Community
“But what about AIDS?” The question arises immediately, almost every time I hazard the opinion that sex is not harmful to minors. Often it is not a question at all but kind of a preemptive statement: as long as there is AIDS, there cannot be adolescent sex. In 1981, when only gay men and their friends knew about the incipient epidemic, “chastity education” was a laughingstock. But as soon as HIV hit the cover of Newsweek, not far behind was the remarkable popular consensus that no-sex was the best thing to teach and the best thing for teens to practice. Just when mass public education about transmission, condoms, and nonpenetrative forms of sex was most crucial, AIDS became the rationale for not talking about sex. “The right wing’s demand to ‘teach’ abstinence created the next generations paradox,” wrote Cindy Patton in her searing Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong. “[E]quating ‘no sex’ and safe sex suggests no sex is safe.”
That paradox did not yield mass abstention. Sex continued more or less unabated, but instead of safely, many youths did it ignorant of the difference between those acts that abated HIV transmission, those that were relatively safer, and those that virtually precluded transmission. And exactly as the militant AIDS activist group ACT-UP warned, silence has equaled death. By the mid-1990s, a young person was being infected with HIV every hour of every day.2
The first decade of public-health AIDS education told us there were two kids of people in the world of AIDS. The “high-risk groups” included gay men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users and their sex partners and babies. These people used to be called AIDS victims but were actually thought of as AIDS victimizers. In the “low- or no-risk groups” were suburban teens, heterosexuals, white Yuppies—As Patton put it, the people who qualified as bonafied “citizens.” Prevention for the “low-risk” folks meant avoiding anyone who looked suspicious and, second, by practicing “partner selection”: interrogating potential partners for their possible inclusion or interaction with “high-risk” persons and rejecting those who might be “unsafe” lovers.22 Teens did not have to perform this discretionary process. They were instructed to say no to everyone.
The concept of the risk group helped neither presumptive group. The people supposedly inside it were either stigmatized (and neglected by policymakers) for their allegedly self-destructive lifestyles or ignored. Some of those relegated to this status used it as a powerful political motivator: ACT-UP emerged from gay men’s rage at being excluded as legitimate recipients of health care resources. For others, however, being branded “at risk” only induced fatalism. The idea that one is likely to die simply by virtue of being a certain kind of person does not concentrate the mind wonderfully on life-saving strategies. And for already hurt people, this new denigration only compounded hopelessness. “Individuals who have been at high risk,” like kids who have been abused, lived on the streets, or turned tricks, “are likely to see themselves as at risk of getting HIV,” said Gary Remafedi, director of the University of Minnesota’s Youth & AIDS Project. “Or they’ll say, ‘I’m gay. It’s inevitable I’m gonna die. So what?’” According to Jeffrey Escoffier, a New York public educator, sociologist, and AIDS activist, research shows that gay men who learn that all gay-associated sex, including fellatio, is equally fatal come to believe they are doomed, so they engage in more of the riskiest behaviors. In one San Francisco survey of seventeen- to nineteen-year-old men who have sex with men, 28 percent had recently had unprotected anal sex, the behavior carrying the highest risk for HIV transmission;23 in a six-city study of young gay men of color, almost half had done so in the preceding six months.24
For people both “inside” and “outside,” however, the risk-group theory had a profound flaw: there is no such thing as a discrete social sexual population. No group is an island; all risk is shared, potentially, with a limited universe of partners. While in America most people travel in social ruts, apart from other races and classes, not even the most insular, cautious people always stay in those ruts. Drug users don’t congregate only in crack houses; they also frequent trendy nightclubs. And a man who has unprotected sex with a sero-positive teenage hustler in a downtown city park may have sex the next day with a guy he knows from a neighborhood bar, and that guy will have sex with his middle-class suburban wife the next.
One way to circumvent the hazards of the risk-group assumption, while being realistic about the fact that it’s been drummed into everybody’s head, is to use it to get people’s attention, then redirect their thinking. Rather than choosing or rejecting certain people or “kinds” of people, specific behaviors can be rejected. As a pamphlet displayed with a couple dozen others on District 202’s wall put it: “Being Young and Gay does NOT have to mean being at Risk for HIV & AIDS. . . . But being unsafe does.”
A fair number of the youngsters who find their way to Offstreets, District 202, or Remafedi’s program at the university either regularly or occasionally turn to prostitution to get by. In the risk-benefit calculus of life on the street, sex is both a plus and a minus. “Survival sex”—sex in trade for a bed, shower, or a pair of shoes—may also offer some personal rewards, such as adult companionship and affirmation. And like other adult-minor sex, it is not always an interaction of utter abjection on the young person’s side. “A lot of youth don’t see survival sex as prostitution,” said Ludfi Gonne (pronounced “Honnah”) Asser, a young outreach worker, “This youth was talking the other day, saying, ‘I was going to clubs and getting lucky. Older people wanted to have sex with me.’” Of the here-today-gone-tomorrow relationships between youngsters and adults, she added, “It can be a relationship that lasts a week, but to the kid, it’s still a relationship.”
