by Moira Weigel
“Within a few years,” Rosett recalled, “everyone else in David’s bed that day—except me—was also dead.”
* * *
The Centers for Disease Control had noticed the first signs in the summer of 1981. In June of that year, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report noted a strange outbreak of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in Los Angeles. Between October 1980 and May 1981, five young men had been diagnosed with the disease. The article speculated that it might have to do with “some aspect of the homosexual lifestyle.” The next month, the MMWR reported that in the prior thirty months, twenty-six young gay men in New York City and California had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that was extremely rare in the United States and all but unheard of except among the elderly. By June 1982, 355 Americans were known to be suffering from KS and other opportunistic infections. Doctors and the press had started calling what afflicted them GRID, for “gay-related immuno deficiency.” In July 1982, the CDC would rename GRID “AIDS” and identify four populations that were especially at risk: homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. As shorthand, doctors called them the “4 H’s.”
Of course, AIDS dramatically changed how gay men dated. “A profound panic has crept over men in the major centers of the outbreak,” The Advocate reported in 1982. “Few know what to do or not to do.” But the disease was not striking only gay men.
As early as 1983, Essence magazine reported on CDC findings that 4 percent of HIV-positive patients were not 4 H, and that many new infections were occurring among African American women. By 1996, the number of African Americans with AIDS would surpass the number of whites who had it. At first, many magazines that aimed at black middle-class readers seemed inclined to blame drug users and black men who engaged in homosexual or bisexual activity, despite leading straight-looking lives. “MSM,” the CDC called them, for “men who have sex with men.”
An article that appeared in Ebony in April 1987 warned: “Not only is it killing ‘them,’ but many of ‘us’ as well.” The author of an article that appeared in Essence later that year warned black women to be careful whom they dated. “If I find a guy who’s a little swishy,” the author confided, “I stay away.”
With brutal speed, throughout the 1980s, AIDS would divide daters into Positives and Negatives, straights and swishes. Us and them. For yuppies, niche dating may have been a matter of preference. For those trying to live and love where AIDS struck, it was not snobbery at stake. It was survival.
The communities struggling to cope with AIDS had to rewrite the rules regarding how people talked about sex. For decades, euphemisms like “necking” and “petting” had sufficed to cover everything short of “going all the way.” No more. The AIDS crisis compelled Americans to speak about sex at great length and in great detail. It forced even conservative politicians to do so in public.
AIDS raised the stakes of dating: There had been crises before, but never one with such deadly consequences. It required daters to develop new protocols for how to interact. Combined with new technologies, the new precision about desire that activists invented would change how everyone went about looking for love.
* * *
For six years after the “gay cancer” appeared in California and New York, the Reagan administration did almost nothing about it. The right-wing Christians on whose support Reagan depended saw it as a disease of “junkies and queers.” In their eyes, the people who were dying were more than expendable: They deserved it. In 1983, the conservative TV host Pat Buchanan remarked in a moment of faux-compassion: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
In 1984, researchers at the National Institutes of Health isolated the virus that caused AIDS. But even after his close friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS-related causes in 1985, the president remained silent. He would not address the public on the subject until 1987. By then, it was known to have killed more than twenty thousand Americans. In the face of this indifference, the communities suffering from AIDS had to activate and expand existing social networks in order to bring care to those who needed it. They had to develop strategies for delivering information about how to protect yourself to the people who were at greatest risk.
Well before the first cases of GRID were recorded, LGBT activists in many cities had created their own public health institutions. In 1971, the Fenway Health Community Center in Boston was founded with the mission of providing care to gays and lesbians; the Gay Men’s Collective at Fenway developed a strong track record treating hepatitis B and other STDs. At the University of Chicago, a group of gay medical students founded the Howard Brown Health Center in 1974. They hired the well-known drag performer Stephen Jones, aka Nurse Wanda Lust, to help with community outreach. Donning her signature wig, nurse’s outfit, and round spectacles, Wanda drove around Chicago in a brightly painted “VD van,” giving lectures about sexual health. On Easter Sunday 1979, a group of drag performers based in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco began making public appearances in nuns’ habits and dramatic makeup in order to evangelize similar information. They called themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
In 1980, a New Yorker named Richard Edwards created a “discreet fraternity” of “fuckbuddies” called Meridian. Meridian required prospective members to undergo an STD screening. After receiving a clean bill of health, you got a membership pin. In a series of letters that he wrote to the gay newspaper the New York Native, Edwards—or “Mr. Rick,” as he signed them—explained his thinking: “Buddies care about buddies. It is naturally masculine.” Camaraderie, the fuckbuddies reasoned, was the best protection.
