Multipartnered or
A Man2Man Alliance Policy Paper
by
Pansexualism
With thanks to
Chuck Tarver and Dr. Edward C. Green
Multipartnered or
A Man2Man Alliance Policy Paper
by
Pansexualism
With thanks to
Chuck Tarver and Dr. Edward C. Green
Preface
Some of the raw material in this policy paper -- that is, the cultural messages coming from the ASOs, the gay male establishment, and the gay male media -- can also be found in Chuck Tarver's Fighting the Conformity That Kills.
That's not because Chuck and I are plagiarists, but because we routinely exchange material and ideas.
Our two papers are different however, and each has material unique to it alone.
So I encourage you to read both.
Taken together, they give a terrific overview of the support for anal penetration and promiscuity, and the lack of support for non-anal alternatives and fidelity, which currently passes for discourse about sex and disease among gay men.
This Man2Man Alliance Policy Paper presents and analyzes a variety of representative cultural messages from within the mainstream gay male community supporting promiscuity, anal penetration, and other forms of fringe sexuality -- often referred to by their ideological proponents as "multipartnered pansexualism" -- among gay men.
Taken together, these sorts of messages, which are ubiquitous in gay male life, constitute a dominant culture, ideology, or paradigm in which anal penetration, promiscuity, and "sexual experimentation" -- including such acts as the sharing of urine and feces, the insertion of fingers, fists, and various innate objects into the anus/rectum, and oral-anal sex -- are considered norms and values inherent and necessary to the lives of gay men.
To true believers in this ideology, any attempt to change these values is wrong, judgmental, and an attack on the foundations of gay male identity.
The Alliance sharply disagrees.
Present day mainstream gay male norms are a distortion of the goals of the early gay rights and Gay Liberation movements (ca 1950 - 1980), which sought an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation; decriminalization of sexual acts between consenting adults; and individual sexual autonomy within a societal context which celebrated romance and love.
Individual sexual autonomy was understood to be a form of self-actualization free of the constraints of family, church, state, and peers.
At no time did the gay movement or Gay Liberation monolithically support promiscuity, or endorse one sex act above another.
Nor did activists intend to produce a culture in which anal promiscuity would replace heterosexual monogamy as a cultural model which all men who have sex with men must follow.
SUBVERSION OF THE IDEAL
The ideals of the early gay movement were subverted and ultimately destroyed by economic, cultural, and biological forces which no Gay Liberationist anticipated.
The first was the swift movement, in the 1970s, of entrepeneurs into the sexual arena, businessmen who benefited from the ground cleared by Gay Liberation without understanding its goals or principles.
These market capitalists were responsible for the proliferation of bath-houses, backroom bars, and other sex venues which greatly facilitated the increase in both anal penetration and promiscuity among gay men.
And for the development and massive dissemination of slick, homogenized pornography in which anal promiscuity was romanticized, sanitized, and presented over and over again as the role model for male-male sex.
The second, which was consequent to the first, was the appearance of HIV, and with it the attempted stigmatization, by the religious and political right, of people afflicted with AIDS who had unknowingly acquired the disease through anal penetration.
The third was the emergence of AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) as powerful arbiters of sexual culture among gay men.
Had AIDS not appeared in the early 1980s and provoked such a severe backlash from the right, it's likely that the pronounced predominance of anal promiscuity among gay men, which began around 1975, would have passed.
Because by the late 1970s, many in the gay male community were questioning promiscuity and the high degree of conformity, sexual and otherwise, demanded of gay men by their subculture, epitomized by the muscular, mustachioed, Castro-Christopher Street clone.
But as the number of those afflicted with AIDS increased, and as attacks from the right became more virulent, the community circled the wagons.
Even those who had been made uneasy by the extent of promiscuity, impersonal anal sex, and bizarre and objectively dangerous practices like "rimming" (oral-anal sex), felt the community needed to present a unified front to the political and cultural forces attacking it.
AIDS SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS DEFINE "SAFER SEX"
That stance became codified by the early AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs), including New York City's Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Shanti, which were responsible for drafting what were first called "safe sex" and then amended to "safer sex" guidelines.
Most of the volunteers, staffers, and board members of the early ASOs were gay men who were themselves HIV +, who had acquired the virus through anal sex, and who believed that, since promiscuous anal sex was core to their identity, it must be core to the identity of all gay men.
Relatively few of those early ASO staffers had a background in Gay Lib or even the gay civil rights movement.
Rather, most were people who had in the previous decade been apolitical, but were drawn into the AIDS arena by personal experience of the disease.
As a consequence they understood little about, and were often disdainful of, the goals and methods of Gay Liberation.
Instead they confused sexual liberation, meant to be an ongoing process, with the status quo, and conflated anal sex and promiscuity with "the freedom to be gay."
Which then, at the hands of various gay social scientists, gender feminists, and queer theorists, became the doctrine of "multipartnered pansexualism."
In which anal promiscuity, effeminacy, and compulsive sexual experimentation were all to be covered by the umbrellas of "safer sex" and "honor diversity."
Though most of those who made those decisions have since succumbed to the disease, their successors, who staff and are on the boards of the major AIDS Service Organizations, remain committed to that ideology.
Thus many of the excerpts in this paper are from studies and programs run by the ASOs, which though they purport to be scientific, are in reality ideologically-driven.
A SECULAR IDEOLOGY
It should also be noted that this guiding ideology is determinedly secular.
Part of that, like the emphasis on anal itself, is a reaction to the extreme hostility of some Christians to any form of homosexuality.
But part of it too has little to do with Christianity per se and is instead an expression of a philosophy which sees virtually no role for God in human affairs.
In such a philosophy, man is indeed the measure of all things, including morality, and may do what he wishes free of religious strictures.
So the ASOs and their academic brethren support a secular ideology which is avowedly hedonist and favors sexual experimentation and promiscuity.
Furthermore, the power of the ASOs within the gay male community should not be underestimated.
The ASOs are by far the best-funded institutions in the community, and are widely perceived as being professional, scientific, and caring.
Messages generated by the ASOs, then, carry enormous weight within the gay male community.
Probably the only other group whose influence is as pervasive as that of the ASOs are the pornographers, who, like the ASOs, are dedicated to supporting promiscuity and anal sex.
And while some pornographers claim to be punctilious about representing only "protected" sex, others, as we shall see, specialize in unprotected, condomless sex, which is termed "barebacking."
Here then are statements from a variety of cultural messengers within the gay male community supporting, for ideological reasons, anal penetration and promiscuity among men who have sex with men.
Taken together, these cultural messages, which are ubiquitous to the point of drowning out all others, are recognizable as the components of a dominant culture or paradigm of anal promiscuity among gay men, a culture which manufactures and promulgates a multitude of cultural messages among gay men all saying the same thing:
And that a man's self-worth is measured by the number of his sexual partners.
In contrast, The Man2Man Alliance is committed to:
Qualitative Interview Study II: Excerpts from research by UCSF's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies setting forth the connection between anal promiscuity and gay male identity.
No Limits: "Necessary Danger in Gay Male Porn." A discussion, by a pornographer, of "barebacking": condomless anal penetration.
Bumper to Bumper: An AIDS Service Organization workshop encouraging men to engage in anal sex.