Of course, prostitution without even that rudimentary relationship poses its own risks. Working girls (and boys) have long adopted their own health and safety practices, notably condom use. Among homeless youth, it appears that when the trick is a stranger, condom use is the rule.26 No educator should underestimate a young person’s ability to make informed decisions, though, people need information, and some AIDS experts argue that what they need is the kind of detailed information about risks that is available throughout most of Europe but that the U.S. health departments are reluctant to give out. Rather than listing acts as either safe or unsafe, period, so-called relative-risk data disseminated in Paris or Berlin tell you that such-and-such behavior has led to HIV transmission in a particular number of known cases in this or that country, or that findings about this other behavior are still inconclusive. Armed with such data, people can make choices about their sex lives in the same way they craft the rest of their lives: by weighing desires and rewards against dangers and unwanted consequences.
A homeless kid turning a trick may not protect himself or herself for some subtler and sadder reasons as well. Such youngsters typically have been the victims of inordinate violence; “more than half have been physically abused, more than one-third, sexually abused, more than one-third beaten by an intimate partner during the last year,” said a report of Minneapolis’ gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender homeless youth conducted by the Wilder Research Center in 1996 … For people who have been treated with routine cruelty, particularly by their “loved” ones, self-care can be a foreign concept.
AIDS prevention for the street kids of the Twin Cities, then, means more than pressing a bundle of condoms into a hustler’s tight jeans pocket. “So many of the youth I work with have been treated in such a disrespectful way, they can’t respect themselves,” said Youth & AIDS Project caseworker Jerry Terrel. “A third of the people I see are suicidal, a fifth are actively using chemicals, and then for the homeless youth, there’s no tomorrow; everything is today. The main thing is helping them to imagine that there is a future and beginning to get a toehold in whatever might be. HIV is at the end of a long line of other issues.”
Those issues are both emotional and material. When the Wilder researchers queried homeless youth on what would really make a difference in their lives, their sights usually focused somewhere between hand and mouth. Several suggested access to a free washing machine. “I can wear dirty clothes, pants, shirts, and stuff,” said one girl. “As long as I can have clean underwear, I’m okay.” Under such circumstances, safe sex can be a rather abstract and distant notion. “‘Safety’ means finding a bed tonight,” explained Amber Hollibaugh, former head of the Lesbian AIDS Project at GMHC in New York. “Putting on a condom is not exactly the Number One priority.”
Street kids are not another species. Even for them, sex is not all work, exploitation, or pain. “Sex is nice, it’s intimate, it’s fun, it doesn’t cost anything,” Project Offstreet’s Thoemke said, in answer to my question about the role of pleasure in his clients’ lives. “These kids, not having close relationships with their families, or if they were abused, sex was a really awful thing. To find sex as pleasure, that’s so great.” He grumbled at the relentless Lutheran-ness of the bureaucrats who check up on his agency. “They come in, and they’re appalled that we have condoms available at our front door or the kids are watching cartoons smoking cigarettes.” Homeless kids carry all the responsibilities of adult independence, he reasoned. Why not get a few of the perquisites? He paused. “But sex is the easiest thing in the world. It’s love that’s hard to find.”
For many people, simply bringing up the subject of protection is so threatening to trust that trust requires absolute censorship. Some of the people Willie interviewed went so far as to say that requiring long-term couples to talk start talking about or, worse, using condoms would mean an irreparable rent in the social fabric. “I mean there’s got to be some element of trust somewhere,” said a young man named John, “unless life as we know it ain’t gonna happen.”
True love is monogamous, trust depends on monogamy and monogamy on trust, and trust is the cornerstone of love: unfortunately, from the view of the sexually transmitted virus, this formulation is heavy with potential dangers. First, although statistics vary widely depending on the surveyor, the way the questions are asked, and the sexuality of the subjects, at least a significant number of married and committed couples stray at least once, and at least a third of teens do,37 and even youths who are monogamous are only serially so. Meanwhile, fewer than 60 percent of sexually active adolescent boys who use only condoms say the use them every time.38
Yet many of these people predicate their relationship on unerring fidelity. That sets up an untenable dilemma: the confession of a lapse fatally threatens the relationship, but keeping a secret fatally threatens both the person and his or her beloved. Carla Willig’s informant John accepted that maintaining a societal and personal contract of trusting silence might mean the sacrifice of a few “innocent victims” whose partners committed crimes of omission.39 Is the symbolic and moral risk of abandoning loving trust “as we know it” really greater than the risk of rampaging HIV infection? Federally funded abstinence-only education says yes, by teaching, contrary to evidence, that the only safe sex is within a “traditional” committed (read unquestionably monogamous) heterosexual marriage.
