The Nation   4/21/97
(e-mail: letters@the nation.com)

By Gabriel Rotello

The idea that some gay men perceive risky sex to be in their immediate best interests and need a cultural incentive to practice safer sex may strike some as absurd. What greater incentive could there be than avoiding infection with one of nature's deadliest viruses?

That argument might make sense if unsafe sex automatically or even usually led to H.I.V. infection, and if H.I.V. quickly and invariably led to illness and death. But the cause-and-effect relationship between unsafe sex and negative consequences is nowhere near that direct. First, unsafe sex is not followed by the swift and sure penalty of infection. One can expect to have unsafe anal intercourse dozens of times before becoming infected, even with an H.I.V.-infected partner, and one can expect to have unprotected oral sex perhaps hundreds of times with an infected partner and still avoid infection. Biostatisticians grimly point out that the cumulative result of all these individual risks is the continued high prevalence of H.I.V. in gay communities. If the average gay man in New York reduced his sexual contact rate to one "unsafe contact" per year, the level of H.I.V. in that population would probably drop to less than 5 percent in thirty-five years. But if the average rose to two unsafe contacts per year, H.I.V. prevalence would rise to 60 percent. For each individual, though, the immediate risk of one unsafe encounter -- the one he is about to have -- often seems low and escapable, and statistically speaking, he's right.

When infection does occur, illness is postponed for many years, perhaps even decades. A 20- year-old gay man having unsafe sex today can quite logically assume that if he does get infected, he probably won't get sick until he reaches his 30s or, with today's improved drug therapies, even later. To many 20-year-olds, the age of 35 seems a lifetime away. In addition, anyone becoming infected today can certainly hope that before he or she gets sick, AIDS will have become a "manageable" syndrome and may even be curable. Indeed, as of this writing many argue that H.I.V. infection is already a manageable syndrome, at least for those who can afford and can tolerate the expensive combination drug therapies.

Even before the advent of protease inhibitors, there was an effort to refute the idea that AIDS is an automatic death sentence. Activists pointed to plenty of "long-term nonprogressors" infected for ten years or more who showed no signs of immune depletion, and "long-term survivors" infected for more than a decade who were leading fairly healthy lives. People are said to be "living with AIDS," not dying from it. Gay magazines and newspapers are filled with articles that celebrate the ability of healthy-looking H.I.V.-infected men to lead rewarding lives, and stories abound of men who experienced meaningful personal growth only after they found out they were infected. A stranger to gay culture, unaware of the reality of AIDS, might believe from much of the gay press that H.I.V. infection was a sort of elixir that produced high self-esteem, solved longstanding psychological and substance abuse problems and enhanced physical appearance. This, of course, is hardly the reality for most H.I.V.-infected people, who scoff at any supposed benefits, wish that they had never become infected and pray desperately for a cure. But such messages, which are primarily aimed at the already infected, inevitably reach the uninfected as well.

An additional, if frequently unspoken, factor limiting the "penalty" of infection is the fact that once infected, many people believe they no longer need to practice safer sex for their own protection. Of course, prudence dictates that infected individuals should avoid contracting other sexually transmitted diseases or opportunistic infections, and it has been theorized (although not convincingly proved) that reinfection with different strains of H.I.V. can hasten illness and death. But for many people, once they become infected the primary reason for struggling with safer sex is now eliminated. This was eloquently expressed by Scott O'Hara, the H.I.V.-positive editor of a defunct gay sexual magazine called Steam:

One of the most liberating comments I've heard in recent years came from a friend who's also been positive since the early years of the epidemic. "I'm so sick and tired of these Negatives whining about how difficult it is to stay safe. Why don't they just get over it and get Positive?"... Just as I believe that Gay Men Have More Fun, so too do I believe that Positives have learned to have much more fun than Negatives.... The Negative world is defined by fear, ours by pleasure.

This is followed by what O'Hara calls his Declaration of Independence: "I'm tired of using condoms," he writes, "and I won't."

Mainstream society contributes to this problem as well. From childhood on, gays and lesbians are bombarded with the message that they are sick and disgusting. Polls consistently show that well over half of Americans believe that homosexuality is, in the words of one poll, "always wrong." But once you're infected with H.I.V., matters frequently change. Governments that deny basic civil rights to homosexuals often provide housing, income support and health care to those with AIDS. Companies that are allowed to fire employees simply for being homosexual are often forbidden by law to discriminate against those disabled by H.I.V. Clergy who revile homosexuality from the pulpit often take up collections for AIDS sufferers. Families who throw out their gay sons may take them back when they're dying. It's almost as if society is saying to H.I.V.-positive gay men: Now that you're infected, you're forgiven. This is not to say that people with AIDS are adequately taken care of, or that there is little stigma against those with the disease. But it is not illogical for some gay men to conclude, at least subconsciously, that they're better off, if not dead, at least dying.

