by Dale Peck
This is so seventies, I tell myself. I tell myself that queers have freed sex from quaint notions of commitment and meaning and consequence, but as I look around at the men in this room, many of whom are in their thirties and forties, I find myself wondering if any of them still thinks that, or remembers a time before AIDS when it might have actually been true. I wonder if they feel guilty now, or lucky, or afraid—but then some hairy-chested dude with poppers-glazed eyes pinches my nipple while someone else whose face I haven’t really seen applies his mouth to my cock, and for a moment the scene is reduced to its physical parameters. My body; his—and his, and his. There’s a dick in each of my hands. Wait, let me rephrase that: there’s a dick in each of my hands! One goes with the hairy chest, but I’m not sure what the other’s connected to. I wouldn’t mind doing a little sucking myself, but my lips are chapped and the bottom one might have a small cut, so no kissing for me, let alone sucking. (Jay’s voice in my head: “How do you get AIDS?”) I lid my eyes and try to impersonate poppers guy, who’s moaning porn aphorisms: “Yeah, baby, do it.” “Oh yeah, pull on that thing.” The guy’s hot, but the blankness of his expression is off-putting, and the words coming out of his mouth are a reminder that no experience is ever just physical. Somewhere along the line this guy learned to think of his drivel as erotic, and I find myself wondering who his performance is for: me, or himself? It’s all a bit much, and I close my eyes and pretend I’m masturbating with somebody else’s mouth. I come; I go.
On the drive home, I thank God for CB’s car: my idea of sexual denouement isn’t a subway ride. “How was Alex?” I ask. “Alex?” “My friend, Alex. That’s the guy you ended up with.” “Oh,” CB says. “He came on my shirt.” He shows me the spot, as innocuous as a water stain. We talk about how strange it must have been, in the days before the sex clubs were closed down, to have done this every weekend, every night even; in hindsight, I find it telling that we used the word “strange” rather than “exciting” or “addictive” or, I don’t know, “enervating.” CB drops me off and heads back to Connecticut, and Jay. It’s morbid, but I can’t help wondering how many gay men went out for a night as equivocal as the one I just had and died for it. Upstairs, my roommates are sleeping and the cat has this funny idea I’m going to feed her. I don’t though. I just brush my teeth and wash my hands—and then, remembering, my dick—and go to bed.
5
In the wake of later developments, it’s easy to forget that back rooms, sex clubs, and bathhouses re-emerged not because of some newfound tolerance by straight people (or their elected officials) for the more risqué aspects of the gay milieu, but because even the most rudimentary understanding of how HIV is transmitted will tell you that it’s hard to get, which is one of the reasons why everyone in the world isn’t infected or, well, dead. That group sex and promiscuity were significant factors in the virus’s spread in the gay community in the first years of the epidemic—which is to say, before the invention of safe sex by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen in 1982 (or, to be more accurate, before their tactics were endorsed by a government reluctant to acknowledge the existence of homosexual intercourse, let alone talk about it)—is borne out by the demographics of infection in the developed world. But according to the Centers for Disease Control, the rate of new HIV infections peaked in 1983 and 1984, just as the techniques of safe sex began to be widely disseminated, and, by 1986, new infections had dropped by about 25% and held steady for the next four or five years—which is to say, until around the time the sex clubs began to reopen—at which point new HIV infections dropped another 25%. And, though most of the clubs and back rooms closed after another three or four or five years, infection rates have remained more or less steady since 1992, with approximately 50,000 Americans seroconverting each year.
A significant portion of these new infections, however—between 60% and 80% depending on the year—occur among “men who have sex with men,” or MSM, as the CDC terms them. By way of explanation for this phenomenon, the CDC, in its Estimated HIV Incidence Among Adults and Adolescents in the United States 2007–2010, reports that
individual risk behavior alone does not account for the disproportionate burden of HIV among young MSM. Other factors are likely at work, including: higher prevalence of HIV among MSM, which leads to a greater risk of HIV exposure with each sexual encounter; the high proportion of young MSM (especially young MSM of color) who are unaware of their infection, which increases the risk of unknowingly transmitting the virus to others; stigma and homophobia, which deter some from seeking HIV prevention services; barriers, such as lack of insurance and concerns about confidentiality, that result in less access to testing, care, and antiretroviral treatment; and high rates of some STDs, which can facilitate HIV transmission. Additionally, many young MSM may underestimate their personal risk for HIV.
