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The End the bear

my goal for today is to log out of this site and never come back cuz frankly i have been here way too long and i don’t make actual posts anymore so it’s kind of a waste of time for me that doesn’t feel good

enoughtohold

[G]ay people invented safe sex. We knew that the alternatives — monogamy and abstinence — were unsafe, unsafe in the latter case because people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them “just say no,” they will have unsafe sex. We were able to invent safe sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic or not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many things, not only about the pleasures of sex, but about the great multiplicity of those pleasures. It is that psychic preparation, that experimentation, that conscious work on our own sexualities that has allowed many of us to change our sexual behaviors — something that brutal “behavioral therapies” tried unsuccessfully for over a century to force us to do — quickly and very dramatically. It is for this reason that [Randy] Shilts’s and [Larry] Kramer’s attitudes about the formulation of gay politics on the basis of our sexuality is so perversely distorted, why they insist that our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that will save us.

The elaborateness of gay male sexual culture which may have once contributed to the spread of AIDS has been rapidly transformed into one that inhibits spread of the disease, still promotes sexual liberation (albeit differently defined), and is as marvelously fringe and offensive to middle America as ever. [Cindy Patton, “Resistance and the Erotic: Reclaiming History, Setting Strategy as We Face AIDS,” Radical America, vol. 20, no. 6 (Facing AIDS: A Special Issue), p. 68.]

All those who contend that gay male promiscuity is merely sexual compulsion resulting from fear of intimacy are now faced with very strong evidence against their prejudices. For if compulsion were so easily overcome or redirected, it would hardly deserve the name. Gay male promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality.

— Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (1987), ed. Douglas Crimp.