New York City’s Health Commissioner Tom Friedan has a really stupid new idea that’s about 25 years old and was pretty dumb back then: close all the gay sex clubs and bathhouses.
This move is the latest lame response to the fact that although no one knows how to get the new HIV infection rate down, the folks in charge do think they know how to make people stop having sex. I agree that the entire field of HIV prevention is in crisis, but one thing that’s NOT going to help is another attempt to get between guys and their dicks.
When AIDS first appeared and nobody knew what it was or how it was transmitted, it’s understandable that panicked public health authorities decided to impede the kinds of casual sex that patrons of gay bathhouses and saunas typically engage in. But even San Francisco, where it was done first, soon moved beyond the simple-minded notion that the venues cause the behavior or that shutting them down would end it.
Friedan’s sex inspectors even want to move against private sex parties, which would draw mocking guffaws from downtown if it were occurring in Georgia. One of Friedan’s top deputies in the HIV program quit, calling the move a ‘witchhunt.’
In fact, saunas and bathhouses are sometimes the best environments to teach or model safe behavior, and there’s something to be said, too, for recognizing that not everybody is going to be 100% safe 100% of the time—it’s called being alive.
Setting oneself up as a hall monitor checking on who’s putting what where is just the kind of Miss Prim sex policing that turned off generations of gay men to the safe-sex message entirely and stimulated fetishism around ‘barebacking’ and similar phenomena.
New York fancies itself oh-so-cool and hip when it comes to sex, but this latest wrinkle smells suspiciously like caving to the Christian right’s relentless war against doing it, dressed up as public health protection.
It’s too bad that Friedan is doing this Giuliani imitation because it will weaken support for his successful, ground-breaking anti-smoking campaign that took bars, clubs and restaurants smoke-free. The tobacco industry’s shills will jump on this crackdown and draw a phony parallel, saying it shows how the nanny state wants to dictate our behavior and limit personal freedom.
That will resonate, especially among gays who already smoke at much higher rates than everyone else. Friedan’s inability to distinguish between the two situations is giving Philip Morris a big fat belated Christmas present just as the drop in smoking prevalence has stalled.
It’s not as if there were no gay lobby or AIDS prevention outfits around to object, but the latter at least are too reliant on DoH dollars to put up much of a fight. Meanwhile, the experts worrying about the spike in new infections wonder where all the feisty spirit and inspiration of the old days went. Good question.
If we’d have waited for answers from doctors and health departments in the 1980s, the concept of ‘safe sex’ wouldn’t exist at all. Their solution would have been no sex.
The AIDS field needs a new round of radical defiance, and there’s no consensus on just what form it should take. But it has to start from the lessons AIDS taught us about the subjective aspect of people’s sexual and emotional beings and not resuscitate failed ‘disease control’ measures that smack of previous centuries.
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