The irony is that this site is full of negative gay role models.

I'm a negative gay role model -- 13 years in a serodiscordant couple and I'm still negative.

Chuck's a negative gay role model -- and Don and Mart and Boomer and Beagle and Randy and David and a whole lot of other guys right on this site.

In point of fact, were the community interested, they'd find no shortage of negative gay role models.

But the gay male mainstream -- of which Harvey is part -- won't come near us because we're critical of the very behaviors which, as Harvey quaintly says, "You need to be compliant in ... to be at risk."

Compliant indeed.

You have to be into anal to be at risk.

Anal.

Anal sex -- IT KILLS.

The day the community admits that -- the epidemic will be over.

Harvey's right that the community's too tolerant -- though he blames drug companies for using advertising which appeals to the community's biases.

That's what every advertiser does.

I'm not a fan of the drug companies -- who, besides barebacker Andrew Sullivan, is? -- but the problem is not the drug companies.

The problem is the prevalence of anal.

You reduce the prevalence of anal, you reduce the prevalence of HIV.

So like Tom Coates, architect of AIDS prevention programs in the US, Harvey plays footsie with the real issue.

"You need to be compliant in certain behaviors" is Harvey's trope -- his little figure of speech.

It's not "certain behaviors" Harvey.

It's anal penetration.

Stop anal, stop the epidemic.

Tom Coates pulled the same analist bullshit more than two years ago in an interview with Gay-dot-com.

He said that there was a need for a new generation of leaders.

I wrote to him and told him that new generation could be found on our website.

He didn't reply.

Guess we're not his sort of leaders.

See, Tom wants polypartnered pansexualist leaders -- promiscuous analists, but responsible promiscuous analists.

Tom doesn't get it.

"Responsible promiscuity" is like "safe promiscuity" -- an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

If you're promiscuous you're not going to be responsible.

That's the whole point to being promiscuous -- you don't have to be responsible -- you love 'em and leave 'em, fuck 'em and forget 'em.

So we don't need more multipartnered analist leaders.

We don't need any sort of analist leaders.

What we need are guys into Fidelity and Frot.

Us frot guys are the true gay, bi, and str8 negative role models.

And won't Harvey and Tom be surprised when we emerge?

Don F

Re: Harvey Fierstein's Trope

8-4-2003

Bill - here's another excerpt from the article, one that I think is baffling---

Many of our young men see infection as a right of passage, an inevitable coming of age. I hear of them seeking the disease as entree into the cool, queer inner circle that being negative denies them.

Harvey also stated something similar in a recent PBS re-broadcast of an "In The Life" episode dealing with AIDS.

Yup. Actually "seeking" to acquire the disease because it's cool to be HIV positive.

What kind of self-loathing attitudes could make such a death-wish fashionable and cool?

The PBS program centered on improved outcomes from drug treatments, with healthy-looking (if femme-sounding) guys boasting of robust health from the newest protease inhibitors, etc. but no mention or discussion of how the infection was acquired.

The attitudes expressed struck me as a declaration that analism was somehow linked with "gay rights" and everyone else was to blame---drug companies, government, society-in-general--except the victims themselves.

The very last scene in the program was Harvey declaring his frustration that after so many efforts at prevention and treatment, there were those who were deliberately SEEKING to become infected as a social "right of passage" to a community of sickness and death---an attitude that essentially trashes all the work done by so many activists to prevent and eliminate the disease.

It suggests that HIV has become "fashionable" and butt-fucking is some sort of constitutional right for gays.

Terribly sad.