The Age of Promiscuity: Gay Male Sex Before AIDS -- Seminar Syllabus

Monograph Number 46, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, LaTrobe University, Melbourne., 2003

The discussion of post-AIDS initiated in 1996 is not over Dowsett and McInnes 1996a, b). Post-AIDS refers to how gay men live separately from, and in relation to, HIV. There has been a decrease in interpersonal contact with the epidemic for HIV negative men and an increase in distance from the effects of the epidemic. This often involves HIV positive as well as HIV negative men. Doing gay separately from HIV, however, has become more than distancing from the social effects of the HIV epidemic. Most gay men still practice safe sex most of the time, but gay and safe sex cultures are dynamic and adaptive. Put simply, doing gay is about living a gay life. Safe sex fits there, but has an increasingly abstract relation to HIV as both epidemic and virus. New ways of living gay are constantly developing. Social possibilities that were once formed in a direct relation to homophobia and HIV are now less so. Crisis and oppression are not as determinant as they once were. Media representations and new media technologies (www, internet) have changed the number and kind of available social resources and contribute significantly to social options. In this changed environment, differences in 'ways of doing gay' are apparent (McInnes et al 2001a), even where normalisation seems to be the dominant trend. For the purposes of these prefatory remarks, three quick examples will do. Firstly, there is now a distinct movement amongst some gay men toward family formation and parenting as part of how they do

Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2017

In coining the term 'post-AIDS' some 20 years ago, I was noting the dissolution of a singular and unified experience of HIV and AIDS for gay communities that had been the case until that time. Not only were HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men having increasingly different experiences, but divergent trajectories were opening up. Since then, many other factors have come into play, for example age and generation; the ascendancy of the biomedical and the technosexual; and the supremacy of neoliberal politics (including sexual politics). Now, if gay men are to survive as such-and there is a question about this-are there larger issues than HIV and AIDS that ought to command our attention? Or do we need to rethink how we situate HIV and AIDS within the larger framework of gay men's health and wellbeing. This might be just a question of politics, or it could be a question of theory. Are we finally returning to the original gay liberation agenda of the eradication of difference, or simply being traduced (seduced?) by our success at intimate citizenship? 'outsiders'. Bette Davis was, and probably still should be, a great gay icon. Her many famous characters offer models not just of unconventional gender enactments, but also of outsider sexual relations and erotic negotiations with which many gay men can identify. Of course, Davis is not the only gay icon in cinema. There were many other phallic women portrayed by divas such as Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, to name just four more from that particular era, who provided representations of emotional and sexual lives

There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist. Those are good things, but still, wouldn't we all much rather never have had it.-Tony Kushner, qtd. in Vorlicky 201 Scare Tactics to Care Tactics AIDS, the most dreaded epidemic in the final decades of the 20 th century, has become an afterthought in the 21 st. The seemingly miraculous preventive drug Truvada is only the most recent of incredible medical advances; increased awareness and behavioral changes have also helped to transform a previous plague into an innocuous news item. Nevertheless, HIV remains incurable and still afflicts1.2 million Americans, and almost thirty-seven million people worldwide (CDC). Popular media has contributed to this transition; AIDS appears less and less frequently in the news, in television, in film. The animated series South Park used a running pun on ‚AIDS‛ and ‚aides‛ in the 2002 episode, ‚Jared Has Aides,‛ in which AIDS is touted as a weight-loss strategy and, in the end, is declared funny because a sufficient (and arbitrary) amount of time had passed: ‚22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny‛ (Parker). 1 Perhaps in response to trivializations such as these, Louise Hogarth created a short documentary with the telling title, Does Anyone Die of AIDS Anymore?; in 2003 she completed a longer film, The Gift, which details the horrifying practice of ‚bugchasing,‛ or engaging in risky behavior to deliberately catch HIV. Both films The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 85 suggest the danger of our current societal attitude; while the disease is still a killer, it is rarely presented as such, thus encouraging complacency rather than activism. The queer theater community, struck particularly hard by the disease, was once at the forefront of AIDS representations, galvanizing the populace to combat an encroaching epidemic. As Steven Winn described earlier plays in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‚It was in the live theater, more than anywhere else in the arts, that AIDS found its most penetrating voice. The forms and immediacy of the medium; the centuries-old potency of agit-prop; the almost sacramental power of live actors enacting stories of death, defiance and endurance all preordained it‛ (201). This, too, has changed, in our contemporary era. A 2004 Village Voice article describes the recent trend in AIDS plays, citing Biro, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and Small Tragedy, as plays in which ‚when AIDS appears, it's just another bombshell-a thematic layer that alerts the audience to something profound‛ (Goldstein). When, then, did the theater community begin to move from a strong activist position to one of peaceful coexistence between man and disease? In this article I examine three queer AIDS plays of the 1990s indicative of the transition from demonizing the virus to demonizing excessive anxiety over its proliferation. As Tony Kushner's epigraph here implies, this change likely stems from an understandable desire to mitigate some of the harsh stereotypes of AIDS victims by creating ‚a kind of community‛ and ‚forg*ing+ alliances‛ (Vorlicky 201). In Angels in America, Jeffrey, and Rent, this sense of community appears so important as to outweigh concerns for safe sex practices; indeed, it is consistently the uninfected who appear outcast and alone. Decades after these plays, what are we to make of their impact? Fear, once a galvanizing force for prevention, becomes the thing to fear itself; safe sex practices become denials of connection and intimacy; the HIV-negative suffer from survivor guilt and exclusion for this sense of community. As the AIDS crisis continues, our response to it-in the media and in art-may well impact out attempts at prevention and an actual cure. Looking Back: How Did We Get Here? Immediately following the first official announcement of the retrovirus by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, AIDS appeared a gradually encroaching intruder, and the theater of the time portrayed it as an emerging and increasingly horrifying menace. Much has been written about Larry Kramer's 1985 The Normal Heart, now revived into an HBO original movie, which contrasts enraged activism and timid passivity. William Finn's less well-known Falsettos, a two-part musical premiering in

