Sex/AIDS/Gays

My earliest impressions of sex were directly linked to AIDS.  The first time I heard about AIDS was at the same time it was becoming national news and the same time I was starting to become aware of my own sexuality.  Queerness, AIDS and sexuality all coincided and became intertwined in my consciousness.

It was the early 1980’s, and AIDS was explained to me as a deadly disease that gay men get because they have anal sex.  That was the exact definition.  I was very young and did not know much at all about sex, but I got the clear impression that queer sex was fatal and queer people were doomed.  The time I learned about straight sex and the time I learned about AIDS seem very close together in my memory.  As a kid I remember literally considering that if a man’s cum going in your butt gave you AIDS, how could it possibly be safe to have it in your pussy?   AIDS was found in semen, so I had to learn what that was, and logically it just didn’t compute that semen was bad when it went up gay guy’s asses but OK for women’s pussies...  Kids are rational even when adults are being hysterical, but it would be years before anyone talked about straight people getting AIDS.  My mother explained that a condom was kind of like a sock.  AIDS was attached to a very specific kind of sex.  At the time, it wasn’t even discussed as an infection, but as some mysterious something in the body fluids of gay men that would contaminate others upon contact.  Not expose others, but contaminate.  People literally got AIDS from anal sex.  All gay people have anal sex, therefore all gay people have AIDS.  (Lesbians were treated as mythological and irrelevant anyway.)  Between AIDS and the tainted Tylenol, the world of the 1980’s became contaminated.  Rumors and horror stories were our main source of information.

With Ryan White, the media made it known that you could get AIDS from blood as well as semen.  I remember a teacher talking about how if you saw a car accident at the side of the road it was now a different matter to decide whether or not to help the victims because of AIDS.  Because you might get blood on yourself and get AIDS.  There was no non-threatening information about how it was transmitted, only word of mouth and fear.  My mother kept having regular blood tests because she had received a blood transfusion prior to the hospital screening for HIV. As always when there is little information, stories start up and fear takes over.  This is how you end up with a community holding fundraisers to keep Ryan White out of his own neighborhood school.  There was no accurate information coming from the government, the doctors, the press, or anyone.

Several years later, we knew slightly more, a fact that must be entirely credited to the unrecognized and tireless work of activists in ACT UP and other grassroots groups.  There is one incident in my memory that really captures straight suburban thinking around AIDS and homosexuality in the early 1990’s:  With all the puffed-up authority only evangelical christians can muster, a girl in my high school declared, “All gay people will have AIDS eventually.”  Another born-again student dramatically stood up to her and said, “Maybe this is God’s way of testing our compassion.” Well god knows if you can be compassionate towards some homos you are sure to get into heaven! No wonder I was scared to come out and join the damned and the doomed.  There were no dissenting voices to be found anywhere.

The Blue Oyster Bar

One very early influence on me was the movie Police Academy.  One particular scene became burned into my childhood brain when I watched it on HBO with my dad: The Blue Oyster Bar.  In Police Academy, the Blue Oyster Bar is a gay leather and uniform fetish bar down a dark alley with no sign out front.  Just the idea of a secret place where men wore uniforms and danced together was so amazing to me.  In a very brief scene in a very silly movie, I saw a little glimpse of my future home.  At the Blue Oyster Bar, machismo was all about desire and attraction.  At the time, the only macho I had seen in the real world was exclusively about anger and violence.  The Blue Oyster Bar scene did not seem homophobic to me, but more of an alternate reality where straight cops fall into an unknown culture and suddenly the meaning of their uniforms is transformed.  It plays on the old fashioned idea that entering a queer space will force you into a queer encounter, because queer sexuality is so expansive and powerful that it draws in all who come near with the force of a planet’s gravity.  What a romantic idea, you mean all I need to do is show up and I will be pulled onto the dance floor by a guy with a big moustache and leather cap?  How amazing, what a magical world!  I have my own reading of that homophobic fear and my reading makes it a sexy secret underworld, not a scary place where your heterosexuality will be ruined, although that sounds kind of romantic too.