As a result of all these factors, the "penalty" meted out for any given incidence of unsafe sex is fairly weak. Arrayed against it are the powerful immediate rewards for having risky sex. Unprotected sex is good old-fashioned sex, without inhibitions and restraints, which to many people is the whole point. In addition, sexual intimacy is a way of connecting with other gay men, a way of creating community, a source of psychological meaning. In a gay world in which sex provides the sense of meaning and community that marriage and children provide for others, a world in which many influential forces continue to extol sexual freedom and pleasure as its highest values, the surprising thing is not how much unsafe sex is occurring but how little.

Logic would therefore suggest that if gay men want to create a sustainable culture, this reward system has to be turned upside down. While a system that encourages safety will not guarantee a culture of safety, it is probably a prerequisite for creating one. If the central task of the new gay male culture is the integration of sexuality into a whole life, a life that respects sex but does not make it the central point of existence, gay culture needs to embrace the whole human being, his spiritual and personal self, his humanity, his vocations, his dreams, and not just his muscles or his libido or his penis. It has to draw explicit connections between sex and intimacy, reward self-restraint and end the pervasive belief that those who are living at the most extreme fringes of gay sexual life are somehow the most liberated and the most gay.

The construction of a gay culture that validates sexual moderation will be a daunting task. The tendency so far has been for the most visible and seemingly representative members of the tribe to veer rather wildly between extremes: intense core-group activity in the seventies and early eighties, intense fear and a shutting down of sexuality in the mid- to late eighties, and today a powerful revival of the external aspects of core-group behavior. Many observers feel that as AIDS becomes a more manageable disease the old disastrous lifestyle will fully reassert itself, with predictably devastating results. It therefore seems incumbent on gay men to provide ourselves with incentives to live a life that is openly and proudly gay but that reduces as much as possible the dangerous imbalances of the past.

The emphasis on using condoms during anal sex will remain a major component of safer sex far into the future. Beyond that, a new gay culture of safety will also have to aim for the integration of sex into a wider fabric of private intimacy and public community. There will be many ideas about ways to accomplish this, and a few are presented here to help initiate a broader debate.

One of the most basic ways to make gay culture more sustainable is to create an honored place for relationships and fidelity. We need to encourage a new gay ideal that validates and supports relationships rather than one that validates and honors sexual adventurism, sexual consumerism and risk-taking. Some might complain that this apes the heterosexual model that many gay men came out of the closet to escape. But one could just as accurately say that the values I'm talking about are found in the lesbian world more than among heterosexuals. Lesbians are in much the same political and social boat as gay men: They cannot marry and are therefore free to enter and leave relationships, usually without an entangling web of legal or cultural impediments. As members of the same sex, they do not enter relationships with predetermined power imbalances based on the sex of one partner. Yet lesbian society tends to honor fidelity in relationships. Far more than gay men, lesbians tend to be monogamous, if not for life at least for the duration of the relationship.

Of course, lesbians are dealing with a very different set of biological urges and cultural assumptions than gay men. But lesbians have shown gay men the possibility of creating a sexual culture without necessarily mimicking heterosexuals. They also demonstrate that there is an alternative to promiscuity on the one hand and an ideal of absolute lifetime monogamy on the other: a culture in which serially monogamous partners expect and reward fidelity while they remain partners, but are ultimately free to dissolve the partnership, and tend to do so several times over the course of a lifetime. This kind of balance between fidelity and freedom would probably be important for gay men.

Building a more embracing gay culture would also seem to require that we develop alternatives to bars and discos as the prime meeting ground for gay male life. When I came out in the seventies, virtually the only places you could go to socialize as openly gay men were bars, nightclubs and bathhouses, places that inevitably connected gay life with cruising, consumption of alcohol or drugs, and racking up large numbers of casual partners. We need to create a larger array of spaces where people can be gay, be social and be so in environments that are not focused exclusively around sex, cruising and drug and alcohol consumption. Perhaps the most promising example of this kind of institution is the gay community center. From a humble beginning in the seventies, usually in run-down or abandoned buildings, a network of lesbian and gay community centers has now blossomed across the nation, and many of these institutions are now united in a national network. In addition, there has been a huge increase over the past decade in gay sports teams, political groups, social service groups, volunteer organizations and all sorts of recreational groups that also provide ways for gay people to be openly or socially themselves outside an exclusively sexual context. These alternatives should be encouraged and expanded, and a host of similar ones explored.

In addition, there are growing networks of gay religious organizations that provide places for gay people to express their spirituality. These groups -- ranging from gay synagogues and churches to New Age groups and meditation centers -- reach out to the spiritual aspirations of gay men and lesbians, which were often ignored or repressed in the heyday of the gay sexual revolution. A literature seeking to connect gay men to their spiritual and religious cores has appeared, and this should be nurtured.

Not only do we need to promote greater self-esteem among gay youth generally, we need to make old age more attractive. The heavy emphasis on sex and looks and body culture in gay male life has produced a sometimes obsessive focus on maintaining youthfulness, leading in some cases to an almost desperate attempt by gay men to stave off the aging process. One result is the cult of the gym. A much less healthy response is the fear that some gay men report when they contemplate growing older, sometimes resulting in a subconscious feeling that they might as well live fast and die young.

