Your MSM—and Mine

The shorthand term ‘MSM’ for ‘Mainstream Media’ always cracks me up. In the AIDS field it also stands for ‘Men who have Sex with Men’. Think about that fully and completely, and tell me you’re keeping a straight face, no pun intended.

The acronym arose as AIDS educators realized that there was a lot of male-to-male whatnot going on here and there that couldn’t fairly be called ‘gay’ because that term implied a specific, collective identity that wasn’t always present. So if you wanted to talk about prevention among men in Wisconsin gay bars where the guys celebrate Pride Week and debate upholstery, that was one thing.

But if you were dealing with homoerotic forays on truck routes in India or in cruising sites along the interstates among men who otherwise see themselves as just horny guys, it’s not very meaningful to call it ‘gay’. So when Larry Craig insists he’s not, there’s some truth to it—I can’t imagine him having anything interesting to say about Britney Spears’s extensions despite his well-honed skills in the tearoom stalls.

That made ‘MSM’ a useful technical category for describing a specific set of circumstances. But as so often happens, it began to ooze into common usage as a blanket description of ALL homosexual activity of whatever stripe. Amazing as it may seem, you rarely hear references to ‘gay men’ any more in the AIDS environment because it feels slightly off-center and generates those haven’t-you-heard stares, like saying ‘black people.’

The screamer is that now you do hear frequent references to the ‘MSM community,’ when the whole point of inventing the term was to include guys who have no sense of community at all with regard to their sexual predilictions. Of course, saying ‘MSM community’ leaves out those who do and erases their four decades of political agitation as ‘gay’ people.

I think this occurred because the word ‘gay’ makes people uncomfortable. So to avoid ruffling the feathers of homophobic health ministers from the Middle East or southern Africa at the big conferences, it’s much easier to shift to a doctor’s office descriptive term like ‘MSM’ instead of one referring to a social movement and a way of life. The gay-heavy AIDS industry itself has become comfortable with the shift too as the federal and state dollars roll down like a mighty stream and the organizations inevitably cede ground on sexual emancipation.

So what do the mainstream media MSMs have to do with the schnitzel-smuggler MSMs? Nothing at all except as a curious example of semantic mission-creep. Half the disgust with our dominant class these days involves dredging up the MSM boogeyman, a barn-sized target if ever there was one. Fine, but as Lord Sebastian Flyte would say, ‘How tedious’. It’s simplistic and reductionist to cast them as somehow responsible for all our current ills or even a large portion of them. A ruling elite will have a propaganda machine; ours plays the MSM like a set of bagpipes. And?

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[With this post I inaugurate a special feature, ‘Twilight Highlights,’ comprised of those frequent and indisputable signs of the accelerating demise of our species. Although the examples are myriad and selection a huge chore, please send along any you find particularly illustrative to be shared here.]

Twilight Highlights: Some biped is paying $750,000 for a special baseball that Barry Bonds and his chemical additives hit over a fence. That’s nothing new and not worth a Highlight. But this is: NBC IS INTERVIEWING THE GUY! The conversation will be conducted by a select team of humanoids with pencils who, in a futile attempt to improve the gene pool, will then hurl themselves into the Three Rivers Gorge.