Sexuality's law.

• Author: Spindelman, Marc
• Position: III. The Ideology of Sexual Freedom: Proofs A. Douglas Crimp, How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic through B. David Chambers, Gay Men, AIDS, and the Code of the Condom, p. 122-157

3. The Ideology of Sexual Freedom: Proofs

1. Douglas Crimp, How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic

   Douglas Crimp's How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic appeared in a special issue of October, dated Winter 1987, (118) which Crimp edited, and was republished in a volume dated 1988, also edited by Crimp, called AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. (119) This volume remains one of the most important--certainly, one of the most engaging--collections of intellectual interventions into the HIV/AIDS epidemic ever published. (120) It deserves its stature.

   At the heart of the bid Crimp ventures in this essay is a flourishing gay male sexual culture, built out of a profound respect for sex, a culture of various experiments in bodily pleasures. Happily, sex has produced, along with these pleasures themselves, a good deal of practical knowledge about pleasures--knowledge that behavioral therapists, attempting (mostly unsuccessfully) to change gay sexual behavior, seem never to have figured out. (121) Especially helpful in the age of HIV/AIDS, gay men have learned that sex's joys come in a "great multiplicity" of forms. (122) We know it is possible to change our sexual behaviors if we want to, including to save our own lives. Best of all, we know we can--and how to--do so without having to give sex up altogether. The idea commonly bandied about, that our sexuality, particularly in the age of HIV/AIDS, "will destroy us," (123) is thus recognized by Crimp as nonsense. The truth we must heed and spread instead is that "it is our promiscuity that will save us." (124) HIV/AIDS has given us new reasons to worship the productive powers of sex, not to abandon it or have it with dread. (125)

   As much as Crimp idealizes sex, and is committed to protecting it and ensuring its proliferation, the particular version of sex he is selling is not, at least at first glance, the sex that the ideology of sexual freedom values. The sex he is interested in has no violent, destructive, "dark" side. It is only ever a force of, and for, good. This does not mean sex's demons, such as they are, play no part in Crimp's analysis. They are actually integral to it--but as essential features of views that Crimp sets out to reject, not positions he himself claims to espouse. Those who see and think about and talk about sex as a devastating force, those who believe it leads to human suffering, especially from HIV/AIDS, in ways that must, like sex itself, be stopped are, as sex's enemies, the enemies of the good. They are Crimp's enemies, too.

   In this spirit, Crimp predictably offers up the work of the gay author and playwright Larry Kramer as an exhibit. Predictably, because Kramer, even before the HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged, was perhaps the most prominent gay critic of gay sexuality and gay sexual life, at least since his book Faggots hit the shelves in 1978. (126) With the appearance of HIV/AIDS, Kramer's views on gay sexuality and gay sexual life were given a new stage and airing. The problems with gay sex, whatever they had been before, Kramer believed, or hoped, could not now be ignored. By having sex the way we did, by being politically committed to fucking the way we were, we were, Kramer argued in a variety of print (and other) venues, literally killing ourselves and one another. Kramer's thought: Sex is not worth dying or killing for.

   Kramer's signature tone--angry, preachy, sometimes shrill--regularly obscured the larger message of his work. On a fair, substantive read, Kramer did not mean to damn gay men or gay sex in their entirety. Rather, by his own measure, he was hectoring them out of love. (127) In his own way, he was trying to point out that we could, instead of choosing what he saw as meaningless, anonymous, pointless sex, with the devastating consequences he saw it was having, choose sex, if we were to have sex, that was full of meaning, of love, of commitment, and that affirmed life, above all. In this sense, Kramer desperately wanted gay sex to be the force of, and for, good that Crimp, with a different substantive view of the good in mind, was insisting it already was.

   While Kramer may well have carried a thick (if contingent) brief against gay sex, Crimp, like many others, read it uncharitably, characterizing it as simultaneously vicious and ridiculously light. Far too often, Crimp cleverly figured out, Kramer, becoming entangled in his own pitchy rhetorical escalations, and a certain penchant for traditional sexual relationships, had portrayed gay sexual promiscuity as such as responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS. After collecting and reciting a number of examples, Crimp delivers a deft reply: Promiscuity does not spread HIV or AIDS as a result. That, of course, is right. It does not and never did.