When news of GRID broke, networks like Meridian sprang into action. The problem was that nobody was sure what exactly the “gay plague” was or how it was transmitted. Some CDC researchers thought that GRID might be a reaction to a toxic substance that gay men used in greater numbers than the population in general. Others, like the prominent Greenwich Village doctor Joseph Sonnabend, thought that GRID was caused by repeated exposure to less devastating infections, like syphilis.
Facing so many unknowns, some activists preached monogamy and even abstinence. The writer Larry Kramer became infamous for taking this position. In 1983, Kramer wrote a furious screed for the New York Native, “1,112 and Counting.”
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” it began. Kramer aimed to inflame his readers to demand action from the mainstream press and from the government. But he also expressed rage at gay men who put themselves at risk. “I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death,” Kramer wrote. “I am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks.”
To many gay men this attitude seemed to come dangerously close to blaming people with AIDS for their disease. Besides, pragmatists realized that the abstinence Kramer preached was impracticable. The best method of prevention was to teach people how to continue to enjoy sex while minimizing its risks.
* * *
In 1983, the young gay writers Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz collaborated with Joseph Sonnabend to produce a forty-page booklet titled How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. The five thousand copies they printed got snatched up in a flash. The opening chapters urged gay men to treat one another not as conquests but as partners. This required placing a high value on the health of your lovers and speaking truthfully with them.
In a section called “Staying in Control,” the authors recommended discussing sexual health ahead of time with any prospective partner and even treating such conversations as foreplay. “Discussing precautions before you have sex might seem like a turn off, but if you enjoy staying healthy, you may eventually come to eroticize whatever precautions you require prior to the sexual encounter.”
In addition to openness, Callen and Berkowitz insisted on precision. How to Have Sex breaks down gay sex into a menu of discrete safe and unsafe acts, and provides ve
ry clear instructions about the difference. For instance, the section “No Risk Sex” makes the following suggestions:
Creative Masturbation offers alternatives to jerking off alone at home. These include: mutual masturbation, group J/O, body contact, fantasy, dirty talk (verbal), voyeurism, exhibitionism, touching, fingers (not fists), titplay, toys, etc. (See section on “Jerk Off Clubs” on page 31.)
Creative Penetration includes the use of condoms, fingers (not hands) and “toys.” (For a discussion of safe dildo practices, see page 24.)
Other chapters offered equally frank practical advice on “Sucking,” “Getting Sucked,” “Fucking,” “Getting Fucked,” “Kissing,” “Rimming,” “Water Sports,” “Dildoes,” “Sadism & Masochism (S&M),” “Fist Fucking,” “Washing Up,” “Closed Circle of Fuck Buddies,” “Jerk Off Clubs,” and so on.
In the years that followed, AIDS service organizations across the country would produce educational material that presented similar terms in similar menu formats. Rather than telling readers to “Just Say No,” these pamphlets offered a wide range of options. The checklist format encouraged readers to mark off new fancies, the way they might dog-ear items in a catalog. It assured them that they could still enjoy an almost infinite variety of sexual experiences as long as they followed the right protocols. The condition was learning to recognize and name what they wanted.
* * *
In order to survive the plague, gay men had to become comfortable talking openly about their histories, diseases, and desires, and seek out partners who shared their attitudes. They would have to break sex down into constituent parts and determine which were safe and which were dangerous. These efforts produced descriptions of sexual behavior that were at once explicit and specific.
Individuals and subcultures had surely come up with terms for activities like “rimming” and “fist-fucking” before. But now these terms were being deliberately codified and disseminated. Different descriptions were needed for each act and target audience.
“Safe sex” promised to save many aspects of gay liberation for a frightening new era. But there was a problem: A lot of the people at risk did not think of themselves as part of that movement. Many black and Hispanic men who had sex with men did not call themselves “gay”; some took offense when others did.
In many cities, communities of Men who had Sex with Men were highly segregated. Bouncers at bars and bathhouses would turn away black men by demanding multiple forms of identification when they did not block them outright. This meant that the viral marketing campaigns launched by organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and the Harvey Milk Foundation in San Francisco reached only a limited demographic.
The techniques that the San Francisco AIDS Foundation used to distribute tens of thousands of condoms every month in the Castro did not put them in the hands of African Americans and Latinos who lived in the Mission District or the Tenderloin. And to the women contracting HIV in these poor neighborhoods, risqué pamphlets and posters would have felt irrelevant. Billy Jones, the African American activist who founded the San Francisco organization Black and White Men Together (BWMT) warned that most of the people he served thought AIDS was a “white boy disease” that could not strike them.
