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Dear Camille:
In this morning's San Francisco Chronicle I read about "Russian Roulette" games and
the sport of "barebacking" in the gay community. ("In a Castro district apartment house, an $8 admission fee promises a night
of communal gay sex. The only rules: no clothes, no condoms, no discussion
of HIV ... At a 'Russian roulette party' set for next month in Houston, a Web posting
seeks three healthy men to have sex with five other men. Four of those must
be HIV negative, but the fifth is already infected with the AIDS virus ...
Two decades into an epidemic that has taken the lives of nearly 18,000 San
Franciscans, a new homosexual subculture is emerging: Healthy men are
seeking unprotected sex with HIV-infected men, for the erotic thrill of
communion with the deadly AIDS virus. For years, AIDS experts have been concerned about the growth of a practice
known as 'barebacking,' where condoms are abandoned, usually based on
assumptions that partners are both HIV positive or both negative.
Now a fringe element, linked by the Internet, is taking it even further.
Web sites are offering lists of 'extreme sex' party sites where the
prospect of becoming infected or of infecting others is part of the erotic
allure.")
I find these developments most curious
and would really like your input. How do you explain the rise of these practices?
Meena Moitra
Dear Meena Moitra:
The rebellion by horny young gays against their graying, doom-ridden elders
doesn't surprise me in the least. Carpe diem ("Seize the day") has been the
pagan rubric of love poetry since the sixth century B.C. Eros will
out -- defeating reason, prudence and common sense.
Gay guys playing chicken with Dr. Death are no different from 19th century gents and rogues tempting fate by cavorting through the syphilis-ridden brothels of Paris and New Orleans -- when syphilis, before the discovery
of penicillin, could lead to insanity and death. Barebacking Russian Roulette, in
its oddsmaking way, is a perverse attempt to impose Apollonian order and
number on the Dionysian incoherence and compulsion of sexuality.
Euripides' "Bacchae" tells the terrible truth about Dionysus, who rends and
murders even as he brings communion and ecstasy. Those who base their lives
on their carnal sexual identity -- as so many gay men have done in the 30 years
since Stonewall -- have surrendered to Dionysus and will reap the whirlwind.
Nature is a cruel taskmaster, as I have said again and again.
The barebacking trend is a cold douche only to those who promote the
sentimental PC view of gays as saintly humanitarians or angels of America. I
saw the early signs of gay boredom with "safe sex" even before 1992, when I
had a very unpleasant exchange over the matter with a prominent British gay
activist (a Foucault idolator, naturally) on the stage of the Institute of
Contemporary Art in London. Sexual desire, I have argued in my work, is
intensified rather than quelled by boundaries and taboos. Transgression is
hot.
As a libertarian, I believe that people have a perfect right to destroy
themselves in any way they wish. I can understand barebacking's voluptuous
allure and feel fortunate, as a woman, not to be faced with these choices.
But gay men should stop posturing as pretty St. Sebastians, martyred by
benighted homophobes and the big bad authorities, and reflect instead on Oscar
Wilde's hedonistic Dorian Gray, confronting his spiritual failures in his
corroding portrait.
Dear Camille:
A state jury in San Francisco has just ordered the Philip
Morris Companies to pay $51.5 million to a woman who says her inoperable
lung cancer was caused by more than 35 years of smoking cigarettes,
primarily Philip Morris' Marlboro brand.
I'm interested in your opinion about such cases. How far will this go?
Will victims of heart disease be able to sue the pig farmers who put out
the "other white meat" ads? How much of an idiot was the woman for
smoking in the face of 35-plus years of evidence that it'll kill you?
Throwing up my hands in Boston
Dear Hands Up:
The clogging of the machinery of the American justice system with these
costly, greed-inspired lawsuits should disgust everyone. Cigarette smoking is
a voluntary act for which each individual must accept full responsibility.
The tobacco industry is merely supplying a product for which there is
obviously a public demand, whether the social-welfare commissars like it or
not. Soldiers during World War II were already calling cigarettes "coffin
nails." The risks of tobacco abuse have been known and widely publicized for
decades.
It is my libertarian philosophy that government has no business meddling in
private consensual acts of any kind. The juries making these huge awards have
been influenced by a hysterical climate created by government agencies and
fanned by the media. While long-term heavy use of tobacco has been implicated
in a variety of diseases, from emphysema to oral, esophageal and lung
cancers, there is no way to prove conclusively that any specific case is in
fact traceable to tobacco use.
Lawsuits against corporations are certainly justified when there has been
wanton injury to public safety, as in environmental pollution or defective
automobile design. Tobacco, which in fact improves mental efficiency and
productivity, has become demonized as the Source of All Social Ills. In fact, traffic safety is a far more pressing concern: Too many
high-powered cars are being carelessly driven by inexperienced teens and
incompetent adults. Driver's education courses have been phased out in many
school districts or are offered at prohibitive fees.
Tobacco is less of a threat and drains the health-care system far less severely
than the mutilating, homicidal demolition derby of American highways.
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