Set your DVRs (what's TiVo?) tonight for 1:15am on the Sundance Channel. If you've never seen "The Gift" (I haven't) then do so now. In fact, do a little prep work and read this article from this month's issue of the letter to the editor of the New York Times. For whatever reason, my last two visits to the Pines have coincided with some news story about reckless sexual behavior. As sorry as I may feel for the countless people who are contracting HIV at this very moment, I am also impossibly fed up with a culture that continues to fuel self destructive behavior. In this month's Advocate the topic of bareback sex parties is addressed and the promoters of these parties are "exposed" in a half-assed attempt at muckracking. Long story short, the party promoters are not holding a gun to anyone's head. They're not pedaling death, they're making money off sex the same way Michael Lucas, a hero of sorts in Chelsea, is. No one attacks Falcon Studios or the other porn houses for promoting a culture of loose sexual conduct. So why should the average Joe, with a room or two to spare in his home, not make a buck off the losers who are going to drop their pants either in a parking lot, the dunes in the Pines or a bathroom at a club?
The lack of accountability in our community for our actions is killing us. To call sex party promoters peddalers of death is a call for the endictment of all gay media outlets -- all of whom are complicit in promoting a sex-obsessed culture that accepts drug use and other self-destructive behavior as par for the course of being gay.
People, no one can be responsible for your actions but you. The same way I blasted a 29 year old crack-addicted mother of five in a previous post I am blasting stupid gay men who think its their right to screw every other man under the sun while "praying for a cure for AIDS." I'm praying for a cold shower to fall over these hypocrites -- you're free to do whatever you want but the AIDS crisis now is a moral dilemma. We know how to prevent the disease and once we find a cure we're only going to create another illness to wipe us off the face of the earth. What's the point then?
I'm appalled by this, but it doesn't surprise me. Young HIV-neg men, young enough to have known of AIDS all their lives, seeking to get "the gift" of infection from HIV-pos men, is a symptom of a sickness in our gay culture we just must address.
ReplyDelete20 years ago I trained as an AIDS Hotline counselor for Aids Project Los Angeles. We were told of APLA clients reporting how they'd get approached in a bar by a guy who said he thought their Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions were sexy. The 20 of us in that class were some pretty tough birds, but that was the only thing in the whole training course that shocked every one of us.
It's many things. It's survivors' guilt, for some older people. Why should I live when my friends have died? But for the youngsters, they've absorbed a culture in love with its own victimhood, and what greater victimization is there than death? It's thrilling to think of yourself as the brave but doomed hero fighting a magnificent but futile fight against inevitable death, seen as transcendence in glorious defeat. That you've invited this fight to the death upon yourself be seeking out infection is horribly sick and perverted, but the mind's capacity for self-deception takes care of that.
Addendum: Excuse me, I misremembered. The story was not that the guy with visible KS lesions was told his lesions were sexy. He was told that they were cute.
ReplyDeleteSomehow, that's worse. Shudderingly worse.
Interesting post.
ReplyDeleteMaybe some day there could be a discussion about "obsession." A person might have a high interest in sex without it being an obsession.
"Obsession" has a lot of ancillary baggage which allows a reader to read something into it which a writer might not wish to convey.
If we all possessed the same level of sexual urgency (from non-urgent to NOW!!!), we might be able to use words which have multiple variations with precision. That situation probably doesn't exist.
Splitting hairs?
Regardless of the above, your point that there is, and has always been, a compelling need for responsibility in sexual activity is 100% valid.