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I finished And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts last night. It's the seminal book on the AIDS crisis, but it's not easy reading, and more than once, I wanted to bludgeon people and scream at them for being so willfully dense, short-sighted, grasping, and paranoid, though in the case of the latter, I can't fault them since there is such a long and storied history of anti-gay hatred and violence. Once you've faced beatings and institutionally-enshrined bigotry, discrimination, and neglect, if not outright violence, it's no great leap to think you'll be quarantined or sent to a camp to keep you separated from "respectable people." I will, however, never understand why so many gay men clung so tenaciously to the bathhouses. They struck me as so so grotty and squalid and impersonal, and yet they held them up as bastions of gay culture and sexual liberation.
Maybe it's a simple disconnect. People can do what they like with whom they like as long as everybody is willing, but anonymous sex has never held any appeal for me, and the idea of banging multiple strangers in one night makes me want to heave. If there's no connection, however, fleeting and temporary, with my bed partner, then there's no spark and no pleasure. That others are perfectly happy shoving Crisco up their ass and going to town with whoever comes into the room makes no sense to my romantic inclination, and, in fact, makes me want to scrub myself with Comet.
And Crisco? Really? Agh. How did they not contract a raging infection from shoving lard and microscopic fecal matter into anal fissures? I could've gone the rest of my life without reading about public fisting, too.
Grubby mechanics of unsafe gay sex aside, the stories of the activists, researchers, doctors, and dogged Congressional aides and public health officials are absorbing, and I never imagined I'd be rooting for Orrin Hatch and C. Everett Coop, but that what happens when politicians put the public weal before party. Too bad those days are long ago and far away.
Maybe it's a simple disconnect. People can do what they like with whom they like as long as everybody is willing, but anonymous sex has never held any appeal for me, and the idea of banging multiple strangers in one night makes me want to heave. If there's no connection, however, fleeting and temporary, with my bed partner, then there's no spark and no pleasure. That others are perfectly happy shoving Crisco up their ass and going to town with whoever comes into the room makes no sense to my romantic inclination, and, in fact, makes me want to scrub myself with Comet.
And Crisco? Really? Agh. How did they not contract a raging infection from shoving lard and microscopic fecal matter into anal fissures? I could've gone the rest of my life without reading about public fisting, too.
Grubby mechanics of unsafe gay sex aside, the stories of the activists, researchers, doctors, and dogged Congressional aides and public health officials are absorbing, and I never imagined I'd be rooting for Orrin Hatch and C. Everett Coop, but that what happens when politicians put the public weal before party. Too bad those days are long ago and far away.
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