Brett Averill and Bill Weintraub were gay activists and lovers. They met in 1982 and were together until Brett's death in 1995.
|
Brett Averill
was born in 1957. A journalist and writer, he was the editor of two of the most important gay newspapers in the nation: the New York Native (from 1981 to 1984) and San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter (in 1989). In addition, he was a nationally published author whose work appeared in The Village Voice, Harper's, the Advocate, GCN, Philadelphia Gay News, the Long Island Connection, and Mandate.
Brett died of AIDS in 1995.
|
Bill Weintraub
is the gay activist and author who coined the term Frot and who created the Frot Movement.
Bill was born in 1948. A Gay Liberationist, in 1975 he co-founded the Cambridge (MA) Gay Political Caucus; in 1976 served as gay liaison to the Committee to Elect Saundra Graham; in 1977 co-founded Boston Advocates for Human Rights (a support group for gays under attack by Anita Bryant in Dade County, Florida); from 1979 to 1984 was Metropolitan New York Tri-State Coordinator of Field Associates for Gay Rights National Lobby; and from 1983 to 1985 was a founding board member of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project.
In 1982 Bill met and became the lover of gay journalist Brett Averill.
After Brett's AIDS diagnosis in 1988, Bill and Brett moved to San Francisco, where Bill was active in the "Yes on S" campaign to pass domestic partnership legislation; and studied Taoist Erotic Massage with Joe Kramer at Joe's Body Electric School.
Following Brett's death in 1995, Bill started writing his and his late lover's life histories.
It was during this process that Bill begin to address the question of sexual conformity in the gay male community and the role that conformity had played in the ongoing epidemic.
Bill published his first critique of what he called "the cultural tyranny of anal sex" in 1999, in a piece (Hyacinthine Love) in which he also extolled the virtues of penile-penile frottage.
Following very positive reader response to Hyacinthine Love, Bill coined the term Frot and decided to undertake a national campaign to legitimize and popularize Frot and weaken what he terms "the deathgrip of anal penetration on the lives of men who have sex with men."
Bill's work draws, among other sources, on Tom Kuhn's very influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, which introduced the concepts of dominant paradigm and paradigm shift.
Bill refers to the primacy of anal penetration among gay men today as a "dominant paradigm or culture of anal penetration" -- analism -- and has said that there will inevitably be a paradigm shift.
Similarly, Bill's analysis of the role of anal, promiscuity, and ideology in the causation of the HIV epidemic among "men who have sex with men" parallels that of Gabriel Rotello's classic 1997 study of AIDS epidemiology, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men.
Published Articles
These are the articles Bill has published since 1999 on the question of Frot and anal, some of which are still online in their original settings.
Unfortunately, and over time, some of these on-line publishers, which were businesses, ceased operating.
If you can no longer find an article at its original link, you can find it at the second link listed -- on Bill's Man2ManAlliance.org and HeroicHomosex.org sites:
- Hyacinthine Love, or Some Thoughts on Cock-rubbing and the Cultural Tyranny of Butt-fucking. (Published in White Crane Journal's winter 1999-2000 issue)
- Hyacinthine Love, or Some Thoughts on Cock-rubbing and the Cultural Tyranny of Butt-fucking.
Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution (Published November 6 2000 on GayToday)
Interview: Cockrub Warrior Bill Weintraub [with gay rights pioneer Jack Nichols] (Published December 4 2000 on GayToday)
Interview: Cockrub Warrior Bill Weintraub [with gay rights pioneer Jack Nichols]
Does Sex Have to be Anal to be Gay? (Published January 26 2002 on 365Gay.com under the title "Is Gay Sex Trying Too Hard to be Straight?" -- no longer on 365gay site)
Do Gay Men Have to be Promiscuous? (Published February 16 2002 on 365Gay.com -- no longer on their site)
Not All Gay Men Are Sodomites (Published July 7 2003 on GayToday)
Rethinking Gay Sex (Published in the Washington (DC) Blade on October 10 2003 -- the paper and its site no longer exist)
Online references to Bill Weintraub
Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide of January of 2001;
Larry Kramer on gay.com in 2005
Descriptions of Bill Weintraub's Frot Movement Web Sites
- The Man2Man Alliance
- Heroic Homosex
- Heroes
- Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution
- Cockrub Warriors
- Frot Men
- Frot Club
Direct Links to Bill's Sites
Also noteworthy are:
- What Sex Is
- Why Be Faithful?
- An anus is not a vagina
- Sex Between Men: An Activity, Not A Condition
- Are Men Who Have Sex With Men Intergendered?
- Multipartnered Pansexualism or Heroic Love?
- Do Condoms Work?
- Is Unwanted Anal Penetration Date Rape?
- Bug-chasing, Barebacking, and the Safer-Sex Establishment
- Walter Odets, the sex police, and the big lie
- Protective Stupidity and the Debasement of Language under Analism
- We Are Warriors -- co-authored with Robert Loring
- A Somber Day
While Bill remains an activist true to the spirit of Gay Liberation and his beloved Brett Averill, his work has attracted an increasingly large audience of men who are bisexual and/or straight-identified.
Through this work, Bill met one of those men, Patrick; subsequently, Bill and Patrick were joined in a Rite of Warrior Union and now live together.
In recent years, it's become apparent to Bill that the gay-bi-straight labels are meaningless.
For that reason, Bill no longer identifies as "gay"; and Bill encourages all the men of the Alliance to abandon the labels of sexual orientation and instead identify simply as Men.
In concert with these men, Bill seeks to advance Gay Liberation's ultimate goal of freeing all men to be their authentic sexual selves.
An Introduction to Frot and The Man2Man Alliance
Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution
