23 May 2008
My GCN Column, June 2008
I was following an exchange in the Dublin cruising room on Gaydar recently (for research purposes, natch) and, between 'can travel and acummudate in d15' and 'any1 in naas?' (answer was 'no'), I happened on a nasty little thread that showed why self-identified rational homosexuals get Aids. One of the fishers was looking for bareback action ('cc vers bb fuck now' and variations). Another member expressed his offence at these periodic demands.
Guess what happened? Did the other responsible adult users of the age-verified adult site congratulate him for his community-minded indignation? Did they shite. The user was overwhelmed by a tirade of abuse, not just from the original poster, but from other, presumably adult, users.
So far, so what - drunk online cruising folk are often morons. But what struck me was how spitting angry these people were with the idea that anyone would question someone's decision to have bareback sex. I've listened in while the same people have elaborate conversations about the finer points of Bertie Ahern's social agenda legacy or why Madonna's post-feminism is not debased by a beige basque, but when it comes to wearing a condom during anal sex, they far too often become reality-averse idiots.
For the defenders of barebacking, their rights as gay men are somehow bound up with their 'right' to have risky sex, if they so choose. So querying dangerous behaviour is twisted into something homophobic. In fact, one of the posters accused the offended man of trying to impose his internalised homophobia on the guy who wanted to bareback!
This distortion of the idea of individual and by extension, group rights, may well be a consequence of the 'victim-isation' of society that right-wing commentators like John Waters are so fond of blaming for the modern world's ills. In his analysis, men are suffering in areas as diverse as healthcare, child custody and inheritance because they haven't reconfigured themselves as victims and groups of victims, who need to have their 'rights' addressed by government and its associated quangos. He believes that other sections of society - women, the travelling community, the disabled, immigrants and the LGBT community - have all hitched their wagons to the victim gravy train. As a result, people are preoccupied by their individual rights and with extending them into areas of life where they didn't reach previously.
Of course, what's forgotten in this rush to be victims with rights is the importance of responsibility, both individually and as groups within society. It is a nonsense to present a choice to have risky sex as a right; this is a responsibility, or actually a denial of it. It's become normal to deny individual responsibility for what we know are dangerous behaviours and then expect someone else to fix the problems caused. Look at smoking - every smoker knows that their choice to use cigarettes puts them at a one-in-five chance of getting lung cancer, a disease that is still pretty much untreatable. Or alcohol - we know that excessive drinking causes heart disease, stroke and cancer, with the bonus of mangling car accidents, but we remain a nation of heavy boozers.
There's an argument about responsibility and gay men that's been around since just after the first wave of safer sex messages were introduced in the late 1980s. At the time, it seemed that the message was effective and that arming gay men with the information they needed to have safer sex empowered them enough to alter their behaviour. For a while, new HIV infections declined and the introduction of anti-HIV drugs made everyone hopeful that HIV would be beaten. Then, despite the increasing sophistication and penetration of the safer sex campaigns, the rate of new HIV infections among gay men began to creep up again.
Strangely, homophobes and people involved in gay health came up with the same solution to this mystery - gay men weren't taking responsibility for their actions. The homophobes believed that was because of their debased morality, but more usefully, health researchers decided that the ongoing prejudice experienced by gay men made them feel disenfranchised and as a result less likely to feel part of the society that was attempting to control the spread of HIV. The alienated are likely to behave in spite of what the mainstream of society is encouraging them to do.
Fast forward to today, when a mopping-up campaign is taking care of the last lawful anti-gay bastions. Gay people now have a degree of protection and acceptance that would have been difficult for early campaigners to imagine. But advocates of the 'right' to bareback cling to the belief that any questioning of their risky behaviour is just dressed-up homophobia and therefore impinges on their rights.
It is impossible to force people to stop smoking, drinking and barebacking, but their choice to do it should not be presented as a right. People who choose to engage in risky behaviours need to stop squawking about their 'rights' and instead, to behave like adults by taking responsibility.