Being Homosexual by Richard Isay

Author:Richard Isay [Isay, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77350-0
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

And from a physician’s editorial in a medical journal in 1984:

… We see homosexual men reaping not only expected consequences of sexual promiscuity, suffering even as promiscuous homosexuals the usual venereal diseases, but other unusual consequences as well. Perhaps, then, homosexuality is not “alternative” behavior at all, but as the ancient wisdom of the Bible states, most certainly pathologic.

It is true that some gay men flaunted the right to express their sexuality, including the right to sexual excess, during the liberation years of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. But the view that all gay men are or have been sexually promiscuous is a stereotype directed at one time or another against all minorities who are feared because of their difference.

It is known that it is not the number of sexual acts or partners but the nature of the sexual act that accounts for the transmission of HIV. Why is promiscuity mentioned so often and why is anal-receptive sex, the sex act by which the virus is most easily transmitted, mentioned so rarely? Anal sex is the most graphic reminder of what is seen as man’s playing a female role, and this sexual activity can barely be written about, much less discussed and described.

I believe there is an abiding primitive disgust associated with women in our society, and cultural evidence suggests that it is in societies in which femininity is seen as pollution that feminine character traits in males will be most feared. Such negative traits as envy, jealousy, pettiness, seductiveness are all associated with women.

One irony of the AIDS crisis is that love, warmth, caring, nurturing, and nourishing, which are characteristics associated with women, enabled gay men in the 1980s and 90s to prolong and save lives. AIDS organized gay men and mobilized a community to become an effective agent for social and political change.

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