aatombomb

I can't even.

Yeah, because it’s impossible to have safe anonymous sex. Some of us wouldn’t know what to do with meth or any other number of drugs if it was shot into our arms for us. “Wham-bam-thank-you-Sam” was funny though, right?
subjecttomeg:

So Queerty published a piece by Matt Siegel about gay sex clubs. And the comments are filled with several different discussions. Seriously, there are about six different things going on in there. And this was posted a few days ago, and I kind of wish I hadn’t read it, because then I read this comment:

I find it very sad that so many gay men relish the memories of sleazy no-name wham-bam-thank-you-Sam sex. I am 100% gay proud and open about it…and in a monogamous relationship. The idea that calling a spade a spade is a slur to gays is asinine. Queens who prowl for back-room trade are getting just what they deserve and I have absolutely no sympathy for them. When asked to give to HIV charities, I always refuse, who since the 80’s could be living in the ignorant bliss that they can have their dick and eat one too in establishments like the bathhouses and bookstores? Get any disease you want my gay friends due to your own actions, just don’t cry to me about the cost of your meds.

I’ve read it seven times, trying to make it say something it doesn’t. Trying to just make it fear of HIV/AIDS and only a judgment of certain sexual behavior as gross, dirty, and disgusting. But it’s not. And I can not understand — whatever your views on these particular sexual activities — how you can say something like this. How you can believe something like this. I wanted to do a rant, a breakdown, a something, but I can’t. I don’t even know what to say to this. But Christ, if this is not some fucked up, depressing, and totally infuriating shit, I don’t know what is.

(via)

I can understand Meg’s incomprehension here, but I’m sad to report that this is not an isolated viewpoint. There is a segment of our population (the “gay community” is not a community in any sort of geographic sense, of course, only in a fractured political one) that believes that the reason they escaped the “gay plague” is due entirely to their upstanding monogamistic ways, or their fastidious safer sex habits.

This may well be true in their case, but antipathy to those of us who were not as lucky to escape the virus (full disclosure implied - 10 years last April!) is at heart a puritanical reaction created by the usual factor that creates puritanical reactions - fear.

Everyone is, of course, responsible for their own actions, but the price that some of us are paying for youthful indiscretions is astronomically higher than the one paid by most heterosexuals. HIV is a nearly perfect organism, has found a home in a sexually active group of men who have sex with men, and could care less if you used a condom 99 out of 100 times, or if you bounce from one monogamous coupling to another with people who might be too scared to be completely honest with you, or even if you had a complicated relationship with your sexuality and relaxed into the cold comfort of a drug-addled orgiastic romp for a decade. None of those things is, in and of themselves, a reason to deny medical dollars to a subset of the gay population, and certainly no reason to affect some sort of prissy moralistic tone.

Yet, here we are, post-AIDS - whatever the fuck that means - and there are those among us who need only know my status to make moral judgments about me and my behavior. Only now it sometimes comes from other gay men. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Posted September 9, 2009 at 1:42pm || home