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CounterPunch
October
19, 2002
The Necessity of Excess
by PAT CALIFA
More and more of late, as we endure yet another
round of controversy about unsafe sex, promiscuity and bathhouses,
monogamy and marriage, I find myself thinking about the late
'70s and early '80s. During that time, I was a lesbian with separatist
tendencies, in San Francisco and yet a quandary: Even though
I kept myself in school and earned a living, being able to have
the kind of sex I wanted was my true obsession. I went hunting
along the fringes of leathermen's territory because they had
built a culture around that obsession. The stark extremism of
gay-male S/M iconography echoed my own fantasies. The ethos of
erotic risk-taking helped me to escape from feminine conditioning
that sees every sexual opportunity as a threat. The tidy practicality
of trick towels and no-spill popper bottles was endearing. I
learned that lust has everything and nothing to do with love,
and that love has a million equally alluring faces.
Back then I was privileged to hang out
with Steve McEachern, who ran the Catacombs, a fist-fucking club,
in the basement of his Victorian house every Saturday night.
This connection was made through a bisexual woman who was a lover
of mine, Cynthia Slater. Gay leathermen took pity on Cynthia
and included her in their games because they recognized her appetites
as kindred to their own. Her prodigious boozing and drugging,
outrageous masochism, gutter-gums style of dirty-talk topping
and shameless exhibitionism were all as legendary as her tiny
hands. The straight S/M scene barely existed, and it certainly
wasn't a playground big enough for Slater's dramatic abilities.
To some leathermen of that era, the fact that a few women shared
their predilections was just affirmation. The consensus was,
if you try a new drug or a new kink and don't like it, try it
again under slightly different circumstances. Yet along with
the orgiastic encouragement, a firm sense of balance existed:
You could be as big a sexual outlaw as you liked on Saturday
night, but come Sunday, cooking a fabulous brunch was every bit
as important.
And so I am puzzled by that demagogic
playwright who urges gay men to be more like lesbians. Perhaps
his experience does not embrace lesbians who envy and emulate
the outrageous, go-for-broke quality of the unfettered gay male
libido. The sad fact is that if all gay men settled down into
pairs like animals clambering into Noah's ark, a world of possibilities
would disappear. A culture that embraces nonmonogamy, casual
public sex, erotic art, sex toys, costuming and a theatrical
attitude toward pleasure is a national treasure, not a shameful
anachronism.
Twenty years ago, who could have predicted
that any gay activist worthy of the name would be preaching the
same values as Anita Bryant? It was a mad time, both wonderful
and terrible. Gay men had decided they were not going to repress
themselves any more; they were so sick of being discriminated
against, beaten up, ridiculed, pathologized, murdered, arrested,
excommunicated and disowned that they rose up like fireworks.
This was a frenzied period of creativity, lust, intoxication,
activism and brotherhood. Sadly, there was fierce opposition
to this struggle for liberation, and many of us starving for
freedom could not allow ourselves to eat and drink at the table
of self-acceptance. So it was also a time of violence, disease
and suicide in all its urban guises.
AIDS has erased the vibrancy and beauty
of that decade, taking Cynthia, Steve and the Catacombs and leaving
us survivors ashamed of the place where we came from. How could
we help but interpret something this devastating as a punishment
that we deserved? It's easier to believe there's a reason why
we've died in such huge numbers, even if it reinforces our self-hatred,
than to comprehend that we were mowed down by a force of nature
that has no intention or purpose.
And so now there are gay activists who
say we need to shut the bathhouses, stop partying and devote
our efforts to winning a legal right to gay marriage. They tout
marriage as a means to maturity, monogamy, membership in the
mainstream and, ultimately, as an escape from the epidemic, and
they have little faith in condoms, safe sex or a vaccine. This
strategy has been bolstered by recent reports that STD statistics
are on the rise again, apparently the result of a large-scale
return to unsafe sex by those who falsely believe AIDS is no
longer a terminal illness.
Same-sex couples absolutely ought to
be allowed to marry. And for those who choose it, monogamy is
a valid boundary to set. But the gay men advocating marriage
and monogamy as our only hope of salvation from the scourge of
AIDS haven't done their homework. They act as if AIDS were the
only sexually transmitted, fatal disease that ever existed. But
what about syphilis? This disease ravaged Europe and America
a mere century ago.
Take note: Syphilis cut a deep swath
through the heterosexual population. Easy access to legal marriage
was no barrier to the spirochete. No more vigorous attempt to
control disease with the braided flail of self-control was ever
made than that of the Victorians. In England, the Contagious
Diseases Act allowed police to detain for an indefinite period
any woman suspected of being infected. In America, police departments
tried to eliminate prostitution by cracking down on red-light
districts. Even after a primitive form of treatment for syphilis
became available and latex condoms were invented to prevent its
transmission, the epidemic continued because religious organizations
lobbied to prevent public education about prevention and treatment.
