Russell
Fleet
ALIVE AND KICKING
SAFER SEX: DISCUSS
Cyberspace is a funny old place. It’s where you can be anyone you want
to be, go anywhere you want to go, possibilities limited only by the scope
of your imagination. This makes me think that some people have very little
imagination if their Gaydar profiles are anything to go by. I’ve had
a profile on the website since it started, but of course it’s all changed
now. For a start, there are many more subscribers and there are improved options
for uploading pictures and information which allow for a bit more leeway in
describing yourself and your desires.
One such innovation is in the ‘stats’ section where you are asked
to list your preferences around safer sex. The options used to be: ‘always’;
‘sometimes’; ‘never’ or ‘rather not say’,
although if you chose the later you effectively have said, haven’t you?
But it now includes the option ‘needs discussion’. That’s
the one I’ve chosen, as I think it reflects the way in which the whole
issue of safer sex has changed in recent years.
Back in the bad old days it was simple, wasn’t it? If you got Aids you
died, horribly and inevitably, so you used a condom every time and problem
solved. Erm, well no actually, that’s not really how it was at all,
but there are a lot of people who would like to think it was like that and
who, even today, insist that this is the way it is now or ought to be. There
are still people calling for a return to the old fear-based approach to HIV
prevention; people who really think that the 1986 ‘tombstone and dead
flowers’ TV ads did some good. The truth is, they did absolutely nothing
for gay men who had already known about the virus for two years and condom
use for five years at that point, and scared the straights witless for a year
or so until they realised that HIV simply wasn’t affecting them as predicted.
Result? Increased stigma and discrimination and, in the main part, gay men
continued with their condom use regardless and straights continued to disregard
them.
The
whole context in which such a campaign would now have to operate is very different
compared to back then. For a start, HIV was pretty new then; now it’s
over 20 years old. People now have
experience of seeing people with HIV live longer, healthier lives, they have
the experience of having unprotected sex and not getting HIV, or dying horribly,
as a result. Remember, the fear was not just about HIV itself but of the unknown
aspects of it; we were told it was incurable, untreatable, universally fatal,
a protracted, agonising death which robbed you of all dignity, caused by a
virus that could spread like wildfire. Now we can say that the only part of
that which is still true is the incurable part, and pretending that the rest
is still true will only make us look stupid. Some people just don’t
get it. Browsing online the other day
I discovered an article which began with the following quote: “People
are in such denial about how serious HIV is. Unfortunately, the best prevention
is seeing people die.” This gem was delivered by a Mr Michael Weinstein,
president of the Aids Healthcare Foundation in the US. Now, correct me if
I’m wrong, but I thought the objective of HIV prevention work was to
stop gay men dying. I don’t know if Mr Weinstein is gay – at this
point I’m not even sure he’s human – but if he thinks that
this is an appropriate thing to say to those of us who have worked tirelessly
over the last two decades to limit the damage caused by this virus then he’s
certainly not on our side. To suggest there is an acceptable level of fatality
which will serve a greater good makes me think he learned his ethics at the
George W. Bush Academy of Civilian Related Carpet Bombing. That he can make
such a comment only reinforces for me the notion that safer sex really ‘needs
discussion’ now more than ever in the face of an increasingly complex
set of variables, before the debate deteriorates into a parade of shamelessly
homophobic clichés, simplistic solutions and empty rhetoric which serves
no one.
