by Jim Eigo. Jim is a long-time queer activist and a presenter at the recent "Sex Panic" Teach-In held at the NYC Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.
"The poor homosexuals - they have declared war on Nature, and now Nature is exacting an awful retribution." So wrote reactionary columnist Pat Buchanan of AIDS. If we substitute the word "Nature" with "Ecology", Buchanan's venom becomes the thesis for Gabriel Rotello's recent book, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men.
Rotello is just one of several born-again gay male fundamentalists. They all present a two-part message: 1) Because gay male sexual conduct offends nature or ecology or the social order, we gay men have brought AIDS upon ourselves, 2) Monogamy (of some sort) is the natural, ecological, socially responsible cure for our ills. This message of suicidal gay men and the sanity of marriage is now, unsurprisingly, the dominant gay voice in mainstream media. The fundamentalists' social program feeds on gay male guilt and fear and fans panic into the indefinite future. Its realization would curtail the freedom of all gay men.
Rotello's particular danger is his attack on safer sex. His book argues: since significant new HIV infection occurs among gay men, we should abandon current safer sex strategies and adopt monogamy as a communal norm. But diverting prevention resources to promote monogamy, rather than augmenting the safer sex efforts that have been substantially effective, would be disastrous for public health. As Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of the inventors of safer sex, has said: "This prescription could kill you."
Rotello laments the reduction of safer sex to a "simplistic" condom doe. (As if a one-size-fits-all monogamy were not simplistic!) In fact, safer sex efforts have always offered a varied palette of risk reduction procedures, be it a simple barrier, or emphasizing non-penetrative acts, or reserving unprotected anal sex for a primary partner of the same serostatus. Mixing and matching strategies in sequence or combination, a generation of gay men has literalized safer sex literature quite polymorphously.
In s book nominally concerned with gay men and AIDS prevention, the voices of sexually active gay men and of real-world prevention workers are never heard. Nor is there an inkling that gay male sex involves passion and pleasure. "Sexual ecology" unsullied by desire has no claim to holism. Unconcerned with mundane AIDS prevention, the book is a lengthy brief for gay monogamy, with AIDS its occasion. But had Sexual Ecology been a simple paean to gay marriage, who'd ever have put it out?
Rotello's "deep" ecology has all the specificity and real world relevance that Nancy Reagan's bromide "Just say No" had a decade ago. Rotello counsels: "The answer is moderation. Balance." This is prose more appropriate to a self-help audiotape, utterly unequal to the choices gay men face in the age of AIDS. He warns us his plan has no real specifics. He advocates education, the continued development of community alternatives to bars and baths, and a system of rewards and punishments according the monogamous a "status" withheld from the rest of us. He tells us we're free to disagree with his few non-specifics and to come up with our own. But AIDS prevention needs concrete strategies that people can apply to their lives and adapt with ease. Amid a health crisis, does Rotello seriously propose that we replace current programs with his muddle?
Virally-enforced monogamy is a prescription for an airless life, an edict from above that neither engages individual gay men nor addresses their sexual needs. Recognizing that gay men mate without the constraints of breeders, Rotello says we need not be a lot more promiscuous than heterosexuals, justs a little - hardly an airtight personal prevention strategy. Even among heterosexuals, with a tradition of monogamy and children to rear, marriage, the engine of much misery, today is in a shambles. Rotello tells us that in 1978 only 14precinct of gay American men were in monogamous relationships. Even in the face of AIDS, gay men have shown no widespread inclination to monogamy, a measure of how little it satisfies significant numbers of us. With many finding it purgatory, enforcing Rotello's utopia would take extensive, invasive social engineering.
Openly nostalgic for the epidemic's early years when dread and ignorance enforced sporadic celibacy or makeshift pairing-off, Rotello advocates fear and stigma to lead reluctant gay men to monogamy. What sort of lives would he have us lead? Fear is an animal response to threatening conditions, but it's an emergency response. As such, it's an ineffective base for long-term AIDS prevention. And protracted fear is phobia. Rotello may call the shackles of AIDS-induced monogamy "this revolution", but his glorification of terror reverses the liberating vision of Stonewall. Fear being his bulwark, Rotello laments two features of the virus which limit its devastation: most unsafe encounters won't result in infection, and those that do won't result in immediate disease. Since "weak penalties" vitiate viral fear, he asks us to figure out how we can make them swift and certain. Because not even a full-blown AIDS panic will be strong enough to compel monogamy endlessly into the future, Rotello has to paint "devastatingly predictable" future plagues.
Only 48 percent of heterosexual serodiscordant couples consistently use condoms. Serial monogamy is AIDS prevention only if its defenders accept either of two repugnant implicit subordinate arguments. Either containing the epidemic will mean lots of individual infections within couples, or there will have to be a sexual quarantine of HIV+ men. By contrast, current AIDS prevention efforts care even about those lives that are, in the chilly abstract, epidemiologically insignificant, nor do they demand that gay men segregate affection.
Youth is a time of relative promiscuity. For gay urban youth today the pool of potential partners is vast. Failing to provide a framework for low-risk promiscuity, Rotello's dictum of monogamy effectively abandons gay youth. Rotello may valorize those who, youth spent, withdraw from the fast lane; but no accolade will confer on them retrospective immunity.
Rotello turns his guns on monogamy's great enemy, a core group of multipartnerists. But in an age when many practice safer sex, the rate of partner change no longer determines infection rate. Unprotected anal sex between men of differing serostatus takes place outside the core as well. Effective prevention programs target the activity of individuals and their shifting situations rather than their membership in a group that has to be identified differently today. Modify behavior as necessary but don't consecrate it as some naturally-ordained ecological ideal. Yes, the "sexual ecology" of white heterosexual America is not conducive to HIV transmission. But laying waste the gay male sexual landscape is not something we could easily do. Nor would anyone who prizes people's right to self-determination want to. Calls to monogamy may be simpler than the dirty work of the real world, but the latter messy complexity has one significant advantage: it has a chance of being effective.
Rotello recognizes that safer sex has been "a remarkable success by almost any scale." Even a worst-case reading of current data holds that the rate of new infection among gay men is never far above epidemic threshold. All the more reason to augment efforts that have been significantly successful. AIDS prevention today needs to speak to young gay men who have sex and to men who live beyond core gay neighborhoods. More than emergency measures, today's strategies will help men integrate low-risk sexual activities into lives they actually want to live, exploiting the new hope engendered by more effective AIDS treatments, drawing from the bodies of knowledge that sexually active gay men have attained during the epidemic. More than merely thwart a virus, they will promote our sexual pleasure, the project of a true AIDS prevention activism.
Q-zone
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Last modified: 7/27/97