Everything You've Heard is True, Nothing You've Heard is True by Aongus Burke "Gay liberation means sexual freedom. And sexual freedom means more sex, better sex, sex in the bushes, in the toilets, in the baths, sex without love, without harassment, sex at home and sex in the streets". -- Michael Bronski -- The year of Bronski's proclamation is not 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay liberation movement. Nor was it written in the 1970s, frequently described as a time of unparalleled sexual hedonism among gay men in the United States. Surely, one might think, Bronski could not have made this statement any time after 1981, the year when the AIDS epidemic first became public knowledge. AIDS, that disease which has subsequently decimated communities of gay men around the world, was supposed to have convinced all of us - but especially gay men - that sexual liberation was over, that it was time to reform our licentious ways and settle down into relationships that were loving, committed, and monogamous. How, then, could Bronski insist in 1993 that gay liberation meant promiscuity? Promiscuity has certainly been a central feature of gay male life in the United States since at least World War II and probably for much longer. One study conducted in the 1970s found that half of all white and over a third of African-American gay men surveyed had over 500 lifetime sexual partners. Gay men are, after all, men. Men - whether for biological or cultural reasons - generally make sex more central to their lives, find it easier to separate sex from love, and have more difficulty remaining faithful to their partners than women. But there is also an unmistakable strain of thought in gay male culture that equates multi-partnerism with gay liberation. Since the 1960s movements geared towards the liberation of gay and lesbian people have been closely connected with philosophies of sexual liberation in one form or another. Indeed, the central tenet of the sexual liberation ethos, that all sexual acts committed by mature, consenting actors are equally legitimate, remains a very powerful argument in favor of gays and lesbians today. As Gabriel Rotello notes, many felt during the late 1960s that gay men in particular had something to teach the world about sexual pleasure. Having been denied many of the benefits of monogamy, such as social approval and marriage rights, gay men in urban centers around the United States and the industrialized world had developed their own sexual norms and institutions. It was a world of anonymous sexual encounters, encounters to be had in the backrooms of bars, public restrooms, parks and bathhouses. Liberationists thought that this culture was worthy of celebration. Gay men had for years used sex to express friendship, create community, or simply enjoy a pleasurable act. It offered an alternative model of sexual behavior to everyone seeking refuge from a repressive bourgeois society, a society that falsely insisted that sex had to be connected with reproduction or at least love. The AIDS crisis of the early 1980s might have been expected to strike a death blow to this sort of thinking and indeed many public gay male figures argued that gay men had to change their lifestyles. Most prominently, playwright and ACT-UP co-founder Larry Kramer insisted that gay men simply ought to stop having sex at least until AIDS was better understood. Yet these voices could be easily dismissed. Kramer had a flair for being excessively dramatic whenever he implicated anyone in the AIDS crisis and had a puritanical reputation even in the pre-AIDS period thanks to his award-winning 1978 play Faggots, which depicted gay culture as shallow and decadent. Besides, it quickly became clear that anal sex was the only sexual activity practiced by gay men that presents any significant risk of transmitting the HIV virus that is believed to cause AIDS. Accordingly, gay men could do much to avoid infection if they engaged in other sexual activities and/or used condoms during anal sex Sexual liberationists felt vindicated by this new concept of safe, or safer, sex. As Douglas Crimp stated in 1988: [G]ay people invented safe sex. We knew that the alternatives -monogamy and abstinence - were unsafe, unsafe in the latter case because people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them "just say no," they will have unsafe sex. We were able to invent safe sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic or not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many things, not only about the pleasures of sex, but about the great multiplicity of those pleasures...