What the data and the analysis show, then, is that some gay men have persisted in having sex without condoms since the invention of safe sex, which, because of the high rate of HIV infection among gay men, makes their chances of becoming infected significantly higher than heterosexuals’. The second part of this phenomenon was, of course, well-known from the early years of the epidemic, but the first part remained something of an in camera conversation until the mid-nineties, when a series of articles in the gay and nongay press brought it to broader public attention. The most widely regarded of these pieces is probably Michael Warner’s “Why Gay Men Are Having Risky Sex,” which appeared in the January 31, 1995 issue of the Village Voice. Warner was already a well-known queer theorist (in Homos, which would come out a few months later, Leo Bersani named him a chief architect of the terminological shift from “gay” to “queer”), and he made the discussion personal by admitting he’d had an “unsafe encounter” himself. The experience left him understandably rattled, not to mention frightened for his health, and as a teacher and writer he looked to the literature to try to find out “why I wanted risky sex.” But “in the vast industry of AIDS education and prevention, I knew of nothing that would help me answer this question.”
Warner’s confession became a touchstone for a discussion still going on today, both in terms of practical efforts to get gay men to have safe sex, and in the theoretical world as well—as late as 2007, David Halperin published What Do Gay Men Want?, a book-length response to some of the issues raised in Warner’s then twelve-year-old essay. Warner’s thesis aside—that “abjection” is attractive to certain gay men, who take “pleasure in being the lowest of the low, in being bad, in being outlaws, in betraying both our own values and those of the people around us”—his essay was a level-headed but urgent call for prevention education to move beyond paraphernalia and practice to the psychology of sex, both individual and cultural, and it stood in stark contrast to a slew of articles then appearing in New York’s mainstream press. These articles didn’t so much discuss the supposed reemergence of unsafe sex as decry it, although the truth is they focused less on sex than on certain of the venues in which it took place, i.e., back rooms and sex clubs, which in turn led to the formation, in early 1995, in New York City, of a group calling itself Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists. “HIV transmission among gay men is becoming epidemic again,” GLHPA declared in one of its first leaflets, and the program it outlined “to end HIV transmission in commercial sex establishments” essentially called for the closure of those establishments. This was danced around: all GLHPA actually asked was that HIV educational materials be prominently displayed in “commercial sex establishments”; that these establishments provide regular educational sessions on protected sex; and that, in accordance with pre-existing health code regulations, anal or vaginal or oral intercourse not occur. Additionally, GLHPA asked that such sexual activity as was legally permissible (which seemed to be confined to hand-jobs and toesucking), must be monitorable, meaning adequate lighting and no cubicles, and, finally, that it must also be monitored—which meant, in those few “commercial sex establishments” that made a good-fai
th effort to demonstrate their commitment to safe sex, the shadowy presence of three or four men, usually South Asian immigrants and always heterosexual, dressed in black like stage hands and peering squeamishly over shoulders and through legs in an attempt to determine whether a too-eager pole was trying to gain entry to an unguarded hole like some misguided bridge-and-tunneler trying to slip past the doorman at Studio 54. I remember trying to imagine how one might derive erotic satisfaction in an environment that sounded more like an examining room than a sex club, but all I could come up with was a riddle I learned as a kid: if there are seventeen birds sitting on a branch and you manage to hit three of them with a single shotgun blast, how many will remain on the tree? Answer: none. Even birds know where they’re not wanted.
But this was 1995, and in 1995 we still clung to our acronyms, and our conferences too. And so it was: on March 1, 1995 the New York City Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center hosted a forum that, among other things, formally introduced GLHPA to the Gs and Ls whom the organization claimed, at least acronymically, to represent, and whose sex lives it was trying to regulate. Here was Duncan Osborne, who had once written for the now-defunct gay and lesbian newsweekly OutWeek, and who, more recently, had written in the Daily News: “Impaired by alcohol or drugs, driven by denial or desire for sexually charged ask no questions anonymity, [gay men] are returning to dangerous practices. If this was insane in 1980, I do not know the word for it in 1994.” Here was Michelangelo Signorile, already well-known as the FUCKING! MEDIA! CRITIC! for OutWeek and, more recently, as the author of Queer in America, who, on February 26, 1995, had written on the editorial page of the New York Times, “it seems that some of what we did for those who are positive was at the expense of those who are desperately trying to remain negative.” And here was Gabriel Rotello, once editor-in-chief of OutWeek, later “Cityscape” columnist for New York Newsday: “Death waits in New York City’s unsafe sex clubs for many a gay soul tonight. Beneath the averted eyes of the local AIDS establishment, the band in New York plays on.”