Why? To protect the sacred state of matrimony. Syphilis was seen
as the just punishment of the rake; the fact that he would also
infect his innocent wife was ignored. When penicillin was discovered,
it took a fierce battle before health departments were authorized
to test and treat venereal disease. Moralists feared that without
the threat of illness, sterility and death, people would become
licentious.
Moral panics do not prevent disease.
Instead, they hamper public health education and derail funding
for medical cures. Syphilis was taken down by penicillin, not
by romantic love, antiprostitution campaigns or fear of insanity
and death. And AIDS is killing millions more than it had to because
we continue to allow what should be private moral standards to
dictate public policy.
The epidemic will not end until we find
a vaccine that prevents infection and a treatment that eliminates
the virus from the body of an infected person. Until then, our
best bet is to saturate every at-risk population with explicit,
sexy and humorous prevention education and lobby for an end to
restrictions on needle-exchange programs. When there is a vaccine
or an effective treatment or, please Goddess, both, some will
return to pre-AIDS sexual behavior. And that's as it should be.
Because there was nothing wrong with that behavior in the first
place. In fact, sexual excess has intrinsic value and a spiritual
meaning that makes it a vital part of the human experience.
It makes all the hairs on my body stand
straight up in awe: That illusion of holding another person's
beating heart in the palm of my cupped hand. The first time,
I was very stoned and following the terse directions of a thoroughly
debauched fag who thought it would be a giggle to see the look
on my face when my whole hand went up inside him. So many contradictory
insights washed over me that I could barely keep my forearm moving
in its hot sheath of Crisco and intestinal membranes. I knew
that without the MDA, pot, acid and poppers I'd ingested, this
never would have happened. But I also knew that there was something
sacred about our deep intimacy that was higher than any chemical
could ever get me, perhaps as high as heaven itself.
The man I was fucking was not a nice
person, nor did he have any particular affection for me; after
we were done, he would move on to someone with a bigger fist
and a thicker arm, or simply line up dildos in order (from large
to gargantuan) and perch till daybreak. And yet I felt such great
love for his body, which had opened, accepted and blessed me;
and from his body, waves of gratitude for the pleasure. I was
utterly aware of the vulnerability of this man whose legs were
locked up and back, his feet waving around his ears, but I was
also in thrall to the power of his piggishness, enslaved by the
aggressive strength of his wanton hole. There we were, one man
and one woman, locked in sexual congress -- but nothing could
be queerer.
The body is like the "you are here"
X on a map of a shopping mall. It is the place where we have
to begin. Despite our mortality, the flesh is the only route
we can take to glimpse eternity. Desire for another's touch is
our first protest against the existential loneliness that dogs
human consciousness. We reach for another person to provide us
with reassurance, distraction, the wince of erotic gratification.
For a few seconds, perhaps, we sense what it might be to welcome
another, then return to a state of longing and emptiness. And
we repeat the cycle, again and again, until perhaps we also begin
to look for a more sublime partnership with our Creator, who
has the power to turn our most painful questions into peace and
meet our anger and fear with unflinching love.
Desire was made a part of our nature
not only to draw us closer to one another but to urge us on to
our ultimate source and rest. When we shelter one another's desires,
even those that are strange or degrading, we borrow a little
divine grace and provide a smaller version of the shelter of
that transcendental love. After all, is this not where life began,
in mud and blood, spit and cum? Are they not holy? The man who
arranges himself in a sling, awaiting anointing with Crisco,
has come in perfect love and trust like a child to baptism. Lust
can be a sacrament that washes us clean of envy, pride and anomie,
and returns us to daily life with a satisfied heart, renewed
hope and greater compassion. The mouth is not the only orifice
that generates poetry; we must learn to listen to the hymns of
our other openings, other lips. If "gay literature"
did no more than rescue our genitals from revulsion, and celebrate
them instead, it would be heroic.
My friend Skip Aiken, an Old Guard leatherman
if there ever was one, used to say, "Men ought to share
cum with one another." (Also: "I never knew what I
wanted in bed until I had sex with 300 different people.")
His doctor would claim that Skip died of a heart attack, not
AIDS, but I believe his heart broke from too much loss and grief.
Yet he never altered his conviction that there was something
important about that exchange, beyond the climax it betokened.
Who else, other than gay and bisexual men, are capable of loving
men enough to so patiently and carefully change them? We will
likely always be a selfish and cruel species, capable of cannibalism,
genocide and rape. The heterosexual male's just fear of other
men's violence has created millennia of suffering. The hatred
of homosexuality is twined with violence down to its root. But
is there no way to channel that aggression, transmute it into
passion and pleasure instead of destruction and death? Someday,
a spatter of semen will be a kiss of benediction, not a curse.
Let a thousand of those white flowers bloom.
Pat Califa
is the author of Rough
Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Power and Sex. This article
originally appeared in POZ.
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