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 2005

Objective: To report changes in sexual behaviour among gay men in Sydney from 1986 to 2003.Methods: Baseline data from four studies of gay men in Sydney were used: the Social Aspects of the Prevention of AIDS study (1986/87: 91 HIV-positive and 444 HIV-negative men); the Sydney Men and Sexual Health cohort (1993-95: 237 HIV-positive and 910 HIV-negative men); the Health in Men cohort of HIV-negative gay men (2001-03: 1,148 men); the Positive Health cohort of HIV-positive gay men (2001/02: 237 men). Each sample was recruited and interviewed using similar methods.Results: Fewer HIV-positive men had sex with casual partners over time (76.9% in 1986/87 to 63.7% in 2001/02; p=0.001), but more HIV-negative men had sex with 10 or more casual partners in the previous six months (27.7% in 1986/87 to 37.7% in 2001-03; p=0.012). The proportions engaging in particular sex practices with casual partners changed over time: anal intercourse without condoms that included ejaculation in the rectum fell from 29.4% among HIV-positive men and 32.4% among other men in 1986/87 to 17.8% and 10.0% respectively in 1993-95 (p=0.034 and p<0.001 respectively), but increased to 37.7% and 18.4% respectively in 2001-03 (p-values <0.001); rimming one's partner increased from 36.8% among HIV-positive men and 17.6% among other men in 1986/87 to 63.6% and 52.3% respectively in 2001-03 (p=0.001 and p<0.001 respectively).Conclusion: Gay men's sexual behaviour with casual partners has changed over time, perhaps partly in response to HIV and partly as a general expansion of sexual repertoires. These changes have implications for gay men's health.

There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist.

Thresholds, 2020

During the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS was still an unknown medical affection, the United States government, along with the general media and several health organizations like the CDC, rehearsed an operation of identification and confinement of the potential risk groups into the 4Hs (Homosexuals, Heroin Addicts, Hemophiliacs, Haitians), tagging them as outcasts of society. At the same time, the 4Hs were deprived of the considerations usually taken during an epidemic outbreak: protocols of announcement, research, and measure-taking. Simultaneously, these institutions began to simplify the 4Hs into a single H, highlighting the homosexual connection. The name GRID, as well as the common “gay plague” and “gay cancer,” strengthened the idea of a specifically gay disease related to a certain environment-specific villain, a theory that was adopted by doctors like Yehudi M. Felman of New York City’s Bureau of Venereal Disease Control, who declared that the disease’s cause “could be the bugs out of the pipes in the bathhouses” or poppers (amyl nitrite), a recreational inhalant popular in the LGBTQIA+ community who found it enhanced experiences on the dance floor and in sexual intercourse. The confinement operation of the 4Hs and the later reduction of the four into a single H—male homosexuals—not only described certain segments of the population, but also particular spaces and forms of kinship. The architecture of HIV/AIDS was to be found in spaces of the “gay scene,” describing a connection between the epidemic and the dark rooms, nightclubs, public restrooms, and bathhouses of urban areas. These places were found in New York in the so-called “gay ghetto,” placed in downtown Manhattan, a product of the New York debt crisis that had its peak in 1978. Amidst this landscape, nightclubs and discos became the epicenter of an architectural revolution. They contained, shaped, and propagated a very specific architecture, discotecture: the architecture of the disco, the creation of a space that enacts the politics and social constructions of the period, creating a definition of kinship that challenged architecture. The downtown New York party scene in the early 1980s was where new forms of critical consciousness emerged, embedded in and abetted by an architecture where bodies, music, messages, and technologies were drawn into an extensive urban fabric of political activism. A scene meshed by nightclubs and discos that blurred disciplinary boundaries and identities: between gig and performance, theater and political space, and between performer, spectator, and activist. These places shared what appear to be purely aesthetic components based on the qualities of the mixture, recycling, and the unfinished but these repeating elements were also strategic responses to the temporary nature of the spaces that housed them. Most importantly, this ad hoc aesthetic strategy became the model for an emerging form of political activism as initially informal and discontinuous efforts to face the HIV/AIDS epidemic turned into regular meetings and actions by recognizable groups like ACT-UP, GMHC, and Gran Fury.

A continuación se presentan las razones que se consideran comunes: proporcionando el nombre, significado, fórmula, lectura e interpretación en términos generales.