[Kramer and others] insist that our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that will save us. At first, it appeared that the sexual liberationists were entirely correct. By the late 1980s, studies showed that most gay men in the most economically prosperous nations were quite well informed about how to protect themselves against HIV and were acting on that knowledge. Rates of new infections among gay men in these countries plummeted dramatically. But by the early 1990s articles began appearing in both scholarly journals and mainstream newsmagazines suggesting that gay men were "relapsing" into unsafe activities. If these activities continued, one 1992 study of gay and bisexual men in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh concluded, one third of all currently uninfected twenty-year olds would convert by their thirtieth birthday, and more than half would eventually get infected. Epidemiologists began to speak of a "Second Wave" of HIV/AIDS in American gay communities. Although the rate of new infections among gay men was not necessarily rising again, it had never fallen substantially enough in many urban areas to bring down the overall infection rate among gay Americans. What, if anything, had gone wrong? Researchers, educators, and activists alike pondered this question. It could not be plausibly argued that gay men were uninformed; all of the evidence indicated that gay men who had unsafe sex usually knew all about how HIV was transmitted. Their explanations for their behavior differed little from the explanations offered by heterosexuals for failing to use condoms or other forms of birth control: the heat of passion, the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, or a desire to express intimacy. Yet the dangers of unprotected sex for gay men are clearly so much greater than they are for heterosexuals. Clearly something deeper was lurking beneath the surface. Long time AIDS researcher and activist Cindy Patton has offered an explanation that seems most consonant with liberationist ideology. She argues that by focusing on condom use, gay-directed HIV prevention campaigns reinforced the hetero-normative belief that sex is most physically and emotionally satisfying when it is penetrative. Since condoms are understood as a "stopgap" measure against HIV transmission, gay men have been in effect told that they can no longer fully express their sexuality because of AIDS. This might have been an acceptable compromise for a few years, but, as Michael Warner suggested in a 1995 Village Voice article, as gay men have increasingly come to realize that an AIDS cure or vaccine will not arrive anytime soon, many have become unwilling to put restraints on their sex lives indefinitely. Patton believes that the only way to rescue HIV prevention will be the production of new educational materials that represent non-penetrative forms of sexual expression as fully liberated and erotically satisfying. Patton makes no suggestion that gay men might best contain the spread of HIV by reducing their sexual partners, an idea that has never been fashionable within gay quarters. Just this year, however, prominent gay journalists Gabriel Rotello and Michaelangelo Signorile have suggested this very idea. It should come as no surprise that Signorile's and Rotello's advocacy of the old-fashioned ideal of monogamy has come under attack. Warner, for example, has charged that Signorile and Rotello are simply the pawns of a larger cultural project that seeks to impose a flawed, heterosexist model of sexual life on gay men and lesbians. But it would be difficult to argue that either Signorile's and Rotello's arguments are a mere reflection of internalized homophobia. Both men were members of both ACT-UP and Queer Nation, AIDS and gay activist organizations that are well-known for their radical politics and "in-your-face" tactics. Rotello was Signorile's editor at the now defunct magazine Outweek, which was embroiled the "outing" controversy of the early 1990s. Even Eve Pendleton, who is quite critical of both, insists that "Rotello and Signorile are not by any stretch of the word assimilationists." Rotello and Signorile began writing about the connections between AIDS and gay male promiscuity towards the end of 1994, Rotello in a series of columns printed in New York Newsday and Signorile in a prominent op-ed piece in the New York Times. Their positions did not begin to generate serious controversy among gay intellectuals until this year with the publications of their respective books Sexual Ecology and Life Outside. Signorile's Life Outside details the "gay fast lane of the nineties...a predominately white, middle-class and often upper-middle-class segment of urban gay life that...has a significant cultural influence on much of the gay population." It is a world that glorifies muscles, partying, drugs, and anonymous sex. Although the connections between this world and HIV epidemic in the larger gay community are a major theme of Life Outside, Signorile is ultimately more interested in documenting the superficiality he perceives in this culture and the way it leaves it participants emotionally unsatisfied. On more technical epidemiological matters Signorile generally defers to Rotello's arguments in Sexual Ecology. Like Patton, Rotello believes that gay-directed prevention efforts have erred by overemphasizing condom use. But Rotello is skeptical of the argument that safe sex education should instead emphasize safe(r) practices as an alternative to anal sex. Rather, he believes that partner reduction has been the missing component of preventative