lbo-talk-digest V1 #4444

kwalker2 at gte.net kwalker2 at gte.net
Sat Jun 9 00:16:29 PDT 2001


At 01:03 PM 6/8/01 -0700, Michael Pugliese wrote:
> Gotta run out the door but, a quick answer...Most gay men, this one
>included, settle down in their 30's. I'll find some stats on #'ers of sex
>partners, maybe from a researcher at UCSF, that did a study on HIV- gay men
>and their sexual history, that I as part of about 5 yrs. ago.
> That said, it is pretty prevalent among young gay men in urban areas to
>get fuckedx as often as possible when they are just "out". But, don't
>believe those stats from the groups like the family Research Council that
>allege all gay men have had something like a thousand contacts.


>Like, I wish...

oh, my prurient lewdness has been tickled pugliese!

but anyway, i think joanna that you assumed that anonymous sex means promiscuity and that it means that it is compulsive. i'd disagree! at least as Warner meant it, it was certainly not meant to be compulsory.

there are some gay men who really love the kind of anonymous sex that frequently takes place at glory holes. there's a site on the net, can't recall where, which has a typical structure to it (FAQ, commentary, etc) where you can read gay men talking about how much they enjoy the anonymity that those venues provide. it is highly eroticized --that's what seems different to hets i think. they don't have similarly tightknit sexual practices built around a specific thing or set of things --that seem obvious to hets anyway. but this is because hetsex is hegemonic. gay homosex is not and it takes place under conditions of repression. it is not surprising that countervailing and rather different practices emerge to deal with that. and it's not surprising that an iconography emerges around eroticized practices. a culture emerges. it's inevitable under such conditions, it seems to me. but in part, this is what joe noonan and i are getting at in our critique of the "normalizing" assumptions that there is a "real" gay and lesbian identity that makes one a priori part of a community.

hope that makes sense.

anyway, i'd say that a similar subset of hets enjoy the same and it is certainly the case that women do--lesbians and hets. so i wouldn't say it's a "thang" for any specific group.



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