On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Christian Gregory wrote:
> For example, good caseworkers frequently treat all unprotected sex as of
> the same order of risk--so they wind up telling people that oral sex is
> an immanent life-risk and that they should use condoms for oral
> sex--with men. For 98% of the gay men I know, oral sex with a condom
> might as well be oral sex with a cucumber or a dildo.
This is exactly the answer I was looking for without knowing it. I knew there was something I was missing. This puts the entire "anti safe-sex" discourse in a completely new light for me.
The reason is because in the hetrosexual community (based on my ludicrously insignificantly small sample of same) we make the same deviances or more, but we don't think of ourselves as deviants. In my experience, most straight people think they are practicing safe sex if they use condoms during intercourse with strangers. But it never occurs to us to use them during oral sex. And most of us stop using condoms once we're in a steady relationship (which seems to begin 2 weeks to 2 months after we've been doing it). And we still think of ourselves as perfectly orthodox practitioners of safe sex -- just not fanatics. And so when I read about gay theorists denouncing the tyranny of the safe sex regime, I thought they must be championing some outrageous kind of deviance -- and not what I and everyone I know are doing every day.
Of course what enables het obliviousness is that we are acting against the background of a much smaller risk. But what's interesting is how that has enabled us to silently change what counts as safe sex until it was something we could live with. And to do so seamlessly that people like me could forget there was ever another definition. It as if gays, facing a much higher risk, are forced forced to be conscious. So then of course it makes sense that even the smallest deviance requires the articulation of a whole counter-ideology. Or at least some existentialist slogans. Because the option of just altering the rules obliviously until they are acceptable just isn't open to you. And the despair inherent in the prospect of following all the rules to the absolute letter -- something I don't think any het I've met has ever seriously considered -- places the friendly reception those ideologies get in entirely new light. I can see how anyone who took that prospect seriously would say that every counter-ideology deserved a fair hearing. And that all you want is what we've already got: the freedom to take small risks in the pursuit of pleasure.
Michael