AIDS and Anthropology Research Group: A leading gay anthropologist praises promiscuity.
GayHealth.com: A gay male doctor and medical sex advice columnist counsels a reader suffering from anal fissures to continue having anal sex.
Savage Love: A syndicated gay sex advice columnist denigrates non-penetrative sex.
Media coverage of the Supreme Court repeal of sodomy laws: Gay sex and anal sex are synonymous.
SF Chronicle Op-ed: "A wake-up call to the community" by Tom Coates. Coates, widely regarded as the principal architect of AIDS prevention programs in the US, tries to make a case for responsible promiscuity.
Yahoo profiles: Public profiles posted on Yahoo.com by young men soliciting unprotected anal sex.
Full Circle: Six years after QIS II, a British researcher finds the same cultural forces at work.
This first excerpt is from the Executive Summary of "Qualitative Interview Study II (QIS II) of 92 Gay and Bisexual Males Regarding HIV Risk and Sexual Behavior," a study sponsored by The San Francisco AIDS Foundation in partnership with The University of California at San Francisco Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) and concluded in December, 1997.
[Excerpt begins]
"...among gay men high numbers of sexual partners, active engagement in anal sex, and sexual exploration are perceived as norms that legitimize an individual's gay identity. QIS II participants voiced concerns that on many levels, HIV prevention messages collided with these norms by asking men to question and possibly change practices that are part of the foundation of gay male identity....
"In QIS II, individual formulation of gay male identity and self-worth to a significant degree was based on adherence to specific sexual performance standards and practices within gay male culture. Men in QIS II frequently described anal sex, and particularly anal sex without condoms, as a means to affirm their gay identity, experience intimacy, and feel a broader social and cultural connection."
[emphases mine]
[end of excerpt]
COMMENTARY:
This is the most common justification for the prevailing ASO "risk reduction" model of HIV prevention programs, which in practice are always condom campaigns -- that anal promiscuity is integral to gay male culture and key to gay male identity and therefore cannot be interfered with by "safer-sex" educators.
Harvard medical anthropologist Edward C. Green, whose work on primary behavior change in reducing HIV prevalence in Uganda helped shape the Bush administration's African AIDS policy, describes the history and workings of such "safer-sex" programs in the US:
While Dr. Green is, of course, correct, we need to understand that many of those in the development of that particular allegedly judgment-free prevention paradigm had another agenda.
And that was protecting the gains, as they saw them and as described above, of the early sexual liberation and gay rights movements.
Gabriel Rotello (cited by Tarver, 2003) explained the thought process involved in his 1998 book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Future of Gay Men
The question then became, if anal sex and promiscuity equal liberation, and AIDS is spreading due to anal sex and promiscuity, how can gay men control the spread of AIDS without sacrificing liberation?
These two challenges created a dual imperative that has characterized gay AIDS prevention to this day: to prevent the spread of HIV, but only in a way that defends gay men against attacks from the right and preserves the multipartnerist ethic of the gay sexual revolution. In what was undoubtedly one of the tallest orders a prevention strategy ever had to fill, safer sex was to be a political and social as much as a medical or ecological construction. (Rotello, p. 92)
In sum, says Rotello: "The desire to avoid 'transformative' change in gay sexual culture was a cornerstone of prevention. (p. 109)"
So it is not the case, as its proponents proclaim, that the dominant risk-reduction or condom campaign model eschews value judgments; rather, it is ideologically driven.
There's a very strong bias among condom campaigners in favor of promiscuity, which they call "multipartnering," and anal sex and other fringe forms of sexuality, which they refer to as "pansexualism" and "sexual experimentation," and which they justify as "sexual liberation," and "honoring and respecting sexual diversity."
Yet the facts are that the prevalence of anal sex and anal promiscuity is, as Rotello demonstrates and as many in the Alliance know from our own life-experience, of recent vintage; that such prevalence is, as QIS II points out, the result of cultural forces reinforced by cultural messages; and that if we change the cultural messages we can change the behavior in ways that will make the entire culture less self-destructive.
What we can see then in this excerpt from QIS II, and the quotes from Green and Rotello, is that the current emphasis on anal promiscuity in the gay male community is a result of *cultural forces* which have been supported since the mid-1980s by AIDS professionals.
Even worse, these professionals have supported and propped up those cultural forces and behaviors in the name of being non-judgmental, while in reality being motivated by an ideology which is full of value judgments about the nature of sex and fidelity, and which fears change.
The truth is, however, that there's nothing inevitable about either anal sex or promiscuity among gay or other men who have sex with men;
that both historical and cross-cultural evidence indicates that these behaviors have been comparatively rare among men who have sex with men;
that not all gay men are involved in these behaviors now, and that there's no reason to believe these behaviors can't be changed among those who are;
and that the prevalence of these behaviors is due to decisions made by persons long dead and policies rigidly adhered to by their successors, none of whom have shown a willingness to critically examine their own views on sex, promiscuity, fidelity, and sexual liberation.
The question then becomes whether we might not need, as Chuck Tarver has suggested, not just ASOs, staffed in no small part by the HIV+, but AIDS Prevention Organizations (APOs) as well, staffed by those who have remained HIV negative.
As Chuck says, "If someone needs a math tutor, you don't send him to someone who FAILED the exam. Yet that's exactly what we've been doing with HIV/AIDS prevention."
WARNING: this excerpt, written by a pornographer who specializes in films featuring condomless sex, describes promiscuous, unsafe, receptive anal penetration in very explicit language.
Do not read this essay if such language will offend or upset you.
This excerpt is from "No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn," a speech by Paul Morris presented at the World Pornography Conference in Los Angeles, Summer 1998.
[Excerpt begins]
In interviewing gay men, I have found that barebacking is far more generally practiced (and tacitly accepted) than I had suspected. It is in a sense an element of a new closet: it is one of those things that gay men don't usually discuss even among themselves. Yet I would estimate that more than fifty percent of the men I have spoken with engage in bareback sex with strangers regularly. Some perhaps once a month. Many on a weekly or daily basis. Some love it because it is raunchy. Some love it because it is a sign of unlimited intimacy. Some men who fuck without a condom are wild and compulsive. Others are balanced, healthy.
In San Francisco there are weekly parties in homes and rented play spaces; bars, clubs and organizations enable and support barebacking among large numbers of men. There are on-line encouragement groups for barebackers around the world--including groups specifically for those most trusting and optimistic of men, HIV-negative barebackers. There are at least three porn production companies that specialize in barebacking scenes, mine being one of them.
I had coffee a few days ago with a young man who calmly and cheerfully told me about his Wednesday night: he had snorted a bump of crystal, gone to a sex-bar South of Market, and been fucked by so many men that, as he put it, "I lost count at 20 of the hot loads that I took up my ass." He fucked there until the bar closed, at which point he walked to a nearby sex club, Mack, with cum dripping down his pants legs. At the sex club he was fucked by a half-dozen other men. I asked him why he was doing this. He responded, "My diagnosis was a wake-up call. My life is limited. I want to be happy."
In no sense does this young man feel unusual when you speak with him. He is not rabid, not crazed, not stupid. He is level-headed, quite brilliant and works at a high level in the Gap organization, making a great deal more than I do. Yet in the context of the larger culture--and certainly in the context of the medical/epidemiological culture--this is irresponsible behavior, a fact argued with intelligent futility by Gabriel Rotello.
