you--like those you denounce--made my sexual practices, sexuality and sexual orientation an issue when you maintained that i ought to get out of the cop car and get down with the people. with very little evidence and a horrendous misreading of what little you had, you made a claim. i didn't have to answer your charge, just as sullivan didn't, but i see no reason not to, since i'm not ashamed and don't think it's a scandalous revelation (i teach courses on the sociology of love, sex, the family so, no, it's not big news). given that, i informed you that i was in the streets with "the people" and got down with them. (damn prepositions!)
furthermore, mine wasn't a confession since i assume that quite a few people directly know from my theoretical and more personal writings on this topic elsewhere. so, it was kind of a joke i made--a wink at everyone who knew differently--just how absurd was your charge that i was the vanilla het sex police. oh, and of course, i do my damndest to please dd across the point--my greatest sexual trick yet!--by providing some prurient scandalous stuff to keep his uhhh interest up. it's is such a shame that you think it inappropriate material for this venue --especially given the reception you rec'd for your more formal writings on a similar topic, but hey, i cost you 140 clams, right? so whatever it takes, even if it requires temporary amnesia.
did i engage in any fingering errr finger wagging about sullivan's love of bareback sex? not at sullivan. at the practice in general. yes, for the same reasons others did. like others here i agree that consensual barebacking between HIV+s is perfectly fine. i made that clear several times. like others, i don't happen to think that it is such a good idea to do so with people who aren't HIV+ -- altho i do agree with christian about realistic safer sex education rather than prohibition. but we were all finger wagging, even people who said, "whatever he wants to do as long as it's consensual" iow, as long as people tell their partners, then no big deal. like it or not, that's judging others' sexual behavior and everyone here did it, unless i missed out on someone saying that it would be perfectly ok for HIV+s to have sex with HIV-'s and not tell them about it.
was i moralizing? you bet your sweet luscious bippy! so were they. so were you. so haven't we all. do i think proper moral behavior is the answer to social problems? no. i don't think anyone here does. sullivan, however, does.
so, let's be clear:
i do think that it's useful to point out that some gay men, sullivan in particular, engage in a hypermasculinized rhetoric about gay male identity and sexuality that is open to critique. i think lesbians have done similar things when _some_ have argued that women's sexuality is more warm fuzzy and loving than men's and than lesbian sex is an advance over hetsex. if that issue had come up, i would have piped up and critiqued the hyperfeminized notions that these lesbians have advanced. i think there's a problem with claiming that there is such a thing as a bi identity because it tends to privilege bi as primary, making hetsex AND homosex secondary. i'd critique that if it came up.
i do think that HIV+'s shouldn't engage in unprotected sex with people who are not HIV+. were i HIV+ i wouldn't, even though i know about safer sex practices which don't require strict adherence to condoms 100% of the time. when i raised that issue, i raised in response to what appeared to me to be christian's uncritical assummption that as long as it was consensual, then i was ok. i'm not so sure about that, so i asked what was the scoop with that presumption. that said, i can't imagine any way nor do i even desire that anyone sit down and come up with a way to ensure that we can legislate behavior to prevent such. it's sort of like guns. i support the 2a and used to sell guns and hold a Federal Firearms License. but, there are a plenty of people out there that don't know how to handle them safely and don't care to practice safe gun usuage. so, i tend to make judgements on them.
finally, in the end, you, like me, have finger wagged about public behavior. you started your tirade by complaining about my language. i complained about barebacking that involves HIV- men.
the difference between me and you and andrew, however, is that neither of us are the pop media poster boys for a social movement. furthermore, i happen to think that andrew sullivan's finger wagging at gays who are supposedly promiscuous and pathological is a lot more damaging than your finger wagging at me about language or your revulsion of my frank discussion of my sexuality (and my persona here is part of an identity practice that i've purposefully cultivated) or me finger waggin at christian about what i thought was a cavalier attitude toward a sexual practice that was clearly not monogamous and not strictly between HIV+s.
and yes, what you and nathan and rob miss is the fact that there really is some place between high abstract bodiless theorizing and titillating dish. it can move back and forth between them as mills said it was important to connect biography to history. sullivan does it all the time, except he sucks at social analysis.
michael pollack once engaged in a very moving example of this re: why he's sexually attracted to younger women. dennis thought it appropriate re porno flix. rob schaap has frequently discussed his sexuality in an effort to think through gender debates. if you saw gossip here, then please point it out. noting that sullivan's ad suggests a desire for barebacking with HIV- and HIV+s is about the closest you'll get. but that was engendered by sullivan's own contradictory whine. yes, his whine was engendered by the expose which i've said fromthe beginning was wrong and i wish signorile would knock it off. why do you think i said from the get go that i don't like signorile either!!
there are some really good freeware learn to read programs out there, i hope you'll download two or ten.
kelley
> I was not
>about to follow her onto to that terrain, I had said my piece, and it
>seemed best to let it end there.
