Tweeting, Barebacking, and More

• Thanks to William Bradley for the link to an article about a man who tweeted the argument he was forced to overhear at a Burger King in Boston.  The article's author argues that the argument should not have been made public on Twitter, and many of those who left comments agree.  I disagree, though there are too many reasons to get into why.  I just don't get why people are shocked when things done in public are made public.  Since the Rodney King beating, we know that cameras and recoding devices are everywhere, and that was before we were even talking about social media.  It's funny that so many are upset that this was made public on Twitter, but if this fight had led to the murder or assault of one member of the couple by the other, he'd be a hero for documenting what led to the crime.  We can't have it both ways.
• I love how the last paragraph of this article about some of the problems that have occurred at various occupy sites puts sexual assaults at the same level as peeing in a bottle.  We were in the middle of the power outage when a women's only tent was created at Occupy Wall Street because some women felt the park wasn't safe, so I don't know if anyone has been talking about that or if it has been kept quiet so representation of the movement stays entirely positive.
• John Hodgins tweeted a link to this great article on happiness.  It's a lot of common sense, but it's also concise, clear, and something I think I should read daily.
• I was really happy to see such an extensive article about sex parties and barebacking in SF Weekly, but I did feel compelled to leave this comment at the site: "As someone who has been around and having sex since the 80s, who lost my first husband to AIDS as well as numerous friends, I really can't believe we're still having this discussion. People were having sex without condoms way before any porn company had videos showing it, way before barebacking was a word, and way before we had even a tenth of the drugs we have now to combat HIV. If you condemn the practice, it will not disappear. It will just go further underground. Shaming people about their sexual practices (when it's consenting adults with consenting adults) will lead to nothing but more pain, death, and conflict. Lots and lots of people have sex with condoms. Lots of lots of people do not. I'd rather have conversations than point fingers and say the government should step in and do something to 'those people.'"  I've left other comments, too, in response to what some people have said to me, but it's all the same kind of conversation we all usually have on this subject, and that's sad, really.

Jeffrey G. Sherman's "Love Speech: The Social Utility of Pornography."

Jeffrey G. Sherman's "Love Speech: The Social Utility of Pornography" is probably one of my favorite articles of all time.  It was published in Stanford Law Review in 1995, and it's so relevant today.  One of my big pet peeves when it comes to scholarship on pornography is that it works from a monolithic definition of pornography.  Those who then condemn pornography for damaging women's lives ignore pornography that does not have any women in it but still believe their arguments apply to pornography without women.  Sherman's argument attempts to combat that by explaining how gay pornography actually improves the lives of gay men.  He goes beyond the free speech argument that says pornography should exist because we should not attempt to constrict the marketplace of ideas even if those ideas are harmful ones to say that gay male pornography actually has benefits to it.  I agree with much of what he says on a gut level as well as an intellectual one.  He articulates something I have been feeling but unable to put into words.  I was taking some notes on this article today; here are a few quotations from it.

"In this article, I shall argue not that pornography is to be 'tolerated,' the traditional liberal attitude, but that pornography--at least gay male pornography--is to be valued as serving a social good: it enables its consumers to realize satisfying, nurturing sexual lives" (Sherman 662).


"Unlike liberalism's tolerance-based 'defense,' my argument embraces feminism's assumption that pornography has behavioral and psychological effects" (Sherman 667).


"[S]exuality and sexual response are so personal and idiosyncratic, and the sexual responses of men and women are so demonstrably different, that each sex may be peculiarly ill-suited to make assertions about the other's sexuality" (Sherman 668).


"Sexual exhilaration in the context of a mutually desired sexual connection may present the only circumstance in which one can achieve a complete submersion of self in another's being, transcending the leaden constraints of political obligation and rational discourse" (Sherman 670).


"If government is to foster its citizens' flourishing, and if an integrated sexuality is part of that flourishing, it follows that political regimes must be conducive to sexual integrity" (Sherman 671).


"The silencing and subordination of gay men on account of their sexuality denies gay men the self-acknowledgment and self-definition that every group needs to participate fully in civic life" (Sherman 671).


"It is a sensibility, a culture, a community from which the heterosexual world has much to learn and which is entitled to equal weight and deference" (Sherman 675).


"[B]ecause of our culture's presumption of heterosexuality, we speak of gayness, rather than sexual orientation, as being the invisible quality" (Sherman 676).


"Heterocentrism may disaffirm gay men, but it does not demonize them. Homophobia does that" (Sherman 676).


"A gay adolescent encounters many examples of male-male 'affection,' but they fail to provide the validation he needs if they do not explicitly acknowledge male-male sex" (Sherman 683).


"The men in the gay pornographic films were not being treated like women; they were being treated like gay men" (Sherman 691).


"Sadly, these critics fail to extend that insight to male-male penetration; instead, their comments suggest the erroneous view that penetration is penetration and that two gay men having sex with each other must necessarily be aping the sexist heterosexual norm" (Sherman 693).


"The gay pornography market 'has become a guarantee, at least until legal equality is won, that the existence of sexual minorities and their struggle for sexual rights remain in the realm of public visibility'" (Sherman 694, quoting Andrew Ross in No Respect).


"Second, and perhaps more important, the feminists' argument sets forth a rigid model of what constitutes 'correct' and 'incorrect' sexual interactions. If society accepts that model and restricts permissible sexual images according to that vision, gays and lesbians are likely to feel the lash disproportionately" (Sherman 695).


"The relative importance of pornography in the gay male imagination results from the suppression of other forms of gay expression: not only artistic expression but lived interpersonal expression" (Sherman 703).


"The eradication of homophobia will not occur in isolation. Rather, it will coincide with the eradication of misogyny, for the two are simply different aspects of the same hatred: hatred of femininity" (Sherman 703).


"Enduring gay coupled relationships particularly threaten the hierarchy by offering an example of committed, stable loving that requires neither procreation nor gender-based subordination" (Sherman 704).

I have an article that should be out this summer where I talk about the role that shame has played in my teaching. It's basically about why I did not choose to come out to my classes. Though it would have exploded my argument, I wish I'd read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity before I sent that article out. Sedgwick writes a pretty compelling argument for why shame is not always a negative thing. In fact, it's pretty integral to shaping our sense of self, which in turn means it's integral in how we relate to others. Here are some quotations of hers that are pushing me to rethink shame.

"In fact, shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational, because shame is both peculiarly contagious and peculiarly individuating" (Sedgwick 36).

"That's the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality" (Sedgwick 37). 

"The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does" (Sedgwick 37).

"The forms taken by shame are not distinct 'toxic' parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed" (Sedgwick 63).

"If the structuration of shame differs strongly between cultures, between periods, and between different forms of politics, however, it differs also simply from one person to another within a given culture and time" (Sedgwick 63).

"Shame interests me politically, then, because it generates and legitimates the place of identity--the question of identity--at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but does so without giving that identity space the standing of an essence. It constitutes it as to-be-constituted, which is also to say, as already there for the (necessary, productive) misconstrual and misrecognition. Shame--living, as it does, on and in the muscles and capillaries of the face--seems to be uniquely contagious from one person to another" (Sedgwick 64).

"Survivors' guilt and, more generally, the politics of guilt will be better understood when we can see them in some relation to the slippery dynamics of shame" (Sedgwick 64).

Yes, I'm posting a lot of quotations lately. I'm spending this first part of the summer doing a lot of notetaking, which is why I'm finding a lot of amazing quotations and presenting a few here now and then. If they inspire you, I'd love to hear how in the comments.  Oh, I have written about this book before on my personal blog.

From Larry Kramer's "Nuremberg Trials for AIDS"

Each of many, many people committed acts of inconceivable inhumanity that must be documented. Without such official documentation, the politics of homo-hating and bigotry will continue to rule the world and this plague will never end.

More. . .

Two Reasons Why Some People Do Not Get Tested for HIV

At 3:00 PM EST today, the National HIV Testing Day Twitter Town Hall will be taking place.  Check out the #nhtd hashtag for tweets about HIV testing.  My initial thoughts are too long to convey in a tweet, so I thought I'd map them out here.  HIV testing is incredibly important, but there are two things that always come to mind whenever I hear people calling for HIV testing, two reasons why people may not want to get tested.  I've been talking about both of these reasons for years, and no one has been able to give me strong counterarguments for them that I can use when people give these reasons to me.  I welcome hearing such perspectives in the comments.