In the context of a sexually-based American male sub-culture, however, "unsafe sex" is not only insane, it is also essential. For a subculture to be sustained, there must be those who engage in central and defining activities with little regard for anything else, including life itself. In a sense, not only the nature but also the coherence of the subculture is determined and maintained by passionate devotees who serve a contextually heroic purpose in their relationship with danger, death and communion.
[end of excerpt]
COMMENTARY:
This sort of romanticization of anal penetration, promiscuity, condomless sex, and even death is extremely common among gay men.
In attempting to associate the word "heroic" with courting death from a fatal disease acquired through a degrading act, the author epitomizes the "world-turned-upside-down" aspect of analist culture, in which a kiss is considered more intimate than penetration, effeminacy more politically correct than masculinity, and a buffed body more important than the ability to defend oneself.
Because of the unending romanticization and exaltation of anal sex, promiscuity, and disease in the gay male community, the Alliance believes that it's necessary to attack anal penetration and destroy its mystique, while offering the alternatives of fidelity and the highly pleasurable, mutually genital, and very healthy practice of Frot.
Thus the Alliance, in language which is frank and uncompromising, works to de-glamourize anal penetration by characterizing it as dirty -- because of the presence of fecal material; dangerous -- because of the risk of STIs, some of them fatal, and of structural damage, including anal fissures and sphinctal leakage; and degrading -- because of the division of men into insertive and receptive roles, so-called tops and bottoms, which grates on male sensitivities and is destructive of masculinity, and which emerges in the harsh and severely self-deprecating language men involved in anal penetration use to describe themselves: bottombitch, pussyboy, asscunt, pig, slut, and whore.
The conventional wisdom of the ASOs is that direct attacks upon a practice like anal penetration will not succeed because they're "negative" and "turn people off."
Yet evidence from Uganda's ABCD programs (for Abstain from sex, Be faithful, use a Condom if you can't do the first two, or Die), which speak openly of the danger of death from promiscuous behavior, and from anti-smoking campaigns in the US, which have historically both warned of disability and death and sought to de-glamourize smoking by drawing attention to such negatives as bad breath and smoker's cough, indicates that, in matters of life and death, people routinely listen and respond to so-called negative messages.
Ugandan AIDS Poster (It should be noted that Uganda is the only African nation to report a drop in HIV prevalence for 12 consecutive years.)
Given the success of this sort of frank talk, in our writings on our website, in brochures, and around the net, The Man2Man Alliance offers men stark choices:
LIST OF EXCERPTS
Excerpt 1
QIS II: UCSF's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies sets forth the connection between anal promiscuity and gay male identity
The dominant prevention paradigm was developed for high-risk groups in US cities like San Francisco. Part of the risk reduction model was to not address sexual behavior. It was argued that this would amount to making value judgments, which is unscientific and would only drive away those who needed to be reached. AIDS experts settled for risk or harm reduction approaches, which assume that behavior is difficult or impossible to change, therefore efforts ought to be made to mitigate the consequences of risky behavior. Thus condoms and clean needles (if legal) were provided to reduce risk of sexually transmitted and blood-to-blood HIV infection respectively. There was and is no discouragement of any form of sexual behavior, or injecting drug use. AIDS experts applauded themselves for their open-mindedness and realism. (Green, 2003)
Excerpt 2
No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn
|
FROT phallus fidelity masculinity equality freedom pleasure health LIFE |
|
anal anus promiscuity effeminacy submission subjugation pain disease death |
The Alliance is confident that a significant number of gay men are weary of anal penetration, promiscuity, the division into tops and bottoms, and constant concern with disease.
And we know that most nongay men who have sex with men are repelled by anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy.
Which they correctly see as highly unpleasant and dysphoric.
The Alliance therefore stays on message regarding both the myriad discontents of anal promiscuity and the intensely masculine sexual pleasure, man2man intimacy, mutuality, health, and other rewards of Frot Fidelity.
As noted in the introduction, AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) consistently support and seek to facilitate anal penetration among men who have sex with men, while dismissing in various ways, some rather blatant and others comparatively hidden, non-anal alternatives and those men who don't or won't engage in anal.
Here, for example, are two entries found on the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) website. (GMHC is the primary ASO for New York City, and was one of the first in the country, having been founded by Larry Kramer in 1982.)
[Begin excerpt]
FAQ for gay men
Q. I keep hearing about harm reduction, harm reduction. Whatever happened to "no means no?" As in, don't have anal sex. Or don't do drugs. I don't do those things anymore because they're too dangerous for me. Hello, gay men? Clue phone: it's for you.
A. Every pleasure, or even things that are useful without always being pleasurable, come with risk. That's why so many people drive in cars despite thousands of annual deaths in auto accidents. Gay men have a lot of practice in balancing risk and pleasure, gauging the safety of going home with a stranger, or coming out at work, or other things that seem both important and potentially dangerous.
How quick you are to give up a particular activity usually depends on how important it is to you. If it's not important as anal sex may not be to you it's easy to give it up. Those decisions vary from person to person.
[end excerpt]
And here is a listing for a GMHC workshop:
[Excerpt begins]
Bumper to Bumper
When and with whom do you have receptive anal sex? Would you like to be penetrated but you don't dare? What is stopping you? Can you imagine wanting to? We'll discuss these questions and more in this workshop.
[end excerpt]
A more subtle but very dangerous form of support for anal penetration is the way in which ASOs and their websites treat risk behavior:
They consistently refer to "vaginal and anal sexual intercourse" as high-risk activities, thus making both an implicit and explicit comparison between the two.
Yet the reality is that only penile-vaginal intercourse is genital-genital and can properly be called "sex," whereas anal penetration is just that: the penetration of an organ of excretion.
Throughout the world, the overwhelming majority of human beings agree that sex is about genitals.
It is only in the relatively tiny gay male subcultures found in post-industrialized societies that sex is thought to be about anuses.
Yet anal penetration is not, in the ordinary and most widespread human sense of the term, "sex."
Because it is not mutually genital.
Nevertheless, the constant repetition by the ASOs of the phrase "vaginal and anal sexual intercourse" has had the effect of lending sexual legitimacy and the aura of heterosexual equivalence to an act which is not genital and has far less to do with sex than it does with coercion and power.
So while it's of course true that "vaginal and anal intercourse" are high-risk activites, the reality is that vaginal sex and anal penetration are not comparable in any other way, and that indeed, in terms of HIV risk alone, studies in Europe and California have found that women in serodiscordant couples are 10 to 20 times as likely to seroconvert -- that is, become HIV + -- through anal penetration than they are through vaginal intercourse (Halperin, 1999).
So an accurate "hierarchy of risk" would note that anal penetration is significantly riskier than penile-vaginal intercourse, and would further note that while the vagina was meant to be penetrated, the anus is not -- that in truth, there are vast differences between these two types of "intercourse."
Nevertheless, the very well-funded KnowHIVAIDS.org website says only, under "ways to reduce risk"
Use a condom for vaginal or anal sexual intercourse, and barrier methods, such as a condom or dental dam, for oral sex
There is, as Chuck Tarver points out, no discussion of the different levels of risk involved, no discussion of the unique vulnerabilities of the anus when penetrated, no mention that the anus is not a genital organ and contains no erectile tissue, and no discussion of alternatives.