I mention the OutWeek connection because I also worked there, for the last fifty-four of the magazine’s 105 issues, during which time I had the unenviable task of copyediting Rotello’s weekly editorial—unenviable not just because to suggest to Gabriel Rotello that he had conjugated a verb incorrectly was to suggest that one was looking for a new job, but also because his OutWeek editorials were guilty of the same bombast that later showed up in his “Cityscape” columns. For example, Gabriel Rotello on morality: “Those who are HIV-positive have an absolute responsibility to protect others.” Or Gabriel Rotello on history: “We have evolved from almost complete intolerance of commercial multipartner sex (1986), to muted tolerance as long as it was scrupulously safe (1987–1988), to denial and confusion when it entered the gray zone of possibly unsafe (1989), to indifference when it became blatantly unsafe (1990–today).” Sex clubs, Rotello declared, either “maintain an attitude of brotherly concern for their patrons’ health,” or they are “AIDS killing grounds.” Cf.: “I witnessed a sex murder/suicide last Thursday night.” Presumably what Rotello is referring to here is unprotected anal intercourse, and as I tried to figure out how he’d managed to confirm the lack of a condom on the top’s dick in the dim confines of a sex room, I found myself imagining Rotello lying on a sticky floor like a dedicated porn cinematographer, squinting up at a pair of swinging balls. And I couldn’t help but wonder: did Rotello have pen and paper with him to take notes at the crucial moment, or was there perhaps something else in his hand?
OF COURSE, THERE was no reason to expect a gay tabloid journalist to write with more sensitivity or intelligence than his straight peers on a subject that has long divided the gay community—it’s doubtful that a single measured statement has ever fallen from the lips of Larry Kramer about anonymous sex or the epidemic (or anything else having to do with gay life), and if he hadn’t opened his big mouth then millions of people who are alive today would have died years ago. But the sensationalism to which Rotello continually resorted led some to question his qualifications to comment on both the issue and the people he wrote about, especially given the political climate into which he dropped his incendiary missives. Because this was 1995, as I mentioned before: the Dinkins idyll was over. Rudy Giuliani had taken office, and, flush with tax revenues from Silicon Alley and Wall Street, the city’s first Republican mayor since John Lindsay was attempting to create a kinder, gentler New York, complete with so-called “quality of life” laws that turned certain neighborhoods into de facto gated communities on weekend nights. The primary focus of his administration’s attention, however, was the transformation of Times Square into a Disneyfied theme park, but in order to pave the way for family-friendly new businesses the city had first to do away with the old. In the case of Times Square, that meant porn theaters and strip clubs, along with the prostitutes and drug dealers who tended to congregate near them, and, in 1995, the City Council passed a set of “strict new zoning rules” to regulate sex-related businesses, which required them to be more than 500 feet from homes, schools, houses of worship, and, most important, each other, which is to say: the new New York City would no longer have a red-light district. According to the regulations, “An adult eating or drinking establishment is an eating or drinking establishment that regularly features one or more of the following: (1) live performances that are characterized by an emphasis on ‘specified anatomical areas’ or ‘specified sexual activities’; or, (2) films, motion pictures, videocassettes, slides or other photographic reproductions that are characterized by an emphasis upon the depiction or description of ‘specified sexual activities’ or ‘specified anatomical areas.’” The ostensible targets of these regulations were porn theaters and strip joints, and the initial focus of enforcement was Times Square, Hell’s Kitchen, and the adjacent neighborhoods. But it didn’t take a lawyer to realize that sex clubs and back rooms throughout the city could be—and indeed were—closed down under this rubric. As an organization calling itself Queerwatch wrote, “New York City Council and Mayor Giuliani want to make history out of most of New York City’s ‘adult’ businesses,” and as a consequence the timing of statements like those made by Rotello, Signorile, and Osborne was, to use Queerwatch’s word, “nightmarish.” Of the motivations that informed such statements, the organization wrote, “There is more than a little stupidity, lack of imagination, hypocrisy, and career advancement involved.” This charge was all but confirmed when, at the March 1 forum, Gabriel Rotello admitted that if he wrote on other issues he received little or no response—it was only when he wrote on sex clubs that he got a reaction.
