reply from bill

Thank you Warrior Rod for this terrific post.

It's been a little over 30 years since Gay Lib burst forth from the counter-culture and sexual revolution with a promise of sexual liberty and justice for all.

Due, in part, to AIDS and the forced outing of hundreds of thousands of gay men and the deaths of even more, the civil rights arm of Gay Lib, the Gay Rights movement, has been a fantastic success. Although the United States continues to lag behind Canada and the countries of the European Union, much of what the radical right likes to call the "Gay Agenda" has been realized in the US, and most of the debate now is about gay marriage and tolerance of gays in the military - important issues, but not as crucial as protection against workplace discrimination and hate crimes.

So we've come a long way.

But culturally the goals of Gay Lib have not begun to be achieved. Quite the contrary - as so many men and one woman on this site have attested, sexual orthodoxies continue to oppress throughout the lesbian, gay, and m2m world.

That's what Rod's post is about - cultural oppression. Having anal even though he didn't like it. Wondering whether there wasn't something wrong with him cause he liked something else. Something that he found "exquisite." Something that, as it happens, carries no risk of disease and none of the psychological damage attendant to being made into somebody's bitch or bottomboy.

The men in this club have it in their power to end the cultural tyranny of anal sex. I know we do because I've been talking to editors and publishers throughout the gay press - Toby Johnson, Jack Nichols, Richard Schneider, and now Sean Strub of POZ - none of them lightweights, and all in agreement with us that there's too much emphasis on anal.

Sean told me last week that he'd asked among his 20-something friends whether they'd been pressured to have anal - and was amazed at the vehemence with which they said yes. Sean was genuinely surprised. But to his credit, he's begun thinking about ways to change gay male culture.

Will Sean follow through on this story? In large part that's up to you. It's certainly important that he does. His magazine goes out to 150,000 people a month - many of them people with HIV, as well as people in the AIDS treatment community, including psychotherapists and sex educators. It's an influential audience - and one we would do well to reach.

So I sent Sean a copy of Rod's post. A wonderful post.

But he needs to see more of them. Far far more.

Fifty-four people have posted in Warriors Speak and Personal Stories. This is my message to the rest of you:

It's time to post. I promised you a national campaign and I've delivered. And I and those 54 others have created, in this club, a powerful tool for self-deliverance, a means of speaking truth to power.

But your freedom is not my responsibility or anyone else's. It's yours. Your lives are in your own hands.

Cultural messages - words and ideas - created the dominant culture of anal sex. Cultural messages can bring it down. That's what this is about. These Personal Stories are those messages. They get read, they get copied, they get passed around, and they change minds.

If you don't post, and, a year from now, you find yourself still trapped in these little internet ghettoes, still haplessly searching for Mr. Right in a sea of men who ask "What else do you like to do?" - you'll have no one but yourself to blame.

If you want the freedom to live and love in the way that you know in your soul is right for you, you have to fight for it.

There's no other way.

AND