A proper hierarchy of risk would note that anal penetration is riskiest, followed by vaginal sex, and then oral sex, and that mutual masturbation and frot are extremely low risk.
Yet these last two activities are almost never mentioned, and when they are, there's no support given or offered to those who practice them.
(Readers who would like to learn more about the morphological realities of penile, vaginal, and anal intercourse can consult our very popular adult article What Sex Is.)
Make no mistake: for the last two decades the ASOs, under the guise of being non-judgmental, have been legitimizing a practice, anal penetration, which is not sexual and which puts its practitioners at the *highest* possible risk for HIV.
This is a foolish policy which is not in the public health interest, and which should be abandoned.
Excerpt from a message posted on "AIDS and Anthropology Research Group," an internet "listserv" for anthropologists working in the field of AIDS.
The author is Professor Douglas Feldman, chair of the Anthropology Department at SUNY, TK campus.
[Excerpt begins]
Unlike gibbons and some other mammals, humans are not naturally monogamous.
Some major religions make polypartnering (having sex with several partners) a sin in order to promote monogamy. However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with polypartnering. Indeed, polypartnering allows participants to enjoy a greater variety of sexual behaviors with a greater number of persons, to enhance their lovemaking skills, and it can be very enjoyable for both participants.
Imagine if religions were to dictate that it was morally wrong for people to eat out at different restaurants, requiring its adherents to stick to one restaurant for their entire lives; or to stick to one movie -- seeing the same film over and over again, never being allowed to see a new movie or to broaden one's experience.
The ideology of the sexual revolution which occurred in North America and Western Europe during 1965-75 was very important in breaking down the Victorian morality of the past, allowing people to become more sexually free.
I believe this was a positive change in human growth, and we should not use the HIV/AIDS crisis as an excuse to revert back to a monastic view of sex. We need to be more sex positive, and encourage people to feel they can become open to sexual experiences with different people. There is nothing wrong with sex with different partners. The problem is not the sex, but the failure to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmissible diseases.
Responsible polypartnering requires condoms and birth control as a given at all times. We need to teach those who engage in the joys of polypartnering how to effectively protect themselves from potential dangers.
[end excerpt]
COMMENTARY:
In this message, Professor Feldman abandons any pretence of objectivity and states openly and blatantly that he favors promiscuity, which he here refers to as polypartnering, over monogamy, and secular ideology over religion.
He also depicts religious support for monogamy as running contrary to the interests of sexual freedom.
The context in which this message was posted was a debate over the role of Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) in reducing HIV prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular an attack upon the work of Dr. Edward Green, who had presented evidence that Uganda's ABC program (for Abstain from sex, Be faithful, and use a Condom if you can't or won't do the first two) had been more successful in preventing new HIV infections than had the social marketing of condoms, which Professor Feldman favors in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
Curiously, in the same debate, which was quite acrimonious, Professor Feldman had also chosen to demand of Dr. Green, who'd been recently appointed to the President's Advisory Council on HIV / AIDS (PACHA), whether he there would advocate for gay marriage.
Yet it's clear that Professor Feldman is hardly a supporter of monogamous behavior, married or not.
What are the consequences of Professor's Feldman's beliefs?
According to recent studies, among heterosexuals, only 11% percent of adults who have ever been married or cohabited have been unfaithful to their partner. (Treas and Giesen, 2000)
Yet a full 75% of gay men in relationships are unfaithful to their partners -- a startlingly high figure.(Adam, 2003)
One consequence is the very high rate of venereal disease among gay men.
For example, the prevalence of the Human Papilloma Virus, which can cause anal cancer, in anally-receptive gay men is 30 times greater than it is in the general population.
Indeed, at the start of the Western "sexual revolution" in the mid 1960s, syphilis and gonorrhea, both easily treated with penicillin, were the only important STDs.
Today there are over 20 significantly prevalent sexually transmitted diseases with 15.3 million newly infected Americans each year.
A disproportionate number of whom are gay and bisexual men.
While most of those diseases can be easily treated -- particularly if you live in a Western country -- some of them can't be -- and a few are deadly.
That's a remarkable and frightening change, and it's a direct consequence of the sort of behavior Professor Feldman endorses, one which, despite what he says, condoms alone in most cases would not be sufficient to ameliorate.
The only way to avoid anally-vectored STIs is to avoid anal penetration.
While the only way to avoid STDs in general is to be faithful.
Another leading source of support for anal penetration among men who have sex with men are various medical and "sex advice" columnists whose work appears in gay venues online and in print.
One of the most prominent of these is Dr. Stephen Goldstone, MD, FACS, who writes a medical advice column for The Advocate, a unit of the largest online and in-print gay media conglomerate; has published a gay sex advice book titled "The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex"; and has his own website, GayHealth.com, which is devoted almost exclusively to anal penetration and its many medical ills.
Although Dr. Goldstone frequently notes, in answer to reader questions, that "an anus is not a vagina," and describes anal penetration as "the highest risk sex act that men who have sex with men can perform," his site nevertheless promotes anal penetration, not just for gay and bi men, but for straight-identified men as well.
In the following excerpt, Dr. Goldstone answers a question about anal fissures while encouraging the reader to continue being penetrated anally.
http://www.gayhealth.com/templates/0/network/ask/index.html?record=657
[Excerpt begins]
Affects:
* Anus
Question
Is a fissure causing my pain during anal sex?
Friday, July 25th 2003
I am very uncomfortable after being on the receiving end of anal sex. I find it excruciating to have a bowel movement and there is usually a small amount of blood on the toilet paper. I have been having anal sex for several years and have always been very careful with it. I have never had this problem before, but my partner is probably the largest I have ever been with. In trying to examine myself, I have felt small bumps on my anus. I am not sure if these are skin tags or a fissure (which I have only heard of in one of your other articles). What is a fissure and how can it be treated? I tried applying hemorrhoid treatment for about a week and the problem went away. It was another two weeks until we tried again, and the problem reemerged worse than before. If the bumps are skin tags, how difficult is it to remove them? Will I be able to have normal, uncomplicated anal sex ever again?
We aren't rough with sex although it does take my partner some time to reach climax. Any help or information would be appreciated.
Answer
It sounds like you do have a fissure, which is a tear of the lining of the anus. It most often presents with pain during bowel movements and a streak of blood on the stool. You can develop swollen skin on the outside next to the tear, which is a tag. Some people develop bumps inside their anus, which are like little calluses and not warts. The tear can heal with simple measures like fiber supplements and stool softeners. While over the counter creams can also help, there are prescription strength medications from your doctor that will do a better job. The problem, however, is that it is easier to tear your anus again because the scar is never as strong as the original tissue.
Clearly an anus is not a vagina, and the tissue is more sensitive to injury during sex, especially if your partner is thick (length is not as much of a problem). If your partner takes a long time to cum, it can create more friction and promote injury. That said, there are things you can do to make tearing less likely. Experiment with different positions to see if one is easier, because some positions will put less stress on the fissure. Use different lubricants (without nonoxynol-9) and different condoms to see if one is better tolerated. Apply lubricant often to be sure that it doesn't get too dry. If he is taking a long time to cum or if you feel discomfort then stop. You can try stretching yourself with a dildo. Gradually increase the size of the dildo as it becomes comfortable until you reach one approximating the girth of your partner. This will help stretch the muscle slowly so that you are less likely to tear.