Ideological affiliation aside, no one was denying that some gay men were having unprotected sex, whether in public venues or the privacy of their homes. But the reality of HIV prevention requires more than theorizing, monitors, or laws: it requires condoms, and perhaps the most tangible product of the March 1, 1995 forum at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center was a second forum, this one held March 18, entitled “Talk Sex,” in which participants tried to find out why some gay men weren’t suiting up all the time and, more important, how they could be persuaded to. I attended this forum, but because its conveners asked journalists not to take notes and not to report anything said on the panels, and because I consider the fact that I didn’t identify myself as a journalist a tacit agreement to abide by those conditions (I was covering the conference for the Voice), I won’t talk about what was said there.
I’ll talk instead about shoes.
There were, when I counted, thirty-four people in my panel, three of whom were moderators and at least two of whom were observers—me, and one of the two women in the room. Of these thirty-four people, at least ten were wearing black boots—primarily the calf-height sponge-soled Doc Martens we all wore in 1987 and 1988 and 1989, which is to say, during the first few years of ACT UP and Queer Nation. At least half a dozen were wearing cross-trainers like the ones Nancy “I’m-going-to-Disneyland!” Kerr
igan had hawked incessantly during the previous winter’s Olympics; several wore the boat shoes I remembered coveting in high school and burning in college; and quite a few more wore Timber-lands of one sort or another, indicating that, as with goatees, house music, the vocabulary and inflection of the language of camp, and baggy jeans—this last only occasionally, and usually only by dinge queens—white gay men had not lost their penchant for appropriating the culture of urban people of color. There were, finally, several pairs of shoes that appeared to fulfill only the most basic function of footwear, which was to interpose a protective layer between one’s feet and the ground.
What I am trying to say is: there were no new shoes at the conference. There were shoes that we had been wearing a long time, and there were shoes that were comfortable, and there were shoes that we had only recently begun wearing but that other people had been wearing before us—new to us, in other words, but not “new” in any real sense of the word. And then there were the shoes that told the true story: they were tired, they were battered. They needed not reinforcing but replacing, but no original alternatives existed. And I don’t mean to suggest I was any different: I wore cross-trainers. I was coming from lunch, I was on my way to the gym. Because that’s what we did in 1995: we ate lunch, and then we attempted to stem the spread of HIV, and afterward we went to the gym to work it out of our systems. By 1995 we had scheduled AIDS into our lives. The epidemic had moved from the evening news to afternoon talk shows, which were less interested in potential new treatments or the persistence of pre-AIDS sexual behavior than in what Greg Louganis had been thinking as a doctor stitched up his bleeding head at the 1988 Olympics, and how did it feel to win his third and fourth gold medals in Seoul! AIDS had become the issue movie: An Early Frost, Longtime Companion, Philadelphia, Boys on the Side. AIDS had become, bizarrely, a cheerful expression of cultural kitsch: when in May of that year I met with Michael Warner in the Big Cup cafe in Chelsea to discuss his article and the events it had engendered, I was distracted by a banner that hung on the opposite side of Eighth Avenue. “Paul Freely,” it read, “wishes you a Happy AIDS Awareness Day.” (The contemporary version of this sign would be the 54,178 people on Facebook who, as of June 2, 2013, like AIDS.) This normalizing of AIDS, or, more accurately, this normalizing of the terms with which we discussed AIDS—tanned, buff Greg Louganis sitting opposite Oprah Winfrey, with frequent cutaways to him in his Speedo, as opposed to the waiting room full of emaciated men I encountered when I went to my doctor’s office—had the opposite of its intended effect: it didn’t make AIDS more visible but, rather, rendered it invisible by incorporating it into the realm of things we expected to encounter on a daily basis, and thus need not give our full attention. Viewed in this context, unprotected sex seemed as inevitable and inconsequential as stubbing your toe on a misplaced chair—or, in the CDC’s remarkably blasé analysis: “Additionally, many young MSM may underestimate their personal risk for HIV.”