This article, in part, is a response to a question posed by a reader concerning the supposed inherent faults within my opinions, as they are based on the experiences of a then young man during the 1990s; the reader asks: Hasn’t gay culture changed?
One of the most fascinating, and the most frustrating, books ever to be written about homosexuality and AIDS is Gabriel Rotello's Sexual Ecology(1997.) He gets so much right: the rampant promiscuity in the gay culture and how that created a fertile breeding-ground for the spread of HIV. With little historical basis to support his claims, he believes that same-sex marriage will bring about a social tempering force in gay society that will eventually lead to higher rates of monogamy among homosexuals. One hypothesis, that he dismisses, is one that I actually fully endorse:
“...another theory places more emphasis on the absence of women . It argues that without women's moderating influence a synergy occurs as sexually adventurous men pursue equally sexually adventurous men, producing a sort of feedback loop that turns an otherwise controllable energy into a tornado. According to this argument, each individual gay man might be capable of restraint if he were operating in a culture of restraint. But a community of all men operates like a chain reaction out of control, creating a critical mass and eventual meltdown: AIDS as China Syndrome.”
I saw this first-hand, as my my entrance into this world, in 1969, the same year of the Stonewall Riots, often mirrored that of the developing gay sexual revolution. For example, as a young boy, during the gay-sex Renaissance of the 1970s, I idolized the homosexual icons and idols, and high-shrines, of the era: The Village People, Disco, and Studio 54. When I grew to be a teenager, the red-stained sickle of AIDS cast a huge shadow over the future, and I cringed at what I once thought of as the blessed bastions of gay sex. By embracing your sexuality – you could die. At the time I came of age, the cult of condoms and safe-sex had been thoroughly entrenched inside the false edifices of gay subcultures. During one of my first sexual experiences, in a bathhouse - of course, I remember falling back and feeling someone roll a rubber onto my member. This was my initiation into a spurious sense of viral-free complacency.
Into the 1990s, my political awakening marched with the time of the AIDS crisis and ensuing non-issue of “gays in the military.” Thoughts of monogamy and marriage were nowhere on the horizon. Men continued to die from HIV all around us. Activists were fighting for lives. Then, as the decade moved onwards, it seemed that less of the guys were dying. People you knew still got infected, but medical science had prevailed and they appeared to live rather unencumbered lives. AIDS felt farther away; a bit of nostalgia. As the millennium got closer, I sensed an ever pressing restlessness in the gay community. The adherence to safe-sex was not working. Slowly, beginning as an underground movement, that had really never fully been bought into the policies of the condom-cops, groups of gay men began to have bareback (condom-less) sex. Then, gay porn also went bareback, and the sexual beast that had been somewhat stifled and driven into the darkness, came roaring back to life.
Now, we live in an age of rampant STDs, including severe strains of syphilis, that are decimating whole homosexual populations; most notably young gay men of color; and gay men of lower socio-economic backgrounds. The corporate Ivy-League contingent of homosexuality, centered in the gay enclaves of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, try to make believe that reality does not exist. By pushing for same-sex marriage, they hope to close the Pandora's Box and return to an AIDs crisis state of marginal monogamy. They see gay marriage as the Holy Grail; that which will put everything right and place gay men in some sort of cosmic and psychological symbiosis. But, like the promise of free-sex, that was held up high in the 70s, it is just another lie. It is only masking the the very serious wounded psyches of those who constantly reach-out for any Earthly hope of Salvation. But, my prayer for these people is they will come to realize that: the only Divine Healing will come from Our Lord Jesus Christ.