Last but not least, if you are concerned about these symptoms or if they persist, make an appointment with your physician. If you do not have a doctor, please look for an LGBT-friendly provider in your area. Check the listing on our site.
Take care.
[end excerpt]
COMMENTARY:
In this Q and A, a man suffering and in pain from an unnatural and unnecessary sexual activity is counseled, by a physician, to continue that activity.
It's difficult to imagine a doctor doing the same under almost any other circumstance.
For example, if a patient had developed a hacking cough from smoking, it's unlikely his doctor would recommend that he continue to smoke.
Dr. Goldstone's response is bizarre, yet typical of the Orwellian advice he offers constantly and consistently: your anus is not a vagina, but you should continue to treat it as though it were.
It's not as though fissures were the only problem associated with anal penetration.
A visit to GayHealth.com reveals the following list of questions that the diligent Dr. Goldstone has answered, always in the way that he has above, and which I think bears repeating:
he says that "clearly an anus is not a vagina," but encourages his questioners to go on using it as though it were.
Notice that in the Q and A in our excerpt he doesn't mention that stretching the anal sphincter with increasingly large dildos will result in what gay men quaintly call "leakage."
Apparently he's keeping back that piece of info for his next column.
Here are the questions about anal listed on the site:
(You can see them for yourself, along with Dr. G's answers, by clicking on this link and scrolling down the page.)
Is a nerve in the anus dangerous?
Should I worry about bumps on my anus?
I love rimming, but how safe is it?
My dildo makes me bleed.
Can Kegel Tighten My Anus?
Worm in my stool?
White bump on my anus?
Anal bleeding, and my doc is no help!
Finding the pleasure spot in my partner's anus...
Safe to douche twice a week before sex?
Did anal sex cause ulcerative proctitis?
What can I do for anal warts?
Health concerns associated with pinworm?
Gooey discharge after anal sex. Help!
Big lump on my anus.
How can I clean myself out before anal sex?
Is it safe for men to use tampons?
Extreme pain after using a dildo. Help!
I can't get rid of parasites in my stool!
Do I have to worry about anal cancer?
Clean bowels?
How can I tighten my anus?
Will poppers and a sex club relieve my pap pain?
Lumps, swelling and painful bowels.
Did my dildo cause anal inflammation?
Diarrhea, bloody discharge and an aching groin?
Unknown growth in anal/rectal area
Do I need surgery for my anal tears?
Can regular douching damage my colon?
Can you give me douching directions?
Is it safe to use a butt plug for 8 to 10 hours a day?
How can I prepare for anal surgery?
What is the horrible pain in my rectum?
Is it safe for my SM Master to give me enemas with wine?
Colonoscopy and anal cancers
Lumps around my anus. Anal warts?
Why can't I control my butt muscles?
Pain after anal sex.
Why can't I ever get clean after I go to the bathroom?
Why did I bleed during a bowel movement?
Is it safe to stick a bottle up my butt?
What is causing the pain when I go to the bathroom?
What kind of doctor can give me an anal pap smear?
Is sex causing my anal leakage?
What will relieve my rectal pain?
Is my partner too large for anal sex?
Should I avoid sex prior to my gender reassignment surgery?
Do anal warts look like anal tags?
Pain when I poop.
Do you think I have colon cancer?
I had sex for the first time and now I am in pain. Help!
I don't feel pleasure now. Did surgery damage my prostate?
Do I need to get a rectal exam?
Why is wiping painful?
Why did I find blood in my stool?
Mucus covering my stool. Normal?
My anus is tight.
Losing control with my dildo.
Pain during anal sex. STD?
Do you recommend enemas?
Where is the prostate?
Something hard is in my anus.
Quite a price to pay for, as Chuck Tarver puts it, maintaining the anal sex norm.
Furthermore, in Goldstone's answers to these questions, there's a total lack of discussion of non-anal alternatives.
That's true throughout his site.
So if you're a gay-identified kid, or a middle-aged man with same-sex feelings, and you go to GayHealth.com, you see a menu with the word "sex."
Clicking on "sex" gives you another menu of "things you can do," which reads:
Male with male sex
Oral Sex
Using a Condom
Water Sports
Toys and Fisting
Anal Sex
That's it.
There's no mention of Frot or of mutual masturbation -- which just happen to be the two safest choices and the two most mutually genital choices available to men who have sex with men.
In February of 2002 a group of men from The Man2Man Alliance emailed GayHealth.com and asked Dr. Goldstone to put up a page on frottage.
Someone calling herself "Sarah Albert," who said she worked for the site and may or may not be a real person, said they would.
Six months went by, and there was no page.
I queried "Sarah," and she said that such a page was "at the top of her list."
Then she started censoring our posts.
Guess what?
It's now been two years since that initial query, and there's been no change -- and no page on frot.
Sadly, that's not unusual on websites which purport to give medical and HIV prevention advice to men who have sex with men.
Basically, what can be seen by visiting sites like AIDS.org and KnowHIVAIDS.org, is that frot has been cyber-ed out of existence.
It is impossible, based on the information that the ordinary and reasonable internet user can garner, to know that non-anal, non-penetrative, alternatives exist and are widely practiced.
That's one of the primary reasons HIV remains so prevalent in the gay male community.
As for Dr. Goldstone, one can only speculate about why he runs his site as he does.
One possibility is financial: that he makes his living treating the ills created by anal penetration.
The other, however, is ideological: that he sincerely believes that those men who want to should be able to engage in anal penetration, and that it's his duty to facilitate their doing so.
The problem with the latter explanation is that, if it's so, why won't he talk about other, less dangerous and objectively more pleasurable forms of male-male sex.
He must know that other forms of male-male sex are objectively more pleasurable, because he admits that the "pleasure" in being anally penetrated is not physiological in his response to question number nine on his list:
http://www.gayhealth.com/templates/105951422497313563898100003/network/ask/index.html?record=246
Finding the pleasure spot in my partner's anus...
Wednesday, April 4th 2001
Question
When a guy performs anal sex with another guy, what are the sources of pleasure for the guy who's penetrated? Is there a spot in his ass that pleases him when touched? My lover wants to know if there is such a spot and how he could reach it before we engage in anal sex (we haven't tried it yet). Thanks...
Answer
Most of the nerve endings that sense pleasure are at the outside of your anus or within the first two inches. The rest of your rectum and colon do not have nerves that sense pleasure. While many guys will disagree with me, there is no physiological basis for most of the pleasure you derive higher up in your colon. There is definitely a psychological pleasure. Your partner's penis can stretch your sphincter and pelvic muscles, but again these are in the lower four to six inches of your rectum. When you have an orgasm, these muscles will contract against his penis and this might heighten the pleasure of your orgasm. Take care and enjoy.
[end of GayHealth.com excerpt]
More of Dr. Goldstone's doublespeak: "there is no physiological basis for most of the pleasure you derive higher up in your colon."
