The Glaring Fallacy of the Safe Sex Professors
By
David Gottfried
The condescension and just plain obliviousness of people who try to teach safe sex, to reduce the dissemination of HIV and other STDs, is plainly amazing. These politically correct mental munchkins think that people should be told to wear a condom. After all, condoms have been shown to reduce the danger of spreading HIV.
Our preachers of the condom gospel tell us that if only people knew that condoms help, they would use a condom and the promised land would be in view. There’s just one gigantic hole in their cutesy little thesis. Everybody has already heard that they should use a condom. Since the time I was in law school, more than thirty years ago, safe sex advocates have been genuflecting before the majesty of Mother Mary Trojan. One would have to have an IQ beneath 50 to be ignorant of the virtues of condoms.
People are simply not so stupid, although liberals, in their condescension, cling tenaciously to the belief that all poor or beleaguered people are very dim-witted. (Just listen to the way a white social worker might talk to a black person; the liberals don’t care for the needy; they get off on feeling superior to a person with problems.)
In any event, back to condoms: People don’t use condoms because they are retarded; indeed, the chance that a gay man who holds down a job with a 100 grand plus salary is retarded are pretty scant indeed. The problem has nothing to do with a need for education.
The problem is people don’t value life that much. Fuck the bullshit and face the facts. First, I’ll talk about black people, and then I’ll talk about gay people.
Black people are not stupid. Young black men see what’s ahead of them and often don’t want to go on. They have been failed by our abysmal school system, and failed by their black daddies who abandoned them, and failed by their black mommas who almost seem to get a kick out of being single as it seems to prove the inherent superiority of women over men, and they have certainly been failed by good for nothing white liberal teachers who are afraid to lay down the law and make them do their homework and who have said to them, after they have turned in incomprehensible and idiotic work, “Oh, I think you’re such a bright, bright young man who is going places.” White lady, you ain’t foolin’ no one. Your black student knows that you think he’s stupid and that you entertain your white friends by telling them just how pathetically stupid he is.
This is all true. My Mother never in her life pulled the lever for a Republican candidate, and in her so obviously insincere voice she assiduously reminded her minority students that they were gems, and when she came home, she passed the time of day by telling me how stupid they were.
And so young black men, quite understandably, don’t think living a long life is all that important. In Manhattan, getting a minimum wage job and working at McDonalds won’t yield enough money to enable you to rent a rat infested hovel no bigger than a prison cell, no woman is gonna want you (Especially since black women will often make more money than you, but that’s a problem that will take an essay all its own), and being so poor, in a region so flush with ostentatious people who get their kicks while reminding you of your monetary misery, makes life seem like a fucking waste of time. And Jesus -- well save that crap for someone else. I’m living in the real world, and there ain’t any saviors here.
And gay men are often pretty damn unhappy to, and don’t tell me that it’s all homophobia, although I will readily concede that homophobia can rip one’s life to shreds.
Let’s address some of the stuff that our enlightened and brilliant liberals refuse to understand. First, look at the numbers. More specifically look at the number of tops going around and the number of bottoms going around. I would venture to guess that for every gay guy who wants to fuck ass, five gay guys will want to get fucked up the ass. Sure, there are happy gay couples, but the imbalance between tops and bottoms means that Manhattan is filled with lots of guys who are craving and dreaming of dick and can’t get it. And after the age of 40, in case you didn’t guess, people generally tend to look less fuckable. Manhattan is filled to the brim with strong, muscular, self-reliant and ardently manly men – but they do not want to be a man in charge; they want to be Daddy’s adorable boy. Very simply, their dream cannot be sustained.
(Incidentally, Manhattan is also filled to the brim with strong, brassy, bitchy women who act a tad too much like Judge Judy – and despite their protestations to the contrary, they swoon before the male organ and they want to be pounded ruthlessly. In a way, it’s sort of funny that Manhattan is almost uniformly feminist, anti-patriarchal and just plain anti male in its ideology, but filled with a slavish craving for getting fucked. Politics ain’t as honest as orgasms.)
