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Eric wonders if we'll ever be responsible

Barebacking pah!

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Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Barebacking pah! Or sexual self-harming as I prefer to - honestly - call it, has been mainstreamed now. We are in its thrall, putting aside our lessons and standards for a cheap, nasty thrill.

What’s the bloody point in nagging a whole host of folk who couldn’t keep their cock in their pants if their self-esteem relied on it! Shagging as a means to an end, using our bodies like teenage crack whores, oblivious to the damage we are doing to each other. What is it with us faggots and queens that we are so stupid - and let’s say that loud and proud - that we are so stupid that a completely preventable disease is still on the increase within our community.

What is it about us that we are still catching and passing on HIV even thought we know how simple and easy peasy it is to stop it? Why do we hate ourselves so much that we take pointless risks for the sake of contact, or intimacy, or thrill, or danger? Let’s all go shag in the middle of the road if it’s danger we lust after. Just as much risk, and I hear you can fetishise tarmac. We could have double yellow line porn... filmed in the middle of the M25... what danger! Gasp at the risks they take! We could creep out of our health closets and scream with frustrations at the pornmongers, some of whom are even our own health providers, using highly erotic images of buffed male torsos in a knowing -wink wink - way to get us to ‘think’ about our sex lives. Such images just alienate us more, remind us of how far from the ‘ideal gay man’ we are, how low our ‘erotic capital’ is. Most of us are overdrawn in the bank of attraction, or at least with a hefty and interest-free loan. This makes us feel shit about ourselves, which when push comes to shove-it-in makes us careless and care less about our own selves.

Folk who drink to get confidence, take drugs to stay up and in with the out-of-it crowd, feel so crap about themselves that any attention, especially sexual attention, is too good or too hot to compromise with requests for safer sex, sense or condoms to be used.

Harvey Milk, our true gay hero & saint, who gave up the bathhouses and his endless pointless empty sexual encounters (and this was pre-Aids) said that ‘hope will never be silent’, he understood that sex for sex’s sake leads away from intimacy with yourself and with your lovers. He grew up a bit, took responsibility for his life & sex and the effect it was having on himself and others. But it’s an ugly word ‘responsibility’; it means having to think, and cocks and brains don’t seem to work so well together. If we don’t stop objectifying each other into lumps of fuckable or non-fuckable flesh then we are going to get exactly what we deserve.