The first reason has gotten more attention in recent health care reform debates.  Many people do not get tested for HIV because they do not want to be labeled as having a pre-existing condition when it comes to seeking health insurance.  Years ago in graduate school, I had a friend who said that he was not going to get tested until he earned tenure and could be more greatly assured that he would never lose his insurance since he would have greater job security.  There's a lot of logic to what he said.  If he took a new job and had to sign up for new insurance, a pre-existing condition could make it difficult, and drug therapies aimed at HIV are not cheap.  This is one reason why many of us argue that true health care reform must include provisions for those who have a range of pre-existing conditions. 

The second reason why some people choose not to get tested for HIV has to do with our judicial system.  Many people do not want to get tested for HIV because being HIV-positive subjects them to greater criminal prosecution.  Back in the late 1980s when I started having sex, the belief was that you needed to take measures to protect yourself if you did not want to contract HIV.  In the late 1990s, that began to change as states (over thirty of them at last count) began to argue that individual responsibility was largely irrelevant and instead started to criminalize the transmission of HIV.  Actually, I'm wrong.  In five states (Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, and Tennessee), you do not have to transmit HIV to be a criminal.

Missouri really drives me batty, though.  As Tim Dean puts it in Unlimited Intimacy, "Missouri is unique in explicitly denying the use of a condom as a defense" (6n10).  In other words, if you are a man who is HIV-positive, and you have sex with someone while wearing a condom and without disclosing your status, you are a criminal.  If you are an HIV-positive woman, and you have sex with a man and ask him to wear a condom but do not disclose your status, then you are a criminal.  If you are transgender, then this point obviously applies to the person/people who insert(s) a penis into the other(s).  We can (and should) discuss the ethics of disclosure but not here.  My argument in this post is that the criminalization of HIV transmission has had the effect of pushing some people not to get tested.  As someone told me when I was doing HIV-related volunteer work when I lived in Ohio, "If I don't know my HIV status, then I decrease the reasons why someone would want me in jail."

Many people use the argument that getting tested for HIV and learning your status means that you gain greater control over your own health and well-being.  There's a lot of truth to that.  But getting tested and finding out you have HIV also means that you become a member of a class of people known as the HIV-positive, and we live in a country that means people with that label are allowed to be treated in ways people without that label do not, which means losing some of the control people have before being tested.  Many people who do not want to be treated in those ways simply do not get tested.  In no way am I arguing that getting tested for HIV is a bad thing.  It can be really important and even necessary.  I do just want to be clear that there are legitimate reasons why some people choose not to be tested, and dismissing those reasons does not help anyone.

If you believe in the importance of HIV testing, then I hope you not only urge individuals to get tested but also push our local, state, and national governments to enact laws (or remove laws) that will encourage and not discourage people from getting tested.  It's something I'm trying to do by raising these issues whenever I can.

ETA: I created a Twapper Keeper for all of the #nhtd tweets.

The Value of Unrespectability

The artists discussed in this book, from Paul Cadmus to Holly Hughes, could not transcend the homophobic constraints imposed upon their work.  They could, however, restage and resist those constraints within the space of their art.  Rather than defending their work as proper or decent, these artists drew upon the force of the improper and the indecent, the force of fairies, most wanted men, sadomasochists, AIDS activists, and flaming queers.  They used the outlaw status of homosexuality both to contest the threat of censorship and to propose other visions of social, sexual, and creative life. These artists offer a record of resistance within the history of twentieth-century American culture.  But they also do something more.  In the face of ongoing demands for decent art, they urge us to recognize the value, and to take the risk, of unrespectability.

--from Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (2002)

The Need for Sexual Exploration

While reading Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (2002), I found this quotation from Cindy Patton's Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (1985).

AIDS must not be viewed as proof that sexual exploration and the elaboration of sexual community were mistakes. [. . .] Lesbians and gay men [. . .] must maintain that vision of sexual liberation that defines the last fifteen years of [our] activism (235-6).

I think this rings even more true today in light of the continuing conservative backlash against queers of all types at local, state, national, and international levels as well as the mainstream gay/lesbian movement's current emphasis on a liberal (as opposed to a radical) political agenda.