If there's no "physiological basis" for it then there's no pleasure to be derived.
It's totally imaginary -- or psychological, which is just a polite word, in this case, for imaginary.
Yet the doctor ends his little screed with "take care and enjoy"
Enjoy what?
And since the guys in the question say they haven't yet tried anal, would there be anything wrong in suggesting to them that there are more pleasurable and less dangerous ways for them to be intimate?
The doctor must know, after all, that direct genital stimulation is more pleasurable than penetration of a body part which lacks "nerves that sense pleasure."
Yet he will not discuss male-male sexual techniques which directly and mutually stimulate the genitals, and do so without damaging them or exposing their owners to fatal diseases.
How liberated is that?
Warning: strong language.
Dan Savage is a popular and influential syndicated gay sex advice columnist.
In the following Q and A, he goes to some pains to belittle masturbation, and by implication, Frot.
[Begin excerpt]
[end excerpt]Q I am a straight teen boy who's addicted to masturbating. I've been told conflicting reports that it is either good or bad for you. One of my friends even found a Web site which said that a kitten would be killed if you masturbated. I don't believe that, but what is the truth about male masturbation? Is masturbating twice a day bad?
-- DNY
A If you're only masturbating twice a day, DNY, then you're showing remarkable restraint for a young man your age.
It's almost impossible to masturbate too much (and, anyway, there are a whole lot of unwanted kittens in this world). One potential pitfall of youthful masturbation, however, is habituating yourself to a particular kind of stimulation. If you masturbate in the exact same way every time, or if you hold your cock in a death grip every time, you may find it difficult to climax as the result of other, more subtle sensations. So don't grip yourself too firmly, and don't masturbate by humping the same scratchy bit of your mattress over and over again. Make an effort to vary your style and you'll make an easier transition from your own right hand to the less intense, more subtle, and infinitely more pleasurable sensations provided in your true love's twat, throat, and tush.
COMMENTARY:
First of all, Mr. Savage warns the putative teen against a masturbatory "death grip" and against "humping ... your mattress," saying that doing so may make climax in other circumstances difficult.
It's difficult to know what he means by a "death grip," since most men masturbate by moving their fist up and down the shaft of their erect penis, and too tight a grip would make that impossible.
Nor have I any reason to believe that certain masturbatory practices in youth would interfere with other practices as an adult.
I've never heard that anywhere else, and in my own life can testify that though I routinely, as a teenager, "humped" my mattress, I had no problem as an adult or even as a teen reaching climax in some other position.
That includes those occasions when I was the insertive partner in anal penetration -- to repeat, I had no difficulty reaching orgasm in what Mr. Savage calls the "tush."
Nor do bisexual men who had frot experiences as teens, and who continue the practice as adults, report any difficulty in reaching orgasm during vaginal sex.
So it's difficult to read Mr. Savage's "advice" as anything other than an attack on non-penetrative sex and an incitement to teenagers to begin oral, vaginal, or anal sex as soon as they possibly can.
Which is the worst possible advice they can be given, since it puts them at risk for pregnancy and a host of STIs.
Yet Mr. Savage, like Dr. Goldstone, claims to be concerned about STIs.
After the publication of Erica Goode's NY Times piece about a "safer sex" educator who sero-converted, Savage wrote a column critical of the counselor, and calling for some restraint in anal promiscuity.
In that same column, however, he made clear that among gay men anal penetration was still to be regarded as the ultimate and culminating sexual act of a relationship -- all he suggested was that men might want to wait until they were in a relationship before they got penetrated.
I wrote to Savage and pointed out that a great many seroconversions occur not during anonymous sex, but in the context of a relationship in which the bottom, in essence, offers his anus to the top as a demonstration of love.
And that it's not unusual, in those circumstances, for the relationship to end after the top has consummated his lust.
Indeed, interested readers can find an account of seroconversion under those circumstances reported in The Boston Globe.
So, I suggested to Savage, it might make more sense to remove penetration from the pinnacle of gay male sexual experience and give men other options instead -- and, at the very least, specifically warn them against being anally receptive early in a relationship.
He didn't reply to my letter, and he has not to two more over the last two years.
The reason he has not is not mysterious.
Dan Savage, like Steve Goldstone, is an analist.
He consistently supports the dominant culture of anal sex, and censors opposing points of view.
Savage is also respected and influential, and is sometimes quoted in the nongay press, most recently in Seattle, where he lives, and where he's become an advocate for "responsible promiscuity."
But not, so far as I can tell, for fidelity.
He simply urges men to use condoms during promiscuous anal sex.
As the ASOs have been doing for two decades.
Like Steve Goldstone, Dan Savage is a perfect example of the way the dominant culture of anal sex maintains its power.
And also of the truly bad choices that culture consistently makes.
Over the last 30 years, analist gay men like Goldstone and Savage have:
Quite a record.
It's important to recognize, then, that the cultural messages generated by men like Goldstone and Savage, though they are just words, have incredibly destructive results.
And that the only way to counter those messages is by developing and disseminating other messages which tell the truth about sex, pleasure, and disease.
Following the overturn of the "sodomy laws" by the Supreme Court of the United States on June 26, 2003, mass media reports commonly made "sodomy" synonomous with "gay sex" and "gay sex" synonomous with "anal sex."
Nowhere was there any suggestion that gay male sex might be other than anal sex.
Here for example are three photo captions from the AP and Reuters:
[Excerpt begins]
Holding a sign which reads "Celebrate Sodomy," Crispin Hollings celebrates in San Francisco's Castro District following the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, June 26, 2003, that struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law. The high court's 6-3 decision overturned not only the Texas statute but apparently swept away laws in a dozen other states that ban oral and anal sex for everyone, or for homosexuals in particular. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Lesbian partners Betsey Leondar-Wright (L) and Gail Leondar-Wright of Arlington, Massachusetts, hug June 26, 2003 during a rally held in Boston. Gays across America welcomed a Supreme Court decision that legalized anal and oral sex in their homes, and experts said the ruling could pave the way for eventually legalizing gay marriage. Photo by Jim Bourg/Reuters
Bill Hohengarten (L) and Ruth Harlow (R), attorneys for plaintiffs John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, smile outside the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) in Washington, DC on June 26, 2003. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws today that make it a crime for people of the same sex to engage in 'deviate sexual intercourse,' a ruling that gives gay rights advocates a major victory. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
[end excerpt]
Excerpt from "A wake-up call to the community"
by Thomas J. Coates
Op-ed appearing in the SF Chronicle on Friday, June 21, 2002
Dr. Coates, who for many years was head of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF, is widely regarded as the principal architect of AIDS prevention programs -- that is to say, condom campaigns, which focus on and support anal penetration -- in the US.
Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, Dr. Coates has repeatedly rebuffed both Dr. Edward Green and myself for suggesting that various types of behavior change, including delayed age of sexual onset, partner reduction and fidelity, and non-anal alternatives would be equally if not more effective in reducing HIV prevalence.
Although Dr. Coates takes credit for the drop in new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men in the late 1980s, the fact is that under the programs he favors, HIV prevalence in America has risen to an all-time high: by some estimates there are now 1 million people infected with HIV in the United States.