education. Rotello rejects the argument that the decline in rates of new HIV infections witnessed in the late 1980s is primarily attributable to the adoption of safer practices by gay men. Instead he believes that initial leveling off of new infections is closely connected with the saturation of HIV in what he calls "core groups." In any epidemic, core groups consist of those organisms that suffer from and transmit the relevant disease at much higher rates than the rest of the population. For the HIV epidemic, one core group consists of those gay men who engage in the most risky sex with the most partners. Members of this core group are obviously quite susceptible to HIV infection, while gay men who have fewer and less risky contacts are clearly less susceptible. Rotello argues that the high rate of new HIV infections in the early 1980s was primarily attributable to the rapid spread of HIV in this core group. By the mid to late 1980s, however, the virus had reached a saturation point - it had already infected most of the men in this group. Core group members were increasingly having sex only with other infected men, if they were healthy enough to be having sex at all. The rate of new infections had to go down, not as a "result of the success of prevention, but of its tragic failure." Rotello believes that the Second Wave of the epidemic is attributable to the rise of new core groups consisting of gay men, young and old, who have recently come out of the closet. While Signorile asserts that these gay men must not be taught that they are somehow less liberated or less gay if they do not embrace promiscuity, Rotello goes a step further, arguing that monogamy must be presented and indeed enforced as the ideal form of sexual life for gay men. Rotello believes that at this point little can be done in order to get gay men to use condoms more often when they have anal sex. He is also skeptical of suggestions like Patton's that educational materials make further efforts to eroticize safe(r) forms of sex, at least if safe(r) sex is understood as meaning oral sex, the risks of which Rotello believes have been greatly underemphasized. I don't think that Rotello's explanation of the persistence of the HIV crisis in the American gay community ultimately stands up to close scrutiny. There is considerable evidence that gay men in the United States thoroughly transformed their sexual practices in response to AIDS in the mid to late 80s in a way that surely would have helped reduce the transmission of HIV. It is possible that this behavior change occurred too late to have had much of an impact since by this point most of the most promiscuous members of the gay community were already infected. Yet even if this were the case, blame would have to fall squarely on the shoulders of a hostile federal government that slowed the production and distribution of explicit, gay-positive safer sex educational materials. Indeed, in countries like Australia where the national government worked more closely with gay groups, HIV/AIDS never decimated the gay community as it has in the United States. But what of the infections that are occurring now among people who know how HIV is transmitted? Is it possible that the newly infected have been so blinded by the ideology that emancipation demands sex with many people that they ignored their health? I imagine that this may account for some of the new HIV infections, but it ignores the fact that a disproportionate number of new HIV cases among gay men come from the ranks of groups that aren't well integrated into the gay community at all, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Indeed, the sense of identification with gay culture is often so weak among these men that researchers often prefer to simply call them "men who have sex with men." Why these men are so poorly integrated into the larger gay community is a controversial question. Internalized homophobia clearly plays a role. It is well documented that Latino culture, which is heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, is considerably more homophobic than mainstream American culture. On the other hand, it is not at all clear that the same thing can be said about African-American culture. Gay culture and ideology has historically been dominated by middle- and upper-middle class white men; it should not surprise us that prevention educational materials designed by such men might have limited appeal to other groups. If HIV prevention efforts are to be effective, marginalized groups clearly must be better integrated into the larger gay community. Unfortunately, this idea has been around for a while, but progress has been slow. In the meantime, other ideas need to be considered. Signorile and Rotello's recommendation of monogamy as a prevention strategy can probably have a positive, if limited impact. But wholly different ideas deserve equal attention. Psychotherapist and clinical psychologist Walt Odets has believes that a kind of collective death wish is at the heart of many gay men's failures to stay safe. Odets believes that for uninfected gay men who have had to deal