From “And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts:
“The gay scene became progressively depersonalized: At first you’d sleep with a person, hug all night, talk and have omelets in the morning. Then, you skipped the breakfast because just how many omelets can you make before it gets boring? Then you wouldn’t spend the night. With the bathhouses, you wouldn’t even talk. The Glory Hole and the Cornhole clubs came into vogue next. There, you wouldn’t even have to see who you had sex with.”
When Randy Shilts published “And the Band Played On” in 1987, he was boldly exposing many of the dark and long kept secrets of the gay community; namely: the ugly and sordid actuality of homosexual promiscuity and perversity. Although, while I was in the gay lifestyle, I never read the book, I did see the HBO docu-drama version from 1993. Then, I found the history of how the AIDS epidemic got started semi-interesting, but the rather watered-down details about the gay sex life I had already learned first-hand. In the film, it was depicted as beyond tame. Many years later, I read the book and it spoke so eloquently concerning the great chasm in the gay world which separates the truly noble and caring and the bulk of lost souls who get caught up in all the revelry and celebration centered around the unloving and anonymous sex acts. And, as Shilts argued, it was this culture which provided fertile ground for the AIDS virus. When Shilts exposed this reality, he was labeled as a “turncoat” and “a traitor to his own kind” by fellow gay journalists and activists in the community. Over a decade removed from the scene described by Shilts, the bathhouses and sex clubs, which had been temporarily shut down in San Francisco, were open again and crowded every weekend by the time I entered The Castro in 1988. When I left, in 1999, much of the forced sort of tokenism still given to a rule of safe sex was almost completely abandoned in favor of a return to pre-AIDS era bareback sex. The imagined gay dream of convivial one-night stands reminisced by Shilts was all a distant memory. Today, we are living with the results, according to the CDC: “two-thirds of all new [HIV] infections occur in gay and bisexual men. They are the only population in country where new infections are rising, more than 12% in past years. One in five gay and bisexual men is HIV-positive.” See: http://www.josephsciambra.com/2013/11/hiv-pandemic-among-adolescents-and-gay.html
Now, I think - what have we learned? Why did so many have to die. Were they all martyred for nothing? Currently, the gay power-brokers and the complicit media have continued to ruthlessly conceal what it is gay men do; the reality of the gay bars, sex clubs, and bathhouses are sequestered to the shadows. Media coverage of gay pride parades and events inevitably feature smiling hand-holding couples and baby carriages. All their wounds go untended. And, here, Randy Shilts serves as the ultimate irony: the man who had the guts to stand up against the gay media lobby, eventually succumbed to the lifestyle he so audaciously tried to unmask; Shilts died of AIDS complications at age 42 in 1994. The boy with the troubled and abusive childhood would write to a friend: “I want fame, I want love ... being able to walk into a gay bar and have people recognize me so they would want me, if not for myself, for my fame.” And, therein remains the root cause of so much unhappiness and needless suffering: the desire of a hurt little boy to be loved.