[Excerpt begins]
Some will argue that with antiretroviral therapies extending life 20 years or more past the moment of infection render the whole argument moot. But the truth is that gay men have higher rates than their heterosexual counterparts of syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, genital warts and hepatitis.
As Gabriel Rotello argued in his book, "Sexual Ecology" (Plume, 1998), an urban gay culture built around gay men each having unprotected sex with hundreds or thousands of different partners is simply not sustainable. It is not only the epidemics we all know about; other epidemics are waiting to happen.
The gay community in San Francisco has slipped away from gay men. Talking with young gay men, one is struck by the pervasive sense of alienation and the frustration of living in a culture where one cannot get a "real" date but where one can easily and quickly find sex. The flip side is that those gay men who are in fulfilling, long-term relationships live lives totally unrelated to the "gay lifestyle" of easy, breezy sex expressed in the media and pursued, not necessarily satisfactorily, by so many single gay men.
The question for gay men here is one of identity, and the values that define that identity. Gay liberation was defined in its earliest days by important values: sexual liberation, acceptance and celebration of diversity, challenges to authority and legal and social equality. Yet, what about the value of caring for one another that is essential to any community? Indeed, no community can call itself such if it acquiesces in or ignores the fact that people are doing things to give each other a highly lethal disease.
Gay men are used to rising to challenges. Coming out is rarely easy for anyone. The extraordinary reduction in HIV infections due to the adoption of the "condom" code remains an unprecedented shift in the annals of public health. The remarkable support gay men gave each other throughout the war against AIDS is a testament to the strength, love and resiliency of the gay community.
Gay men need to continue to celebrate sexual liberation, diversity, challenge and equality. But gay men also need to add to this list by creating a community that embraces the value of caring -- of human rights really -- and that vigorously affirms all stages of life, as opposed to one that celebrates an endlessly extended adolescence as the epitome of existence.
[end of excerpt]
COMMENTARY:
Notice that Dr. Coates studiously avoids condemning anal sex, promiscuity, or sexual experimentation.
And while he does acknowledge that some men are in "fulfilling, long-term relationships," he doesn't begin to suggest that the gay community would do well to replace promiscuity with fidelity as a core gay male value.
Instead, determined to protect what he calls "sexual liberation" and "acceptance and celebration of diversity," he makes no mention of abstinence, partner reduction, fidelity, or non-anal alternatives, and in effect tries to make a case for, without calling it such, "responsible promiscuity."
In our opinion, however, "responsible promiscuity," like "safe promiscuity," is an oxymoron.
Because it's simply not realistic to think that men in pursuit of sexual scalps are going to worry about the health of their partners.
What is needed is genuine cultural change.
Yet Dr. Coates' attitude, and that of his peers, is that present-day American gay male culture is somehow analogous to Iroquois or Australian Aborginal cultures, and should be treated like a sacred artifact.
The reality is that gay male culture as it exists today is a very recent phenomenon, and is an uneasy blend of American consumerism, left-wing and feminist political theory, and out-of-date and indeed half-baked ideas about sexual freedom.
It is in no way sacrosanct, and there's ample historical precedent in the annals of public health for intervening in a culture to change behavior when that behavior is dangerous or deadly.
What Dr. Coates has actually been doing, as Rotello pointed out in our first excerpt, is seeking to preserve the sexual status quo circa 1985.
Yet there's no reason to do that.
Human sexuality, like the rest of human behavior, changes and evolves in response to historical forces.
So Dr. Coates' apparent desire to avoid "transformative change" in gay male culture is pointless.
Cultures change, and rather than standing in the road, Dr. Coates should step back and allow his own gay male culture to change also.
WARNING: Very strong language
The internet has numerous gay dating sites on which men can list their sexual preferences and arrange to "hook up" with those of similar tastes.
These next excerpts are ones I found readily available on Yahoo.
But in point of fact there are entire websites devoted to condemless anal penetration, with names like bareback.com and barebackcity.com, and with their own distinctive "art," most of which can't be reproduced here.
[Excerpts begin]
Yahoo! ID: ChipEatsCum
More About Me
Hobbies: Just getting fucked and fucking, an uncut cock a major plus, and if you want to use a condom, do not waste my time.
Latest News: I am tired of bullshit one line emails, if you got something to say, say it. If you dont have a pic, forget it and forget me.
Favorite Quote
"None. Headed for UC/Berkeley for Graduate School in January. San Francisco top men hit me up."
Yahoo! ID: pigboy
More About Me
Hobbies: Totally into uncut cock,also into rimming & fucking shaved asses, armpit freak, WS and anything kinky. Totally versatile and oh, bareback fucking only. Total pigboy here, interested in other pigs.
Latest News: Interested in pig action only, specially totally into daddy pigs who now how to use a boy, cum, sweat, piss.
Yahoo! ID: dirty_me_up2001
More About Me
Hobbies: getting gangbanged, doublefucked, used like a slut, fucked in the mouth/ass, verbally abused, pissed on, piss in my mouth, raped, gagged, tied up, nipples tortured, etc.
Latest News: I'm looking for guys who want to use me...
Favorite Quote
""Cum on, take it, boy... Yeah, you know you like it...""
Yahoo! ID: alphadog
More About Me
Hobbies: hey dudes, looking for some quality friends, queer as folk parties, canoe trips, day travel, pool side fun, adventure
Latest News: Looking for a new circle of friends, to have fun with and around. Love kink for those who love it too... bottom and proud of it
Yahoo! ID: amsterbottom
More About Me
Hobbies: spreading my legs and my ass, and getting as much MALES fuck me as I can get (males, thats men, dogs, horses, . . .) (my uncle started to fuck me when I was 12, I loved it, and never stopped anymore)
Latest News: spent most of the last weekend in a sling in one of the sleazebars over here, had 11 men fuck my asscunt in 2 days, never felt zo full with cum before
Favorite Quote
"you asscunt feels so good, it must have been made to fuck . . ."
[end excerpts]
This article appeared in September 2003, almost a full six years after our first excerpt from QIS II identified condomless, promiscuous anal penetration as key to gay male identity.
In this article, a British researcher asserts that the rate of condomless anal penetration has increased, and blames the increase on the gay male "search for identity."
Thus we can see that despite six years of ever better-funded condom campaigns and increases in budgets for "safer-sex" education, the level of unsafe sex has actually increased, and as we make clear in Media Watch, HIV and other STI prevalence has also increased among men who have sex with men.
[Begin excerpt]
Gay Men Flouting Safe Sex in Search of Identity
Tue Sep 9, 2003
MANCHESTER (Reuters) - Thousands of young gay British men are courting
death in the hedonistic and newly promiscuous 21st century, flouting
safe sex and actively trying to catch HIV in their
search for identity, a researcher aid on Tuesday.
Melissa Parker of Brunel University said the gay sex pub, club and
sauna scene in London was booming and had been growing steadily since the
mid-1990s, with unprotected sex with multiple partners the rule rather
than the exception.
Catching the AIDS precursor HIV was not just a risk, it was a goal,
she told reporters at the annual meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science.
"Being diagnosed with HIV is a badge of recognition of being truly
gay," she said. "There is a sizeable number of young gay men new to the gay
scene, exploring their sexuality but wanting to belong. HIV is seen as
a bonus."