Now I don’t want to trash my gay brothers, and I will concede that homosexual lives sometimes do work out fine, but when I see a happy homosexual, I see someone who has made a concerted effort to make his life work. Straight men have no great cosmic struggles, and they can arrive at a happy life with little planning and effort. They go to college, they make some money, some girl falls in love with him, he shtups her in the pussy and they make babies. He doesn’t have to hide his sexuality from his family. He is never besieged with self-loathing. If he is from a religious background he knows he never has to choose between his religion and his desire and it’s really quite simple to be religious. (It’s especially easy to do this when one is Jewish, and one does not understand Hebrew, because one will have no idea if the prayers one is mouthing bear any correspondence to what one feels in one’s heart.) By contrast, being gay is usually a big deal with a lot of big deal problems.
Of course, plenty of gay men have lovely, happy and fascinating lives. They go to the country, they go to antique shops (boooring) and if they are feeble minded and have the common touch they listen to “Golden Girls.” But there is another gay world that is not discussed in trendy, shallow liberal periodicals. It is overlooked in tired, predictable articles which argue that we should be tolerant of everything. It is never mentioned at parties where elegant liberal ladies come and go “talking of Michaelangelo.”
I am talking of the world of gay speed freaks and sex on speed. I know people who every so often do speed for four days straight, don’t have a wink of sleep and then are hospitalized for pneumonia. Sometimes, they die. I know people who are on computer web sites, around the clock, who seek anyone, absolutely anyone, who will do them the courtesy of abusing them. And the sex that they have? I wouldn’t call it sex. Sometimes one man puts his fist, and much of his arm, in another man’s butt and pushes in and out for several hours. Neither man has an erection. Both men are thoroughly out of their minds with speed. And this is not simply a feature of the crack epidemic or computers. Plenty of great Lou Reed songs from the early seventies address the same shit. Hell, I have to amend that. One of Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poems, from the 50’s, begins as follows:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
Starving hysterical naked into the angry Negro streets at dawn
Angel-headed hipsters…”
(I can’t recall, verbatim, any more material from the poem, but there are references to being awake for several days and to homosexuality)
Perhaps we must cease to speak of homosexuality as a singular thing and should instead realize that there are different homosexualities in this world. For example, homosexuality can not only assume different forms – it can be loving and tender, it can consist of anonymous encounters and it can be dangerously sado masochistic – but can also be engendered by different things: A) The genetic; B) the epigenetic; C) the pathological family ala Freud, Bieber (I am not referring to Justin Bieber) and Rado; D) good sexual experiences with members of the same sex at an early age and E) a paucity of heterosexual repression (In Some of his accounts, Freud said we are all bisexual because we all have hormones of both sexes but that one branch of our sexuality is usually repressed – Freud wrote over many decades and said different things at different times.).
Consequently these very different forms of homosexuality should be classified separately. Some forms of gay sexuality seem wholesome and benign. Other forms seem plainly pathological. In other words, I propose that we do for homosexuality what we did for Communism sometime in the 1960’s when we realized it was not a unitary phenomenon. The Soviets and the Chinese had irreconcilable differences; the Stalinists and those Czechs who sought “socialism with a human face” were at loggerheads; and a belief in the primacy of the industrial proletariat was shot down by the courage and capacity of the agrarian Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army.
Sometimes homosexuality works out, but sometimes I think that it works out only because gay men have had a lot of pain, and the consequent sensitivity this may have engendered sometimes comes with a concomitant sweetness that makes a gay man make an effort to connect with another gay man. But it’s effort and it’s work. When I look at some of the straight men that I have known, I can only conclude that they have never made an effort to be nice to anyone while everyone has been nice to them. These straight bastards think that it is maudlin and in bad form to say that one feels unloved, but these straight bastards only say that because they have never been unloved. They have been loved dearly by their mothers in ways that gay men have never been loved. They have had Fathers who did not make a sport of mocking their alleged lack of manliness. They were fortunate enough to have had a bunch of buddies who accepted them and not to have had revolting female teachers who slobbered all over them, and set them apart, and said things like, “You’re such a cute angel I think I will eat you up for dinner.” Being straight is easy. It’s sissy stuff.
And so black people and gay people don’t need to know that a condom can protect one against AIDS. If you think that is the case, you think Blacks and gays are mentally retarded. Gays and Blacks have a problem putting on a condom because they have a problem with life.