Introductory note: This brief essay was first posted on the Alliance's Personal Stories message board on June 5, 2001.

Dear fellow warrior

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the first report of the disease we now call AIDS.

For many of us in this club, it's a somber day, a day to remember all those we lost, and their suffering too.

AIDS was and remains a complex phenomenon, with many factors contributing to its spread and devastating effect worldwide.

But in the gay male community in the United States, the principal mode of transmission of HIV was and remains anal sex -- in point of fact, 94% of the time.

In reading mainstream coverage of today's anniversary, I didn't see any references to anal. That's because anal has become so identified with gay that it's considered anti-gay to criticize it, or even mention the way that all those people -- the conservative estimate is more than 438,000 -- contracted the virus that killed them.

I lived in Boston and New York City in the 1970s and 80s. I witnessed what I've called in retrospect the great anal sex frenzy of the time, the backroom bars, the bath houses, the guys trooping past our little apartment on Fire Island on moonless nights to go get fucked anonymously, in the pitch dark, in the woods between Cherry Grove and The Pines. It made me uncomfortable, and I thought it was unwise, but I didn't see what was coming.

Some people did, more or less. Larry Kramer published a book in 1979 called Faggots, which criticized that predatory gay male culture. And my friend and Gay Lib pioneer Arthur Evans warned publicly around the same time that "a great wave of death" was about to break over the community.

Nobody listened to them -- actually, most people considered them erotophobic at best and traitors at worst.

But Larry and Arthur were right.

Remembering the dead, and conscious of our duty to the living, we will in this club continue to speak the truth about anal sex: that it's a vector for disease, that it's psychologically damaging, and, that far from being the defining homosexual act, it is for many of us m2m men meaningless, pointless, and of absolutely no relevance to our lives.

COCKRUB WARRIORS RULE

bill