Bill Weintraub

Re: Analism a Recent Phenom?

7-17-2006

Hi Steve

I know that mainstream gay male culture -- which we call analism -- tells you that "anal penetration was the norm among gay men now and always had been."

But that's a lie.

And it's a lie which we've discussed a great deal.

And so actually have many other people.

The most prominent and probably best known is Gabriel Rotello in his book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, published in 1997.

And which today is widely regarded as a classic of AIDS literature.

On page 42 of the Plume paperback edition, he talks about how oral and mutual JO predominated prior to the 1970s.

Jack Nichols, who was a pioneering gay rights movement guy and who in 1962 persuaded the Mattachine Society to abandon the medical model of homosexuality, says something similar in his Interview with me:

Interview: Cockrub Warrior Bill Weintraub.

Jack Nichols: Bill, I remember a time, the 1950s, when anal sex was talked about only in whispers in the nation's capital where I came out at thirteen and grew to be twenty-nine. The 1950s and early 1960s were big on oral sex. People who invited anal sex were called by a pejorative name, "brownie queens." You came out a little later, didn't you?

Bill Weintraub: Yes, I came out in 1972, in Boston, which I think was a very different place from the big cities like New York or LA or even D.C. Boston had a relatively small but very cohesive, committed, and intellectually lively gay and lesbian community. Free love was then in full flower, and the ideals of Gay Liberation and the counterculture flourished. So far as I could tell, no one sexual act was placed above another. So it was a wonderful and liberating time and place to be gay, and I'm grateful to have been there.

Jack Nichols: I vividly remember many gay men in those days gossiping with this tidbit: "Well, he's a brownie queen, you know." Anal sex, truly, was not chic. That's when I began realizing that no sex acts are written in stone. We change -- even from decade to decade! Isn't that what you're saying too?

Bill Weintraub: Yes, and it's somewhat amusing to me that some people have sought to label what I'm saying as extreme, even though the idea that much of our sexual behavior is culturally dictated and changes over time and place has been at the core of academic discussions about sexuality for two decades, and of course corresponds to our own experience. So it's hardly radical to assert, as I do, that we have at present a cultural dominance or tyranny of anal sex that shapes and guides the sexual behavior of the overwhelming majority of gay men, and in so doing effectively pushes some and coerces others -- I think a great many -- into having a type of sex that they don't really enjoy and would not, on their own, aspire to.

So the idea that the predominance of anal is a recent phenomenon is not a radical idea, and anyone who lived through the earlier era, as I did, knows that's true.

I should also point out that I'm older than Rotello, and like Jack Nichols, have direct experience of what the culture was like prior to what I call "the great anal penetration frenzy" which began in 1975.

And that was a culture of oral, Frot, and mutual JO.

Anal was rare.

Anal was denigrated.

As Rotello demonstrated decisively, it was the switch to anal in 1975 which brought on the AIDS epidemic.

HIV has been around for a while.

We don't know how long -- Rotello thinks possibly centuries -- but we do have a blood sample dating back to 1959 with HIV in it.

Question: Why, if anal was so common, was there no AIDS epidemic in 1965?

Or in 1896 for that matter?

Men have ALWAYS had sex with men.

For example, and speaking of 1896, Toby Johnson, another gay pioneer, looked at Public Health Service data from the 1890s and early 1900s collected from hobos and tramps.

This was a group which was notorious for homosexual activity.

Yet there's no record of anal syphilis, for example, among them.

Clearly, they weren't doing anal.

So, once again we can ask the question: Why, if anal was so common, was there no AIDS epidemic in 1965?

Or in 1896 for that matter?

Answer: HIV could NOT have taken off and there would have been NO epidemic absent the switch to anal in 1975.

Gay men starting doing anal in great numbers in 75.

In 81 the first cases of AIDS were reported.

This is NOT complicated:

The switch to anal created the AIDS epidemic.

Not Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan failed to do a number of things which might have ameliorated the tragedy.

But he didn't create HIV, and he didn't tell gay men to do anal and be promiscuous.

Those behaviors were a creation of heterosexualization, and the gay male community itself.

Now, it's sad that so many men like Steve don't know the history of the gay male community to which they, at least in theory, belong.

But it's not surprising, given that the analists simply teach that anal is the alpha and omega of male-male sex and always has been.

That's a LIE.

A stupid and destructive lie.

Traditionally, cross-culturally, and historically, among Warriors, that is, MASCULINE-IDENTIFIED MEN, Frot and mutual JO was the practice.

Anal is very rare.

It's dangerous, it's dirty, and it effeminizes.

Masculine men, left to their own devices, do not choose anal.

But in our era, they have not been left to their own devices.

As I just posted about in THE POWER OF THE MASCULINE, they've been forced into "gay" ghettoes in which anal and promiscuity predominate.

These are the trash heaps of male-male sex.

Which is why they're full of dirt, degradation, and disease.

Robert Loring:

Many, if not the MAJORITY, of males have gone seeking MANLY bonds with other men only to find themselves lost in the muck of the gay ghettoes dominated by feminized males. Mistakenly, they have believed that this is the way but, in fact, it is NOT the way. They believed they found masculine bonds with other men but they found only cheap sex with feminized men. The point of their quest was missed and finally LOST!

Robert's absolutely correct.

We cannot only thank the gay ghettoes for this but we can also thank our larger society who is so psychotically BENT on homophobia! We can also thank Christianity and it's FUCKED UP concepts concerning sex on ANY level and with any one.

Yes.

So we fight on two fronts:

Against analism and the lie that anal, promiscuity, and effeminacy are normal in the lives of Masculine Men who love Men; and

Against heterosexism and heterosexualization, which teaches that real men don't have sex with other men.

That lie either forces men into those ghettoes or -- into the closet.

And in terms of Christianity -- and remembering that both Robert and I are people of Faith -- yes, the emphasis by the churches on procreative sex exclusively has been and remains a great problem.

Steve and everyone else, I encourage you to read as deeply as you can in the section of the site titled Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution.

Cause you know what the man says:

Those who don't remember their history -- are doomed to relive it.

Bill Weintraub

© All material Copyright 2006 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.