People diagnosed with HIV were not only admired for championing the
cause, but were seen as being pampered by society with better social
support, health care and even standard of living.
The combinations of therapies now available for people with HIV might
even have exacerbated the problem.
"They have made HIV less frightening," Parker said.
She said some gay sex clubs, pubs and saunas had a throughput of up to
500 people a day with some men managing 30 to 40 sexual partners a
visit.
Admitting that she had no figures to support her claim, she said her
research consisted of a series of interviews over several years with a
large number of sexually active gay men whose stories corroborated each
other.
"They are all talking about it and they are all very concerned," Parker
said.
She urged the authorities to tackle the issue urgently, reinforcing the
call for safe sex and if necessary closing down some of the venues.
"Many lives will be unnecessarily destroyed if this advice is ignored"
she said.
[end of excerpt]
Commentary:
First of all, it should be noted that Dr. Parker's research, which simply confirmed what numerous observers had already pointed out -- the rise of a large-scale barebacking movement -- was greeted with disdain by the UK Coalition of HIV Positive People, who insisted that anecdotes about men being penetrated by high numbers of multiple partners in a night were fantasy, and that those who sero-converted, did so almost always by accident.
Neither assertion is credible.
Since the start of the barebacking movement in 1996-97, the gay press has regularly carried stories about barebacking parties in which men were penetrated by multiple partners.
Indeed, barebacking activist Stephen Gendin, who died of AIDS in 2000, wrote about such parties for POZ, the nation's leading HIV monthly.
And the fact is that any time a person barebacks, he's bug-chasing -- that is, he's leaving himself open to infection with HIV.
Yet, while Dr. Parker has correctly identified the problem as one of barebacking in search of a gay identity, she's wrong that "reinforcing the call for safe sex" is going to solve it.
The fact is that young gay Brits, like their American counterparts, have been inundated with
safer-sex messages all their lives.
Do the math:
Today's 18-year-old barebacking gay boys were born in 1985 -- the same
year as "safer sex."
They've literally grown up with safer-sex, and the one thing they don't
need is more messages about condoms.
I'll say it again: They don't need more condom campaigns.
What they need is an anti-anal message.
A message that debunks anal and attacks its mystique while offering men
who have sex with men a hot, masculine, more pleasurable and mutually
pleasurable alternative.
Absent that message, the epidemic will continue.
I repeat: those young gay men know about condoms.
Nothing Dr. Parker can tell them will be news.
What they don't know about is Frot: genital-genital sex which is uniquely male.
And that there are literally millions of gay, bi,
and straight-identified men who have sex with men who never go near
anal.
And they don't know it because their AIDS Service Organizations aren't
telling them.
Pornographers aren't telling them.
Tom Coates isn't telling them.
GayHealth-dot-com isn't telling them.
PlanetOut isn't telling them.
The Advocate isn't telling them.
Dan Savage isn't telling them.
Nor is the New York Times or The Boston Globe or any other major or even minor American newspaper.
And neither is the religious right.
The only entity in all of gay and bi male life which is telling the truth about sexual alternatives is The Man2Man Alliance.
Only we have consistently called for "realistic assessments of pleasure and risk" in the various sexual activities available to men who have sex with men.
And only we have coupled that with a call for Fidelity.
FIDELITY and FROT: that's the program of The Man2Man Alliance, one which will radically reorder and improve the lives of men who have sex with men.
What I hope is clear from these excerpts is the extent to which gay men in America consider themselves defined by anal sex and promiscuity, and the extent to which the safer-sex establishment and gay media support that definition.
Without question that makes the task of promoting Fidelity and Frot among men who have sex with men far more difficult.
Among American gay and bi men, promiscuity and sexual experimentation, and most particularly anal penetration, are viewed as entitlements, and I know from my own experience that many gay men become rabidly angry when it's suggested that these behaviors are dangerous and should be changed.
Indeed, in the last three years of doing this work I've been subjected to more personal or ad hominem attacks -- being called a crackpot, a religious fanatic, a homophobe, and an erotophobe -- than I'd been in the preceding twenty-seven altogether.
Yet what Chuck Tarver and I are proposing is not radical: that we could reduce the prevalence of HIV by reducing the prevalence of anal sex and promiscuity, and that, as it happens, there's an alternative to anal sex which is far more pleasurable and very low risk.
So our task is to build upon the successful lives of those men who are already practicing sexual responsibility in the form of abstinence, fidelity, and non-anal alternatives, particularly Frot, and to work to defund condom campaigns and other programs which, as Ted Green says, "assume that behavior is difficult or impossible to change,'' and in which "There was and is no discouragement of any form of sexual behavior, or injecting drug use."
If we are successful, not only will we end the current epidemics of anally-vectored STIs, but we will have brought about a radical re-ordering of the lives of men who love men, allowing them to forge a new culture in which sex is genital, masculinity is prized, and fidelity is honored.
A culture, in short, of
February 5, 2004
Barry Adam, Relationship Innovation in Male Couples, paper presented to the American Sociological Association, 2003.
Edward C Green, "New Challenges to the AIDS Prevention Paradigm," Anthropology Weekly, June, 2003.
Daniel Halperin, Heterosexual anal intercourse: prevalence, cultural factors, and HIV infection and other health risks, part I. AIDS Patient Care 13 (12): 717-730, 1999.
Arnold Melman, study on penile sensitivity presented to the American Urological Society, Chicago, 2003.
Reynolds SJ et al. Male circumcision is protective against HIV-1 but not other common sexually transmitted infections in India. 41st Annual Conference of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, San Diego, 2003.
Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Future of Gay Men, 1998.
Chuck Tarver Fighting the Conformity that Kills July, 2003.
Treas J, Giesen D. Sexual infidelity among married and cohabiting Americans. Journal of Marriage and the Family. 2000;62:48-60.
is presented by The Man2Man Alliance, an organization of men into
Frot
Click here to read An Introduction to Frot and The Man2Man Alliance.
Click here to understand more about Heroic Homosex.
Or visit our FAQs page to learn more about Frot Men.
© All material on this site Copyright 2001 - 2011 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.
Excerpt 7
Media Coverage of the Supreme Court Sodomy Decision
Excerpt 8
A wake-up call to the community
The desire to avoid 'transformative' change in gay sexual culture was a cornerstone of prevention. (Rotello, p. 109)
Excerpt 9
Yahoo Profiles: Young gay men advertise their desire for unprotected anal sex
bareback site
entry button
Real Name: Chip
Nickname: Chip
Location: Chicago/Norfolk
Age: 21
Marital Status: Single
Gender: Male
Occupation: Student
Real Name: pig
Nickname: boy
Location: Atlanta
Age: 27
Marital Status: Single
Gender: Male
Occupation: Sales
Real Name: James
Location: San Francisco, California
Age: 25
Marital Status: Single
Gender: Male
Occupation: grad student
Real Name: Alpha Dog
Nickname: Woof
Location: Southern USA
Age: 36
Marital Status: Single
Gender: Male
Occupation: Woofing around.......yes I have one....
Real Name: johan
Location: amsterdam
Age: 34
Marital Status: Single And Looking
Gender: Male
Occupation: fuckbottom for topmen
Excerpt 10
Full Circle: Gay Men Flouting Safe Sex in Search of Identity
AFTERWORD
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