What is so ironic about this is that it does not conform with what many older gay men report about their lives. Many researchers argue that older gay men tend to be happier and better adjusted than their heterosexual peers, largely because they have spent their lives learning how to be self-sufficient. But the vibrancy of gay seniors is one of the gay community's best-kept secrets -- even from itself.

All of these changes could have an impact on helping to develop a more balanced gay life by encouraging and rewarding those who integrate sex more holistically into their lives. But they might not be enough by themselves. The anthropological record shows that every culture has encouraged people to settle down in structured sexual relationships, usually with a single partner. Societies seem to have universally recognized that while many individuals desire sexual variety, sexual license leads to social destabilization and is particularly disruptive to the process of raising children. The purpose of encouraging strong families, aside from providing children with a stable environment, has generally been to clarify inheritance and property rights and to avoid the disruptions and distractions that seem to accompany promiscuity.

The core institution that encourages sexual restraint and monogamy is marriage. In most societies an essential part of the marriage contract, perhaps the most essential part, is the expectation that married partners will remain sexually faithful to each other. Partners exert strong pressure on each other to stay faithful, under the implicit threat that if one partner commits adultery and gets caught, the other has the right to terminate the union. The reward for exercising sexual restraint and remaining faithful is that marriage and family are maintained. The expected punishment for not remaining faithful (and getting caught) is marital discord and the possible breakup of the family. Both sexes seem to support marriage and monogamy for their own purposes, and both tend to be unforgiving of mates who stray.

Even so, marriage is hardly a foolproof enforcer of monogamy. There have always been cultures in which males, especially upper-class males, were allowed to play around so long as they were fairly discreet. In addition, many people commit adultery in the belief that they can evade the expected penalty simply by not getting caught, and some married relationships are deliberately and frankly "open." It is also true that the entire system can break down when one partner is unhappy in the relationship and wants to escape. In general, however, the benefits of family life and the threatened punishment of familial breakup have, at least in many modern cultures, provided a major incentive for people to try to remain faithful and in many cases are the bonds that hold marriages together.

The restraining influence of marriage on couples is, however, hardly natural or automatic. It is a deliberate artifact of culture, and is socially constructed in myriad ways. Some societies impose a system of even more direct external rewards and penalties to keep couples monogamous. One way they do this is by playing two seemingly essential male desires off each other: the desire for sexual freedom versus the desire for social status. Many societies have said to men that if you choose sexual freedom over family and stability, you will not be afforded the same respect as someone who chooses marriage and family. When faced with that choice, the vast majority of people seem to have chosen status and family over freedom. Of course, there's always been the famous double standard, the expectation that men need not be as faithful as women. But even though many societies allow men more leeway, men have traditionally been expected to remain discreet about their extramarital affairs and remain married.

What kinds of rewards might encourage gay men to adopt a culture of sexual restraint and responsibility, one in which they will be likely to reduce their contact rate and be as safe as possible within relationships? It seems likely that they are the same rewards that influence most people: a culture that grants status to those who exercise restraint and responsibility, and by implication withholds status from those who don't. Since this is established for most people through the institution of marriage and the responsibility of raising children, one way to accomplish it in the gay world might be to establish the right of gay people to same-sex marriage and the right to raise children, and then encourage gay men to do both.

The idea that marriage would play a stabilizing role in gay male society has long been acknowledged within gay culture itself. Ironically, it is one of the chief reasons many gay liberationists have vehemently opposed legalized same-sex marriage. Ever since Stonewall a furious debate has raged within the gay world over this issue, and one of the main objections of gay and lesbian radicals has been that such legalization would inherently undermine a major goal of gay liberation, which is to validate all kinds of relationships and all forms of sexual expression and experimentation. Legalization of same-sex marriage, they argue, would create a two-tiered gay society in which married couples would be viewed as legitimate, while those who were unmarried would be considered social outcasts. This seems wildly exaggerated, but the core of the objection -- that marriage would provide status to those who married and implicitly penalize those who did not -- seems essentially correct. Indeed, that's a key point. In a culture where unrestrained multipartnerism has produced ecological catastrophe, precisely what is needed is a culture in which people feel socially supported as gay men to settle down with partners for significant periods of time.

The antimarriage sentiment in the gay and lesbian political world has abated in recent years, and the legalization of same-sex marriage is now an accepted focus of gay liberation. Yet prevention activists generally don't include marriage as a goal because they generally don't include monogamy as a goal. Belief in the condom code seems to render the subject moot. Meanwhile, most advocates of same-sex marriage fail to make the case for AIDS prevention because they are generally careful not to make the case for marriage, but simply for the right to marriage. This is undoubtedly good politics, since many if not most of the major gay and lesbian organizations that have signed on to the fight for same-sex marriage would instantly sign off at any suggestion that they were actually encouraging gay men and lesbians to marry. But while practical, it leaves unarticulated the argument that legalization of same-sex marriage and the right of homosexuals to adopt and raise children would create a solid foundation upon which a sustainable gay culture could arise. Fighting for those rights may turn out to be among the most important things gay men can do to assure our own survival.