From: aasos@next02wor.wam.umd.edu (Dimensional X)
Subject: I HATE GAY MEN.
Organization: Workstations at Maryland, University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 18:00:08 GMT

An article from "WAKE uP QUEERS OR WE'RE ALL THROUGh" leaflet passed out a NYC  
Gay Pride. Published by Anonymous Queers June 1992.
----
I HATE GAY MEN.  I feel more and more hopeless about our community.  Turn any  
corner in the ghetto and you can grab sex, but you have to search high and low  
to find real love.  I hate how narcissistic we fags are, how easily distracted  
from the hard tasks, how absurdly trivial in the face of death.  I hate, above  
all, how we expend so much energy on attracting desire and little on taking  
care of anyone but our selves.  I don't believe that lesbians, faced with the  
tragedy of AIDS, would have failed as we have failed.  That thought alone keeps  
me hopeful.

The  AIDS crisis has been part of us for more than a decade, the half-life of  
out community, and is so all-powerful that if any of us survive, we will spend  
the rest of our lives mourning and struggling to understand what all the losses  
have meant.  Half of us -  half of our lovers and friends and fuck buddies and  
fantasy objects - are going to be dead by the year 2000.  I hate the way that  
single fact has not yet transformed us into a real army of lovers.  We just  
keep on sleepwalking through this holocaust, one year organizing and making  
trouble, the next selling out and making careers, the next turning our backs on  
it all, dancing and partying and fucking like crazy.  I hate the way we have no  
sense of the future, so hell-bent on pleasing our selves.  I hate the way we  
pay so much attention to our bodies, grooming and dressing and tattooing and  
sculpting and finally displaying them, like great works of art, on the dance  
floor at the Roxy on Saturday night, or wherever, when everyone is pinwheeling  
on Ecstasy.  I know how beautiful we all are, but that peak moment is so  
fleeting, an it's not much to build a culture around.  Still, we're determined  
to build that beautiful, empty creature.

I hate the way we have unsafe sex with each other in the night, but when  
morning comes, we say nothing.  More and more, the rule seems to be, if you  
don't cum inside anyone, and if no one cums inside of you, that's safe.  We're  
hopping on each others uncondomed dicks because it feels good, and because  
we're so eager to forget everyone who got sick that way, everyone who can't  
walk up the stairs anymore because they have blue lesions growing in their  
lungs, have lost their sight and their hearing and their sense of balance and  
their memories - not to mention their sex drives - to one incurable infection  
after another.  If we actually believe fucking without a condom is safe sex, so  
long as there's no cum involved, then we should have the courage of our  
convictions and make this belief public.  But we're too cowardly and ashamed of  
what we do in bed.

I hate the way we flock to have sex in the backrooms and sex clubs, drunk, on  
drugs, with little sense of who we are or who we are with, but when the  
department of health or the cops or Channel 4 News threatens to pull the plug  
on the party, we say nothing.  We can have all the anonymous sex we want, and  
proclaim it all a great sexual liberation, but we can't talk about it in  
public, even to each other.  We don't want out mothers to know what sex pigs we  
are.  We don't want out dyke friends to know how we treat each other like  
pieces of meat, and love it.  We lie all the time about this to out lovers,  
too.  We're so ashamed of ourselves that we can't even defend the places where  
we go to make the great sexual revolution happen.  What heroes we are! What  
warriors!

I hate the way sex is always more important than love, they way we have no  
respect for each other's relationships, the way every man is a possible hit.  I  
hate the way everyone flirts with your lover if you have one, and you find out  
who your friends are by learning who doesn't make a pass at him.  I'm sick and  
tired of the terms of endearment among ghetto dwellers, how we sleep with  
someone for a few weeks or months, then move on to someone else, without ever  
looking back,  Are we such objects for each other that one person can be  
immediately replaced by another?

I hate the way we are not, as people, very much there for each other.  All of  
this makes me feel hopeless.  I fear that we will never come to know and love  
each other, or take care of each other, or fight for each other's lives, or  
help each other to die, or create relationships that teach us anything worth  
passing on to the next generation.  We aren't monsters, but out humanity is in  
grave disorder.  All we really seem to care about is our fantasies.  As half of  
us work out and jerk off in our gyms and our clubs, crowd the backrooms and our  
sex clubs, the other half are getting sick, losing the will to live, and  
becoming the absolute antithesis of our sexual fantasies.  How unprepared we  
all are for falling in love with our own, with out imperfections and  
infections.

I hate the way we have sold each other out as AIDS activists, will all the  
well-educated and well-connected white fags making names for themselves,  
serving on boards, attending meetings, writing articles, giving interviews,  
becoming know, while women and IVDUs and child and people of color go untreated  
and unrecognized.  Anyone who has spent the last five years in AIDS activism  
knows that if lesbians hadn't been there, we would never have paid any  
attention to anyone but rich white fags.  And what have we gotten?  This year  
we got the news that we can't reasonably expect treatment for AIDS for the next  
25 years.  Are you ready to lose all the men you have ever desired or fucked or  
fallen in love with or loved more that you love yourself?  Are you ready to  
help them die?  Or are you ready to fight for their lives?  For the next 25  
years?

--
Grant Gaskin == University of Maryland at College Park
'If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because
he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears,
however measured or far away.'  -Henry David Thoreau.
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