   More aggressively, Crimp insists that Kramer's opposition to gay male sexual promiscuity is reducible to "conventional moral wisdom: it is not safe sex, but monogamy that is the solution" to AIDS. (128) Bad enough that this makes Kramer's position completely "reactionary." (129) Worse, Crimp adds, it makes it "lethal." (130) "[M]onogamy per se provides no protection whatsoever against a virus that might already have infected one partner in a relationship." (131) For Kramer to prescribe sexual monogamy against the threat of HIV/ AIDS, Crimp thus proposes, is to embrace and promote a deadly version of sexuality rather than to overcome it, as Kramer purports. (132)

   But there is a bigger point at stake in this exchange. Following from Crimp's view of sex as thoroughly good, as that which will save us from death, any effort to condemn sex is suspect. No surprise, then, that when he takes a close look at it, Crimp can expose the ways Kramer's views--ostensibly so life-affirming--might prove deadly. Though Crimp does not put the point this directly, as he sees them, efforts aimed at regulating sex, particularly those driven by ideas that are hostile to sexual promiscuity, have a tendency toward lethality. These efforts may be lethal directly, as with monogamy, or they may be lethal indirectly, by constraining sex, and with it, its power to produce knowledge, which itself includes knowledge about how to save lives. It is to get the schedule of priorities exactly backward to think one must oppose sex to save life. To do that, we must rout the opposition to sex. (133)

   If, by engaging Kramer, Crimp can bring out the looming dangers of opposing sex, by engaging the work of San Francisco Chronicle reporter and author of And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts, Crimp can highlight the pressing perils of certain forms of sexual representation. For Crimp, this is the larger and more important offensive he wants to mount, and Shilts's book is his rallying point for counterattack.

   Famously, And the Band Played On is a journalistic documentary of the early years of the AIDS crisis and all the significant social, cultural, and political events that came with them. (134) Crimp himself describes the book as "extremely useful." (135) But, he adds, it is "also extremely dangerous--and thus has to be read very critically." (136) And Crimp gives the book a very critical reading. Every turn in his analysis beats with passion, violence, and anger. While this makes Crimp's analysis absolutely gripping, and leads him to some stunning insights, it also drives his analysis, at certain moments, sort of mad. (137)

   What really rattles Crimp's cage about Shilts's book, what Crimp cannot abide, is how Randy Shilts has chosen to tell the story of--how Shilts represents--HIV/AIDS. To Crimp, Shilts has outrageously endorsed a homophobic point of view in And the Band Played On. It is written in ways that represent gay men themselves as bearing a certain responsibility for the spread of AIDS. (138) This representation operates, however inchoately, as a form of sexual regulation and that, in Crimp's view, is bad: homophobically bad. By Crimp's own estimation, Shilts's book does more than simply offer an anti-gay account of HIV/ AIDS. Crimp acknowledges that it recognizes and painstakingly recounts the widespread government nonfeasance, really homophobic malfeasance, and the same on the part of the press, in the early years of the epidemic. Although he is very angry at Shilts, Crimp goes out of his way to take note of all this. But what lathers Crimp up is that the early history of AIDS in Shilts's hands also--importantly--remains the story that homophobes have wanted it to be, and stay, all along: "the dirty little story of gay male promiscuity and [murderous] irresponsibility." (139)

   Crimp believes Shilts has found a convenient shill for the homophobic yam he wants to spin in the villainous anti-hero of And the Band Played On, a French Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas, more famously "Patient Zero," (140) the "man who gave us AIDS." (141) Dugas's sexual adventures, woven throughout vast portions of Shilts's book, provide him, in Crimp's estimation, a vehicle for blaming AIDS on gay men.

   Fortunately, they also provide Crimp a useful handle he can grab onto to challenge Shilts for venturing such a proposition. The tale of Patient Zero is one that the homophobic, mainstream press could not possibly resist recounting once Shilts had given it to them. (142) Or at least they could not resist recounting it after the publishers of And the Band Played On dangled it under their noses. (143) The "publisher's ploy" was a phenomenal success. (144) Virtually instantaneously, Patient Zero was one of the country's most famous men. As Crimp reminds us, "People magazine made 'Patient Zero' one of its '25 most intriguing people of'87,' together with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Oliver North, Fawn Hall, Princess Diana, Vincent van Gogh, and Baby Jessica." (145) The media that this story received ensured it would "overshadow his book's other 'revelations,'" (146) but more importantly, it also "ensure[d] that the blame for AIDS would remain focused on gay men."...