Lifting of HIV travel ban is an overdue victory in fight we never should have had to fight. It's a relic
of ’80s anti-gay stigma and an embarrassment.
Arizona senator’s views are not as extreme as his opponents suggested.
Carol Schwartz and I are both Republicans, but the similarities end there. I am unequivocally in support of full marriage recognition for gays.
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Bill Weintraub
Friday, October 10, 2003
RECENTLY A NUMBER of gay luminaries, including none other than Harvey Fierstein,
have decried rising HIV infection rates and a gay male culture that celebrates
being positive.
Harvey in particular noted that we’ve had, courtesy of the pharmaceutical
companies and gay male media, too many “positive gay role models,” and
said we needed “negative gay role models” — that is, guys
who are happily gay and healthy and HIV-negative.
Ironically, but seemingly unbeknownst to Harvey and company, there’s
a plethora of (HIV) negative gay role models, and for the last three years,
I’ve been trying to put them forward as a model for a new gay man.
Why are these guys happily gay and negative? Because they (and that includes
me) don’t do anal sex.
Instead, we favor phallus-against-phallus sex, for which there are various
vernacular terms, but which we usually call “frot” — rhymes
with hot, and short for “frottage.”
Frot has a number of advantages over anal.
Unlike anal, it’s mutually and simultaneously genital, and highly pleasurable
for both partners. And it’s very low risk.
I WAS IN a relationship with an HIV-positive man for 13 years, had a passionate
skin-on-skin sexual life with my lover which was pure frot, and despite his
HIV and eventual death from the disease, I remained HIV negative.
Indeed, in 30 years of being an out, proud, gay man into frot, I’ve
never had an STD. Let me repeat that: Despite losing far too many friends and
sexual partners to AIDS, I’ve never had an STD.
Yet in the last three years of trying to put frot forward as an alternative
to anal, one that would keep sex hot while stopping HIV cold, I’ve encountered
a hailstorm of criticism and resistance.
I’ve been called homophobic and “erotophobic” and a tool
of the religious right. Not so.
My message is intensely gay-sex-positive, celebrating a type of sex that is
unique to gay and bi men, in loving, sexually positive, and indeed ecstatic
terms. And religious conservatives dislike my message.
Said one leading Catholic conservative in an e-mail: “The recent phenomenon
of the ‘reasoned and principled’ gay activism, arguing that there
could be a ‘well-ordered’ type of sexual activity between men,
is in our minds a terrible mistake.”
Another conservative, who is a heavy donor to abstinence campaigns, refused
to support my work unless I renounced frot and embraced abstinence only.
THE TRUTH IS that you can avoid HIV and other STDs, without abstaining from
sex, or using a condom — even if your partner is HIV positive — so
long as you don’t do anal sex.
Sure, promiscuity spreads STDs, and fidelity is a good idea for many reasons.
But the engine that is driving the HIV epidemic among men who have sex with
men isn’t promiscuity per se, but anal sex.
Interestingly, the other part of my message that would alarm religious conservatives
is one that also seems to bother many gay men: the notion that sex doesn’t
have to be penetrative.
The religious right is obsessed with “arguments from design.” They
assert that the penis was designed to penetrate, and that therefore men who
are insertive anally, while of course in violation of the Divine Plan, are
nevertheless at least using the penis in a way that approximates what God intended.
The idea that sex can be both joyful and healthy while completely outside
the penetrative paradigm is as scary to the religious right as it seems to
be to many gay men.
For 20 years, ever since men who’d acquired HIV anally were attacked
and stigmatized by homophobes, gay men have circled the wagons around anal
intercourse, and treated any criticism of anal sex as a betrayal of gay life.
But times change. Sodomy is no longer a crime, and while many conservatives
and religious leaders still decry any form of homosexuality, they’re
also busily off in Africa attempting to help people with AIDS.
So like any other aspect of gay male life, anal sex should be open to criticism.
No one’s talking about banishing anal intercourse. But it’s time
gay men begin to make more realistic assessments of sexual pleasure and risk,
and to acknowledge that anal sex is not the only, and indeed far from the best,
way for two men to be gay.
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