Bill Weintraub

Re: effeminate, strung out, deluded

4-18-2005

Hey Joel

Thanks.

Joel says of their phone conversations, "some of the time...i picked up the effeminate qualities...but then there were times when he didnt use the catch phrases or the girly tones...and actually sounded like a man..."

Right.

If effeminacy were constitutional or organic, a person would be consistently effeminate.

Instead, effeminacy in individuals, as in the culture, waxes and wanes.

For example, when I was starting to come out in the 1960s, there were still "street fairies."

These were very effeminate gay men who did a little cross-dressing and a lot of prostitution and drugs.

They were very distinctive.

Anthropologist Esther Newton described them in Mother Camp, while novelist Hugh Selby wrote about them in Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Guess what?

You don't see them any more.

Street fairies as a subcultural group have virtually disappeared.

Because the culture no longer supports them.

In the gay dot com debate, the analists attacked us for rejecting effeminacy.

Then they said that "low self-esteem" is the reason guys do unsafe sex and get infected.

But if you want to do something about low self-esteem, you can't support effeminacy, which is a self-loathing and *learned* behavior based on a lie -- that men who have sex with men aren't men, but a species of pseudo-woman.

Instead, our message to the effeminate is one of liberation and self-elevation: you're not a pseudo-woman, you're a man, and you can act like a man -- which is what you were born to be.

I repeat, that message is not oppressive, it's liberating, and that's how it's perceived by almost all men who have sex with men.

That said, is "low self-esteem" the reason people get HIV?

No.

There are lots of people with low self-esteem who don't have HIV and will never acquire HIV.

Men who have sex with men get HIV through anal.

Anal penetration, not low self-esteem, is what gives gay men HIV.

If you're a gay or bi man with low self-esteem, and you get fucked:

1. Your self-esteem will go down, because you've engaged in a dirty, dangerous and degrading act of shit sex; and

2. You may get HIV or hep C or a number of other anally-transmitted diseases.

If, on the other hand, you're a gay or bi man with low self-esteem, and you rub cocks with another man to whom you're attracted and whom you desire:

1. Your self-esteem will improve -- because you'll have affirmed both your masculinity and your sexuality; and

2. You won't get HIV, and your risk of other diseases will be very low.

That's the truth.

We're not oppressing anybody.

We're liberators bearing a message of hope and renewal.

The butt boyz and their shit sex brigade are the oppressors -- of themselves, and of all men who have sex with men.

If some men want to whore around doing shit sex and acting like sick little girls, they can -- no one will stop them.

But what they cannot be allowed to go on doing is impose those behaviors on all men who have sex with men.

Because those behaviors are psychologically and physically destructive.

We've had 500,000 dead in America alone through anal.

At least another 500,000 gay and bi men in America are living with HIV which they acquired through shit sex.

And every day 60 more guys join them.

They take antivirals, and their bodies become breeding grounds for new, drug-resistant and mutant strains of HIV.

Which they then transmit through more shit sex.

Their behavior is a danger to themselves and everyone else.

And our toleration of their behavior helps no one.

So:

We cannot nor do we seek to impose behavioral constraints.

But we have both a right and an obligation to criticize those behaviors which are destructive of the lives of men who have sex with men, and more to the point, of men who love men;

And we will exercise that right in every venue and in every way possible.

So as to institute a new m2m culture in which sex is genital, Fidelity honored, and masculinity prized.