Gay men routinely achieve feats of promiscuity that the most fanatical womaniser could only whistle at. In the heterosexual world you might encounter the odd champion satyromaniac who — doing nothing else, all his life — accumulates perhaps a thousand conquests. On some fringes of the gay world (where a man might average ninety ‘contacts’ a month) you could reach this total in less than a year. In the right club or bathhouse, you could have sex with half a dozen different men without once exchanging a word.
However this may be, the median number of sexual partners for gay American aids patients is over eleven hundred. The exponential leap is easily explained. Most obviously, both actors in the sexual drama have the same role; they are both hunters, and can dispense with the usual preliminaries and reassurances (try taking someone to the opera ninety times a week). Also the gay man, more often than not, is making up for lost time. Throughout his youth he has felt excluded, unstable — illegal; even as an adult much of his daily life is spent incognito, in imitation of a mainstream citizen; but at night he joins an extraverted and hedonistic brotherhood. You could cite genetic factors too. Just as the gay woman seems to exemplify the usual feminine imperatives (monogamy, inconspi-cuousness, site-tenacity), so the gay man, in equally intense, redoubled form, does as his DNA tells him: he is mobile, aggressive and disseminatory.
There is certainly a political dimension also, as many gay leaders claim. In America, homosexuality is illegal in twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia. In England we have the consenting-adults package: no sex until you are twenty-one, no ‘public’ sex in clubs and bars, and no group-sex whatever (even troilism is indictable). Despite much harassment and entrapment, these provisos are quite clearly unenforceable. Naturally, then, there is defiance involved, and celebration of the gains already made. Some gay activists even argue that the sexual liberation has worked as an opiate, deflecting the movement from progress of a more tangible kind.
‘For fifteen years, we all had a party.’ It was a time of dazzling freedoms and self-discoveries. In their new world, the distinctions of class, race, money and privilege were all triumphantly erased. Of course there were the expected perils and boredoms of any long party — the occupational hazard known as feeling ‘gayed out’. How many more times (the gay man would wonder) will I wake up to hear myself saying, ‘Well, Clint/Skip/Didier/Luigi/Piotr/ßasim, what brings you to our fair land?’ But the great mix was, on the whole, a vivid and innocuous adventure, one that seemed to redress many past confusions. ‘It was so good’, as I was told many times, ‘that you couldn’t help thinking how it was going to end.’
There has been understandable resistance to the idea that aids is ’caused’ by promiscuity. ‘Life-styles don’t kill people — germs do’, says the New York pamphlet (perhaps a conscious echo of the National Rifle Association’s maxim, ‘Guns don’t kill people -people do’). One vein of paranoia extends to the view that the epidemic was initiated by the CIA as a form of biological warfare. Certainly the profile of the high-risk groups — the j-H club — is politically effaced. As Larry Kramer, the author of one of five plays about aids recently staged in Manhattan, has pointed out: ‘The lowliest of streetsweeper associations has twenty-five lobbyists in Washington, and we [14 million Americans] have one part-timer.’ If the aids virus had chosen, say, real-estate agents or young mothers for attack, then the medical and social context would now look very different. Yet aids has chosen homosexual men. The proportion will certainly decrease (and the African epidemic has shown no sexual preference at all), but so far it has remained fairly steady at around 70 per cent.
Throughout the past decade, in New York, gay men were oppressed by an escalating series of health hazards. To begin with, crabs, gonorrhoea and syphilis, the ancient enemies. Then herpes, then cytomegalovirus, then gay-bowel syndrome, then hepatitis B. All venereal diseases compromise the immune system. And so, crucially, does semen. The vagina is evolutionarily designed to deactivate the antigens in semen, the foreign elements which stimulate the production of antibodies. The rectum does the opposite: it is designed to withdraw water from faeces, and so efficiently absorbs antigenic matter through the rectal walls. At each reception the immune system goes on red alert. Ironically, it too becomes paranoid. Repeated reception, repeated infection and repeated trauma prolong the crisis until the cells lose the capacity to correct their own over-corrections. The analogy is as much with cervical cancer as with standard sexual disease. Again, the double bind. It seems that there is a ‘natural’ — i.e. viciously arbitrary — limit to trauma, to bodily invasion.