Different populations needed their own leaders to speak to them in their own language. In San Francisco, a group of nonwhite community leaders called the Third World AIDS Advisory Task Force stepped in. In 1985, TWAATF started designing and disseminating educational materials. “AIDS is striking people of color,” their first brochure warned readers. In 1989, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and BWMT conducted a series of focus groups with blacks and Latinos in order to try to determine what kinds of ad campaigns might reach them.
SFAF learned, among other things, that the sexually explicit language and images that appealed to gay white men often offended and alienated nonwhites. They realized that to reach recent immigrants from Latin America, the best bet was to go not through bars but through churches. The result was two ad campaigns aimed specifically at each of these populations: “Get Carried Away” and “Listo para la acción.”
* * *
Not all daters found it easy to adopt new safe sex measures. Yet a growing number of Americans recognized that it was imperative that they talk about sex. Don’t decoy, avoid, or make void the topic / Cuz that ain’t gonna stop it, the hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa warned. By the late 1980s, even the Reagan administration was realizing they were right.
In late 1986, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop enraged his fellow Christian conservatives by issuing a public report on AIDS that called for franker discussions of sex and for distributing condoms in public schools. “Education about AIDS should start at an early age so that children can grow up knowing the behaviors to avoid to protect themselves,” Koop recommended.
Over protests from the secretary of education, Koop printed twenty million copies and had fifty-five thousand sent to the National Parent Teacher Association. He followed up with a detailed brochure titled Understanding AIDS.
The CDC started mailing Understanding AIDS to American households in January 1988. By June, one hundred million copies had gone out. Koop did not use the kinds of explicit images or sexual slang featured in GMHC pamphlets and posters. But he studied them carefully. Like gay activists, he instructed couples to talk about their desires and the dangers they might entail.
“Some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly,” Koop warned in a short note that ran on the front page. “I can easily understand that. But now you must discuss them.” The brochure described safe and unsafe behaviors directly and in detail. A section called “What About Dating?” emphasized to readers that they had an obligation to initiate conversations about these subjects with their partners.
“You are going to have to be careful about the person you become sexually involved with, making your own decision based on your own best judgment,” Koop wrote. “That can be difficult. Has this person had any sexually transmitted diseases? How many people have they been to bed with? Have they experimented with drugs? All these are sensitive, but important, questions. But you have a personal responsibility to ask.”
Indeed, in the context of the AIDS crisis, even a conservative like Koop emphasized that being able to talk with each other was the single most important test of whether two daters should take their intimacies to the next level. “Think of it this way,” he admonished. “If you know someone well enough to have sex, you should be able to talk about AIDS. If someone is unwilling to talk, you shouldn’t have sex.”
Communication was paramount. Not formal commitment or community approval. Marriage itself provided no guarantees. Wedding bells did not toll the end of talking about sex. “Do Married People Get AIDS?” an insert on the page dedicated to dating asked. Of course they did. “If you feel your spouse may be putting you at risk, talk to him or her. It’s your life.”
The country had been through a lot since Reagan smirked to voters that free lovers at Berkeley engaged in “orgies so vile I cannot describe them.” Public health officials now spoke with a degree of frankness that would have been unthinkable during the wildest years of the freedom era.
In 1994, Bill Clinton was forced by Republicans to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for saying—at a UN conference on AIDS—that perhaps schools should teach young students to masturbate. But two years later, her replacement, Audrey F. Manley, went on television to talk about “outercourse”—all the sexually pleasurable activities that one could enjoy without exchanging bodily fluids. And in January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and everyone in America started obsessing over whether or not penetrating someone with a cigar or fellating him in the highest office in the nation constituted “sexual relations,” even those of us who were still children had opinions. Sure, it may have felt a little cringeworthy to debate the ins and outs over family dinner. But we had already discussed them in sex ed.
American public schools began offering classes in sex education precisely during the years when dating first became mainstream: the 1910s. As courtship moved out of family living rooms and church basements into public settings, progressive educators recognized that young people might no longer be able to rely on their parents and pastors to tell them what they needed to know, when they needed to know it.
What exactly should be included in the curriculum of sex ed courses had always been controversial. The Chicago teachers who developed pilot programs for the city in the 1920s, for instance, hotly debated whether information about puberty, sex, and family planning should simply be added to existing biology and home economics courses or whether the school should invite doctors and nurses to speak to students during dedicated sessions. Educators bounced back and forth between versions of these two approaches for years. But in the 1980s and ’90s, sex education became a political battlefield.
The effects were paradoxical. During these years, the absolute number of programs grew dramatically. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of states that mandated public schools to teach sex ed went from six to seventeen, plus the District of Columbia. But the fact that federal law left it up to local school boards to set the curriculum meant that students from different parts of the country learned very different things. In many places, conservatives managed to restrict what they were taught to “abstinence only.”