Given the urgent historical circumstances, a policy of confession and forgiveness when a partner strays from intended monogamy might be more loving than censorship enforced by the expectation of rage and rejection. But such ways of relating require less dependency, less jealousy, less unwavering confidence in other person’s ability and willingness to take care of you, and at the same time, more personal maturity, flexibility, independence, and self-esteem, and more altruism from both partners.
Aside from altruism, these emotions are different from the ones we are used to associating with love. Nevertheless, it is these qualities and values, not the blind faith of “true” love and the hound dogs acuity for “risky” partners, that we need to be nurturing in kids.
During the early years of the gay liberation, despised communities harnessed the energy of the hatred directed at them and transformed it into pride—for instance, appropriating as flags of distinction the derogatory terms dyke, faggot, and queer. When the AIDS epidemic hit them, gay men and women turned that energy toward aggressive political confrontation that, for all its outward rage, was fueled by love, both fraternal and erotic. “The AIDS crisis, in all its frightening impact, bearing the burden of fear of disease and death in the wake of pleasure and desire, seems to many to embody the downside of the transformation of sexuality in recent years, a warning of the dangers of things ‘going too far,’” wrote the British social critic Jeffrey Weeks. “Yet in many of the responses to it we can see something else: a quickening of humanity, the engagement of solidarity, and the broadening of the meaning of love, love in the face of death.”40
Self-love and self-esteem are necessary to practicing safe sex. But this history speaks of love that goes beyond the self and even beyond the beloved. This is communal love, a kind of modern agape, based in shared pride of identity and collective self-defense and practiced within circles of personal friendship and desire. Love and loyalty, the same feelings that can discourage safe sex, can also motivate it. People care about their communities even when their communities are hostile to them, and they put on a condom with that caring in mind. “When people are asked why the practice safe sex,” said Jeffrey Escoffier, “one of the main reasons they give is altruism.” He cited a study of gay Latino men, done by the Rafeal Diaz Center for AIDS Prevention Studies in San Francisco. “The most common response was, ‘There are people who count on me.’” Escoffier noted that the people who depend on those men were not necessarily part of any gay community but rather family members, friends, and neighbors in their Latino communities of origin. What this study and others uncovered, he said, was “a high level of integration even into a community that they feel ambivalent about. A lot of [HIV] prevention aims at self-interest,” he concluded. “That’s a mistake.”
America has made many grievous mistakes in trying to protect its children from the dangers of sex. Underlying these errors is fear. Some is “good” fear, that they will be sickened or traumatized, will lose their direction, their ambition, their sense of self. But much of it is fear of eros, to which we attribute anarchic, obliterating power—the power to destroy individuals and civilization itself.
Yet eros is not a wild animal prowling outside the civilizing meanings we assign it, beyond the moralities with which we govern it. We create eros ourselves and for our children; it is we who teach our young the meanings and moralities of sex. In the age of AIDS, we must invent new iterations of the best old values, creating new expressions of love, trust, loyalty, and mutual protection. Inspired and sheltered by the values of caring, young people can discover their sexual power without dominating or diminish others; they can find romance without surrendering self-protection. They can arrive at the divine oblivion of sex consciously, with responsibility, forethought, and consent.
While laboring to vanquish AIDS and the conditions that abet it, we must remember what we were taught by the gay and lesbian heroes of one of modern sexuality’s most terrible epochs. The infinite gifts of the erotic can overpower people and unite communities. The embrace of pleasure can be the greatest defense against peril.
2 – Bill Alexander, “Adolescent HIV Rates Soar; Government Piddles,” Youth Today (March/April 1997): 29.
22 – Patton, Fatal Advice.
23 – U.S. Conference of Mayors, “Safer Sex Relapse: A Contemporary Challenge,” AIDS Information Exchange 11, no. 4 (1994): 1-8.
24 – Altman, “Study in 6 Cities.”
26 – S. L. Bailey et al., “Substance Use and Risky Sexual Behavior among Homeless and Runaway Youth,” Journal of Adolescent Health 23 (December 1998): 378-88.
37 – Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein, American Couples: Money, Work, Sex (New York: Pocket Books, 1983). For teens: Susan L. Rosenthan et al., “Heterosexual Romantic Partnerships and Sexual Behaviors of Young Adolescent Girls,” Journal of Adolescent Health 21 (1997): 238-43.
38 – Freya L. Sonenstein and Joseph H. Pleck et al., “Change in Sexual Behavior and Contraception among Adolescent Males: 1988 and 1995,” Urban Institute report, Washington D.C., 1996.
40 – Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 42.
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