with the pain and guilt associated with the deaths of perhaps scores of friends, there may be several incentives to become infected, including the possibility of closer friendship with positive friends, the compassion of a society that is generally willing to "forgive" gay men who contract HIV, even the assuaging of survivor's guilt through identification with dead friends and lovers. The one obvious positive incentive for remaining uninfected, remaining healthy, has been downplayed by AIDS organizations that wish to boost the morale of positive men and promote community among positive and negative men. Odets believes that HIV- negative men need specially targeted psychological services in order to prevent them from acting on their unconscious desires for unprotected sex during fits of manic behavior, when under the influence of alcohol and drugs, or following any sort of life event that intensifies the power of one's unconscious desires. Odets's recommendation that HIV negative men need special services has met with scorn by many gay AIDS activists, who charge that such provisioning is selfish and would represent a form of apartheid. But it has generated nowhere near the contempt that another idea, the increased regulation of gay bathhouses, has. Perhaps not surprisingly, Signorile and Rotello have been at the forefront of this movement in its latest incarnation. Both have been affiliated with Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists (GALPHA), an organization that has worked with municipal authorities in New York City to better regulate and if necessary shut down bathhouses that permit oral or anal sex (with or without condoms) on premises. Many activists argue that bathhouses and other public sex venues have historically functioned as an important site for building a gay community and represent an aspect of gay men's sexual culture that ought to be preserved. Critics of GALPHA and similar organizations point to studies that show that very little truly risky sex occurs in bathhouses and contend that if bathhouses are closed down, gay men will simply have anonymous sexual encounters in other public places where they are more vulnerable to bashings and less easily reached by safer sex educators. I find it difficult to believe that those bathhouses that permit unprotected oral and anal sex on premises do not contribute in some way to the persistence of HIV in gay communities. But public sex venues that permit unprotected anal sex, by the riskiest of all sexual practices, are quite uncommon. Many gay activists and intellectuals argue that the goal of preventing a relatively small number of HIV transmissions cannot justify any additional regulation of gay men's sexual lives by the state, organizations that purport to serve the gay community, or anybody else. This is the ideology that informs groups like New York City's Sex Panic!, which has pledged to "defend our culture from attack[s]" by municipal authorities bent on restoring the "quality of life" in urban areas and the likes of Signorile and Rotello. The fact that Sex Panic! views itself as defending contemporary gay culture and Signorile and Rotello view themselves as critiquing it suggests to me that gay culture does equate promiscuity with liberation - an impression that is shared by most gay men I have spoken with about the issue. That's problematic. Personally, I resent the implication that gay men like myself - men who are quite "out" and active in the community - who seek committed, monogamous relationships are somehow less liberated than men who spend their free time cruising the streets of Chelsea or sucking cocks at Blow Buddies in San Francisco. In a still very hostile world, I do believe that gay men must protect all of their safe spaces, including bathhouses. Moreover, I do believe that it's important that gay men have a sense of their past and its culture. I'd even say that it's important that we celebrate that past to some degree. In any event, our sexual culture and its history are worthy of respect. We have played an important role in teaching the world that sex can be so much more than merely inserting a penis in a vagina. We have helped spread the liberating idea that sex shouldn't only have to be about procreation or love. But we musn't forget that our lifestyles in the past were shaped by oppressive forces. Back then, anonymous sex wasn't a choice - for most, it was the only plausible possibility. But defending, indeed glorifying anonymous sex today only seems to preserve the closet. And it doesn't exactly help us in our battle to contain HIV. Again, although I don't think that the equation of promiscuity with liberation is the sole or even most important reason why HIV still infects between 30 and 50 percent of gay men in American cities today, it is still part of the problem. Sexual liberation helped us out quite a bit in the 60s and 70s and we helped it back. But it's a mistake to enforce that ideology among ourselves now. It dangerously conceals the fact that gay people are no more naturally prone to multi-partnerism than heterosexuals. And it is slowly killing us.