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Tuesday, February 15, 2005Gays deserve better than some gay activists are offeringThe New York Times today offers this headline: Gays Debate Radical Steps to Curb Unsafe Sex Pretty disturbing stuff. What's most disturbing, though, is that as with the war on terror, there are a lot of people who don't even want to see a problem. 40,000 gays a year are getting infected with HIV, and yet some pretty unsafe behavior is becoming more popular, not less, as crystal meth becomes the next cool thing on the gay scene. The problem, in part, is the existence of the "gay scene" in its present form. Not homosexuality, per se, but colossal irresponsibility within an isolate population. There are sociological arguments to be made for why this came about, starting with the marriage question: Efforts to destroy the Black family in order to keep slaves under control probably played an even larger role than poverty in creating the problems Black families have had since the end of slavery. Likewise, a social system which condemns homosexual behavior as bizarrely animal may produce homosexuals who defiantly respond by acting like animals. But, the homosexual population ought to know better. Right now, ironically, some homosexuals are living out Jesse Helms' finest fantasies, wallowing in rut and so marching to their own extinction. If you're 40, homosexual and have made those life choices, there's not much we can do. But if society wants to come out better in the last 20 years than it did in the previous 20, when an 18 or 19 year-old starts discovering he likes other men, we need someplace better for him to turn for affirmation than the bathhouses. For the bathhouses are to gays what gangs are to innner-city Blacks and Hispanics - sites that feel welcoming but offer only the cruelest of validation: acceptance for those who are willing to die. Gay marriage may or may not be in the cards, but if we want the HIV infections to go down (and the resultant health costs, as well), we need to create a social space for gays more committed to each other than to lust and disaffection. What goes on in the bathhouses is cruel and awful, with narcissists literally killing the ignorant for their own pleasure. The ignorant need both protection from their would-be-killers and a better place to go. Our culture, glad to say, has been working on the second point off and on. Hollywood falls all over itself to feature "normal" homosexuals. And our society at large has been becoming more open (though living in the Bay Area, I know I'm seeing the outer limits of today's version of tolerance). But we need to make some of that acceptance more concrete with actual protections for what gay couples build together - they need to be freed from rootlessness; as important, they need to be tied down by the same things that tie down heterosexuals. While I hedge on gay marriage, I do wonder about other approaches. Business partners often find they have as many committments to each other as to their spouses. And explorers used to sign gentlemen's agreements about what would happen if they didn't make it home. If two gay men signed a gentlemen's agreement and filled out as much paperwork about it as you need for a will, would the courts have the decency to accept it? Even if the long-lost nephew who wanted nothing to do with his "fag uncle" suddenly turned up to cash in? If not, laws ought be written not merely for gays but because consenting adults in general should be able to make binding contracts without the courts second-guessing them anyway. Even with social changes taking place today, there's a long ways to go before we're likely to have gays attaining the humdrum normalcy some claim to desire and others defiantly eschew. But creating an open social space in which the latter group can live will help. That's part two - someplace better to go than the bathhouses. But what about protection for the ignorant from what the bathhouses threaten? I really hate to say it, but if the homosexual community doesn't start policing its own, the "Buckley plan" may be all that's left. For those who have forgotten (or are too young to remember), Bill Buckley suggested a simple, diabolically useful answer to much of this decades ago: the tattoo. Gays at the time protested that Buckley's suggestion was like the Scarlet Letter. But, that was hyperbole. What Buckley suggested was a tatoo or two in places that you would only see in intimate circumstances. One on the buttock, one just above the genitals, would warn partners both heterosexual and homosexual of what they were dealing with. If that didn't stop them, well, there's not much we could do. But it would be a way of letting those looking for love, acceptance and understanding of where their feelings led them know that the person before them wasn't just offering love, that death was quite possibly part of the bargain. The tattoo, of course, sounds scary. Shades of Hitler and all that good stuff. But what's truly scary is seeing the phrase "gay activist" next to quotations whose practical import is that value of unrestricted sexual freedom for the HIV-positive outweighs the lives of HIV-negative young men who don't know what they're getting into. The bottom line is that if every life is precious, then we need to be taking some pretty drastic steps to make sure that the next generation of homosexuals doesn't go down the same path as this one. As much as the NYT article was supposed to be about hard facts, it had a fantasy-land feel to it. Only in a fantasy-land could one seriously argue for a viewpoint whose practical result is killing people and then label that viewpoint as belonging to advocates for those people. In the real world, impact, not intention, is the deciding factor. I've spoken of the need for broader social change. But there needs to be change within the gay community, big time. For right now, the extreme "gay rights advocates" have more in common with Pat Robertson than they do with the health advocates: They're both more concerned with the advancement of political goals than they are about the confused young man who, craving love and acceptance, wanders into a gay bathhouse and meets someone with HIV. Let's hope society at large can do better. 
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM |
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