Brooks is right.

The fight against AIDS is value-driven.

As he says, the AIDS crisis is about evil and about the sanctity of life.

Infecting another person with HIV is evil.

Not saying so is evil too.

As is the failure to acknowledge that life is more important than sex or any other transient pleasure.

That's what the safer-sex establishment refuses to recognize, and that's why safer-sex has failed.

I recently had a letter from a safer-sex counselor saying that he couldn't possibly discuss Frot with all his "clients."

What nonsense.

*Every* safer-sex counseling session should have discussion of non-anal alternatives.

Failure to discuss those alternatives is evil.

Because it encourages a practice which is literally deadly.

And because it puts protecting the client's anality ahead of saving human life.

This same safer-sex counselor continues to condemn our stance on effeminacy while stating both in his gay dot com profile and in his letter to me that he won't sleep with effeminate men.

What utter hypocrisy.

When I was a young man, one of my first boyfriends was an effeminate man.

In bed, his effeminacy vanished, he became what he manifestly was, a man, and we had very hot and mutually pleasurable sex, true man2man sex, Frot.

But his effeminacy was a sticking point in our relationship -- I wouldn't support it and I told him so more than once.

Not surprisingly, we broke up; and also, not surprisingly, he subsequently got buttfucked, got AIDS, and died.

Which is a shame, because he was a bright, talented, and gifted man.

But he bought into the lie of effeminacy, and it killed him.

Should we be supporting other men in that lie?

NO.

Effeminacy facilitates anal penetration.

It's not mysterious and it's not complicated.

Unless, I guess, you're getting paid to give people bad advice about their sex lives.

Otherwise, it's obvious: behavior flows from belief, and if you think you're a woman, it's logical to get penetrated like a woman.

Except that since you don't have a vagina, you have to get penetrated anally.

And if you get penetrated anally often enough in a sexual environment rife with HIV -- you're going to get AIDS.

And not saying so is deeply and fundamentally immoral.

So: in The Man2Man Alliance, we speak, in David Brooks' felicitous phrase, "the language of ought."

We exhort men to choose Frot, not anal.

Fidelity, not promiscuity.

And Masculinity, not effeminacy.

And in so doing, to choose Life.

And we speak of Heroic Homosex and Heroic Love:

To love another man as an equal and a man with total fidelity.

Because doing so, as Brooks says, puts "behavior into some relevant set of transcendent ideals and faiths."

There's no other way to fight this fight.

For if all it's about is sex, there's no reason not to be utterly selfish.

Now, Brooks, who is Jewish, speaks of "transcendent ideals and faiths," by which he's referring, in this context, primarily to Christianity and I would think Islam as well in Africa.

And many of us in the Alliance are indeed people of Faith.

But these transcendent ideals needn't be "religious" in the traditional sense of the word.

There are men among us who are secular, but who live their lives according to their own "transcendent ideals."

What's important in this phrase is the "transcendent" part.

These are ideals which transcend the self and cause one to think in terms of a higher good.

Once again, without men thinking beyond the self and its immediate gratification, there's no way to win the fight against AIDS, or any of the other and very many manifestations of anomie in MSM life.

That's what Brooks understands, and so do we.

Bill Weintraub

June 12, 2005