.

With several laudable exceptions, those segments of the Queer population which have gotten their basic rights have tended to abandon the rest of us when we need them most. Queers of colour, genderQueers, Queer youth, poor Queers, polyamorous folks, and other richness have been marginalized from a relatively privileged community which has since self-destructed.

Those of us who remain political because gods help us, we can do no other, had really ought to forge solid political links and help each other out in our hours of need; both individually and politically.

An army of lovers cannot fail.

18

matt_mcl wrote:

But if he ain’t gonna come in your mouth, what’s the point? :wink:

19

I am Switzerland.

Esprix

20

The banjo grows angry at midnight. What’s that got to do with anything?