>
>But the thread has reemerged with a vengeance after Nathan posted his
>piece. In the throw-away line of his posting, with his reference to the
>classic line 'the personal is the political,' he unwittingly pointed to a
>important issue which lies at the center of feminist and gay/lesbian
>politics. It is precisely the literal, absolutist reading of that precept
>which 'authorizes' much of what is wrong in this 'over-exposure' of Sullivan.
>
>Take Kelley's defense of her position against Nathan:
> >this isn't about gossip but about the rhetorical use of naturalized sex
> >and sexuality and it was, when i raised the barebacking issue, an attempt
> >to have an adult conversation about sex panic politics and safer sex
> >campaigns. there was no attempt to talk about some one person's private
> >life, nathan.
>
>This is too transparent for words. Kelley was not responding to an essay by
>Sullivan, in which he publicly advocated "naturalized sex," a case which
>had to be critiqued in terms of issues of safer sex and other important
>public goods. Far from it. Rather, she has jumped in, with some consider
>relish and gusto, if not glee, in pontificating about the moral failings of
>the private, informed and consensual acts of Sullivan, acts which are now
>public only because his privacy was violated for malicious political
>purposes. We have railing against a 'sexual ideology' which is nothing more
>than a private preference, exercised only in a private context. At least
>most folks who tarry with the subject just admit that they find pleasure in
>salacious gossip, which is a pretty harmless vice as vices go, but Kelley
>insists that her comments have a higher, more noble political purpose.
>
>I think Nathan is right to draw the connection between the Sullivan case
>and passing on Supreme Court justices. By way of example, IMHO, the reason
>why Clarence Thomas did not belong on the US Supreme Court was (1) he was
>eminently _un_qualified by any reasonable professional standard, and (2)
>his judicial philosophy was extraordinarily reactionary, hostile to rights
>and equality for women, people of color, labor and gays and lesbians. It
>had nothing to do with his penchant for watching pornography, or his
>offensive attempts at off-color humor in the workplace setting. I have no
>doubt that Anita Hill told the truth; but I don't believe that her account
>was what should have been the issue in proceedings of Thomas' fitness to
>sit on the Supreme Court and make decisions which impact on our rights on a
>daily basis.
>
>The personal is _not_ political, if what we mean by _is_ in this
>formulation [yes, the formulation is self-conscious] follows its common
>misunderstanding as a relationship of identity, of one-ness, of a
>singularity. The notion that the personal is the political in this sense is
>a profoundly totalitarian notion, the total colonization of the 'personal
>sphere' by the political sphere, the total eradication of any space in
>which a person can exercise personal choice and preference free of
>political, public norms, regulations and law. Every personal act is a
>political act, and thus, subject to political inspection, evaluation and
>judgment. Even personal thought and fantasy itself become the subject of
>the political confessor: just as the Catholic Church constructs a sin of
>'impure' thoughts, one has 'politically correct' fantasies. Fantasies
>constructed around, let us say, a 'natural' sexuality are reactionary, and
>must not be indulged, but battled and purged.
>
>However one wants to conceptually construct and understand a sphere of
>personal autonomy, a sphere of privacy outside of the appropriate purview
>of the public, be it via some fiction of original [natural] rights, as the
>classical liberal philosophers did, or as a simple social construction and
>product of social consensus, in a more pragmatist vein, or just as a
>necessary legal category in a liberal constitutional state, its existence
>and protection is essential to placing limits on the power of the state, to
>ensuring individual rights and to the promotion of a healthy political and
>cultural pluralism.
>
>The personal _is_ the political only when we understand by _is_ a
>relationship of articulation, of reciprocal influence, shaping and
>pertinence -- one might say a dialectical combination, not a simple unity,
>although not runs the danger of its own misinterpretations. Our personal
>and sexual lives are profoundly interconnected with the public world, and
>we need to understand those relationships of interconnection. Sexual
>politics involve the reconfiguration, the re-negotiation of the boundaries
>of public and private, political and personal -- not their abolition or
>collapse. What was once a matter of public law, such as the very acts of
>interracial sex or gay/lesbian sex, are reconstituted as perfectly
>legitimate choices within a pluralist, democratic culture and society, and
>what was once a matter of personal whim, such as spousal abuse, becomes a
>matter of public law. Feminists and gay/lesbian activists seek an
>articulation of private and public based on the equality of men and women,
>and on the equality of different sexual orientations. That is an altogether
>different notion from the idea that we need to enter into the very
>substance of sexual fantasy and practice, and establish and enforce a
>singular norm of what constitutes 'politically correct' sex -- which would,
>at least as far as Kelley is concerned -- leave out such 'incorrect'
>practices as sex without condoms between two men.
>
>Leo Casey
>
>.