It's a weird and very destructive symbiotic relationship.

You have it in your power to disrupt and destroy that relationship.

But you have to make the effort.

And you're not.

Like I always say, Do nothing, and nothing will change.

Except in this case, it's Do nothing, and things will get worse.

Guys, I believe in being involved with my community.

What's happened is that the only people involved with the community these days are professionals -- people paid to be involved.

That's one major reason that the community's become so conservative.

People who are paid become risk averse -- as they say.

No "safer-sex" guy can say the sorts of things I do about anal.

He'd lose his job.

But it's not just that:

As the great muckraker Upton Sinclair wrote a hundred years ago, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding."

Does that make sense?

AIDS Inc. doesn't want to understand because that understanding would hurt their bottom line.

And what about those professionals?

Way back in the 70s Bruce Voeller, a suburban chemist, was kicked out of GAA (Gay Activists Alliance -- most important Gay Lib outfit in NYC) and, weeping for new worlds to conquer, seized control of what was then the National Gay Task Force -- NGTF.

He told Arthur Evans, one of the founders of GAA, that NGTF was going to be run "by professionals."

Arthur responded -- you mean FOR professionals.

Either way, there's a problem with the Bruce Voeller sort of "professionalism."

For Voeller, proving once again just what the road to hell is paved with, left NGTF and used his knowledge of chemistry to combine a spermacide named non-oxynol 9 with a water-based lubricant.

He called the result "ForePlay," and predicted it would stop HIV.

Instead, we now know, non-oxynol 9 actually renders the anus, rectum, and vagina MORE vulnerable to HIV.

ForePlay was widely distributed and used -- just about every gay man had a pump bottle of it by his bedside.

Voeller, having thus encouraged yet more men to do anal and get infected, himself died of AIDS in the late 80s.

Anal begets AIDS.

AIDS begets anal.

Voeller -- the professional -- didn't get it.

He would have been a lot better off, and he would have better served his community, had he abandoned his pricey lube and anal and told men to rub cocks instead.

He didn't.

Anal begets AIDS.

AIDS begets anal.

Other professionals -- the safer-sex educators and the people making policy in the big AIDS Service Organizations and other "Non-Governmental Organizations -- still don't understand that.

They think, despite reams of evidence to the contrary, that anal is an inescapable reality of gay male life, and that the best you can do is distribute condoms.

The men on this site -- Frot men -- know that those "professionals" are wrong.

We know that men who love men can have wonderful, hot, intimate, fulfilling, and passionate sex lives which do not require condoms and are completely free of HIV and other anally-vectored infections.

The professionals, who lament rising HIV infection rates among the men they're supposed to serve, do not want to hear from the one group of "men who have sex with men" (MSM) who've remained HIV-free the natural way.

And those same professionals are actually preventing other men from hearing our message.

Don't believe me?

Ck out the message thread titled you should be put in jail.

In such a situation -- and we had a similar situation with heterosexual "experts" in the 60s and 70s, "experts" who kept saying, "gay men are mentally ill, gay men are mentally ill, gay men are mentally ill" -- in such a situation, where the PROFESSIONALS HAVE FAILED, it's up to you, the grass roots, to correct the situation.

It's up to you, the grass roots, the ordinary gay / bi guy in the street who knows the truth to speak the truth: it doesn't have to be anal to be gay.

Or hot.

Or intimate.

Now, in putting out that message, will you run into bumps on the road?

Sure.

But that doesn't mean you stop putting it out.

Believe me, people were not supportive of my coming out or anyone else's coming out in the 1970s.

Most gay men thought that those of us who were out and active were -- INSANE.

And from their point of view, they were right.

To be openly gay was to be, first and foremost, unemployable almost everywhere.

Nevertheless, I met many wonderful people through my activism, including Brett.

The alternative was to stay in the closet and hang out with those miserable closeted men who clogged the gay bars of Boston.

And my activism and that of my peers without question had a tremendous effect.

Even, when, as sometimes happened, what we tried to do failed -- or at least appeared to fail.

For example, when I met Brett I was living in NYC and promoting a "Self-Defense Course for Lesbians and Gay Men."

There was a lot of gay-bashing in NYC at the time (the early 80s) and there was an urgent need for that course.

Instead, what most gay men wanted was an increased police presence down near the piers and west side bars.

Well, those of us concerned about anti-gay violence worked with the police too.

But there's no question that most gay men would have been better off with a little knowledge of self-defense.

They didn't want it.

To this day, they'd rather go to the gym than learn how to throw a punch.

The gay male community has a long road to travel.

But as part of my involvement in self-defense I ended up being a founding board member of the NYC L&G Anti-Violence Project (AVP).

So my efforts, along with those of *many* other people, did bear fruit.

The community was infinitely better off with that AVP than it had been without it.

(By the way, the person I consider most important in putting together the AVP was another Frot man, who like me, lost his partner to AIDS.

Of course, I didn't know he was into Frot then -- no one talked about it.

He said to me, years later, after I'd started Cockrub Warriors, that being into Frot was like never being able to come out.)

So guys: To me, your choice is spending the next 10 years dating guys who stick a finger up your butt the first chance they get and plan on eventually converting you to anal -- or coming out as a man into Frot and working with other Frot men to change the M2M world.

That's your choice.

And to me it's a no brainer.

Fight back.

Find your life.

Fight back.

Save your life.