Diseased Pariah News and Queer With Class

Somehow a copy of Diseased Pariah News found its way into my hands when I was a young emerging queer.  Fantastic luck!  The zine nourished my understanding of queer anger and it tapped right into the rage that was boiling beneath the surface of my entire life.  From my earliest awareness that queer people existed, I always thought being angry and being queer went together.  And was I ever angry...  I have a different relationship with my anger now.  Once I was entirely fueled by it.  It motivated my activism and my choices and it filled me with the energy I needed to persist in resistance to everything that was wrong.  Now I do my best to see it as a flashing neon sign, alerting me when something is going wrong, when something is not just, when some boundary is being violated or somebody is being fucked over or left out.  It is not the response anymore, it is more of an undeniable signal that I need to respond.  Well, maybe undeniable is not accurate.  I have certainly denied it at times, that’s when I go from being the angry lesbian to being the depressed lesbian.

At the time I found Diseased Pariah News I was super angry and I also had a stockpile of rage I had accumulated from growing up in the suburbs.  Mostly I had rage at imbeciles who looked down on me for not meeting their standards of femininity.  At morons who could not imagine a world any different from this one, a life anything other than the one right in front of them:  A job, a family, a house, getting ahead.  A car.  Always driving, never awakening yet always driving.  I too was driving around, aiming hate at them, aiming fury into their boring houses with their giant TVs blaring and their stupid car and lawn on display out front.  That anger at the pressure to conform readily translated into a larger anger at hetero-normativity.  The concept of homophobia provided a new framework for understanding why people treated me with hatred, fear and disgust.  I mirrored back all that hate for a good while there.  But something like Diseased Pariah News showed me more, it revealed pain and humor and self parody and pride.  I saved that zine all these years even though I can’t remember where I originally got it.  It taught me that queer culture is life affirming above all else, even through gallows humor, and subversive in every circumstance.  Like the Queer With Class story about a little girl who killed her parents because they were trying to induct her into some sick cult that turned out to be christianity.  I always resented having to go to church.  Finding these materials was like finding new friends who had so much to teach me about being queer, about the kind of world I was entering.  I found the Queer With Class book at San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore during one of my summer breaks from college, and have treasured it ever since.

But the idea of being a pariah really rang true to me. It matched up well with my experiences in the suburbs.  By the time I was in high school I was expecting rejection, waiting for it.   It helped make sense of all the mixed feelings I was having, going back and forth between wanting to be loved and being proud that the numbskulls of the world were rejecting me on a daily basis.  There was a boy in my high school who would always approach me in the hallway and flirt loudly for the amusement of his friends.  At least that was mostly why he was doing it.  I was an emerging pariah.  A pariah is an outcast, a scorned person.  I imagined that a pariah could almost be a holy person, somebody whose truth is unbearable for regular people, so they are scorned.  Pride can provide some consolation for the isolated.

The idea that queer people reveal unbearable truths is related directly to one of my fundamental theories of homophobia: You see me, a masculine woman who is not ashamed, making choices about who and how I love.  That means the rest of us can make choices too.  People want what they have been taught is attractive, they present themselves in the gender they have been taught to present.  Desire and gender norms are enforced partly by the assertion that these norms come naturally to everyone and are true everywhere.  My saying NO to regular gender and desire that suggests that it is not natural but constructed, not universal but learned.  That means any one of us can walk away at any time.  But then what would we do?  Scary.  This is precisely why the whole choice/born-this-way conversation about sexuality is so loaded.   And why some people feel just so icky and uncomfortable about me.

If I say I am born this way, then I am just like everyone else, following my true nature, just going down the path I was meant to follow, this is just how I am, etc.  This is a really popular narrative now that so much of the feminism has been sucked out of the gay movement and our culture at large.  When self determination and choice come into the picture, things get more screwed up and less simple.  If I was not born this way or any other way, then I am not just acting on my nature and maybe you aren’t either.  Maybe there is no nature.  Maybe seeking love and pleasure and connection is what is best for us.  Maybe we do not need to believe stories about nature when those stories serve to reinforce patriarchy starting from adam and eve right up to the bullshit emphasis on family during the televised portions of the 2008 political conventions.  Family, family, family, nausea. 

Maybe each of us needs to struggle along in the unknown to find what is best for us, what is healthy, what is life affirming.  If I walk away from the idea that who I desire is some inborn quality in me, I am suggesting that anyone can walk away too, or worse yet, get a surprise at some point and fall in love with some one of the same perceived sex or with more than one person.  This happens all the time anyway but we stick to our made up stories about monolithic sexual preferences and eternal love right in line with our patriarchal, capitalist, monogamous training.  As I read at a young age in Queer With Class, “Customers are required to reproduce in the interests of the market.”  I don’t even need to go back to the book right now to check the quote because those exact words have been ringing true since the first day I read it.  What fabulous teachers I had.