Homosexuality in the 80s?

>>>for our last assignment in our AP Lit class I have to write a research paper on a time period of my choice as long as it's post 2001.

Hopefully, PRE-2001, or your teacher ain't gonna be happy when you turn this thing in.

I was a teenager during the 80s, but I'm afraid I can't offer too much insight. I wasn't even sure that I was gay at that time, and being awkward and shy to boot, I had about much exposure to AIDS as I did to extra-terrestrial life.

I will point this out. It's easy to group history into time segments. So you have the "Roaring 20s" and then you have "The Great Depression" coming afterwards. But even when there's a rather specific event that one uses to divide them (the stock market crash), it's not like life was like THIS before that date, and life was like THAT afterwards. History is a continuum. Our experiences and outlook might change, but it's a gradual thing. To bring this into something more current, we all know the economy's is rough shape, but most of us can't really point to a date when it all happened. It was a gradual shift of perceptions, and the dates are probably different for each of us.

This is especially true of something like AIDS. It used to be called GRIDS - gay-related immune deficiency syndrome. For the straight community (which, in the 80s, was the community at large), it was something some faggots were dealing with, they got it because they all fucked each other, and no surprise there, huh? It wasn't something anybody you, or anybody you knew, dealt with. I think Reagan finally said the word "AIDS" in 1986, by which point it finally was being recognized (very slowly) as something more than "their" disease.

And in the gay community, there was a fair amount of denial. It was something OTHER gays were dealing with. We didn't want to admit that it was something that could affect us, or those closest to us. To speak it would be to make it real. I remember reading one account that mentioned "that nebulous time that we knew, but didn't want to know, so pretended not to know". That about sums it up.

Also, in the gay community, there was a LOT of pressure AGAINST the safe sex movement. Condoms (or "rubbers", as they were universally known back then) were for high school boys to wear to keep their girlfriends from getting pregnant. Gay men didn't use them. To use them was to imply that something was wrong, or that you were "diseased", or that you didn't trust your partner. There's a documentary playing on Logo (I think still) about the porn star who helped spearhead the safe sex movement. This man was ostracized - by his peers, by his (former) fans, by the whole community. He was considered a Judas. We didn't want to hear this. We'd rather keep getting high and screwing whoever we wanted, however we wanted.

By the time I started reading gay publications - the early 90s - the safe sex thing had pretty well taken hold. The messages were clunky at first, and often took a sort of "this is a major pain, but it's kinda important" sort of tone. But at least we weren't denying it anymore. Not outwardly, anyway.

Lex

 

Your post is so timely. I just had dinner with an old friend, and we were talking about gay life in the 80’s. It was very much a time of conflict and contradiction for many gay men. In the early 80’s, before AIDS was known, in some parts of town you could not walk down the street without having multiple opportunities to have sex. There was sex, sex, sex and more sex. It was a wild time. At the same time, the Anita Bryant anti gay movement was still reverberating where I lived, and anti-gay sentiments were widespread. There was little acceptance of gay people. I recall an effeminate boy in my high school, who was picked on and ostracized. There was nobody out at my high school. Even when I was in professional school in the late 80’s, there were still very few gays out (I can recall only 2). In contrast to my friend who came out as a teen, I was very much affected by all of this and refused to accept I was gay. It took me until 2007 to get over it and come out!

Even for those who were out, many were very careful about who they came out to. There were few, if any, legal protections back then. In fact, in 1986, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia law that made consensual sodomy a crime. It was actually constitutional to put gay men in jail for what they did in the privacy of their own bedrooms! (It was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court overturned the earlier decision and ruled that it was an unconstitutional invasion of the right to privacy to make private, consensual sex a crime). Gay marriage was not even on the radar screen as something remotely possible.

By the mid-80’s, AIDS really began taking its toll in the gay community. Gay men were terrified. Friends were dying all around. My friend recalls that only 2 of his circle of friends (out of about 30) survived. The rest all died of AIDS. He was certain he was going to die. In fact, he was so afraid he could not bring himself to get tested until 1994 (he was negative). AIDS had a dramatic impact on gay men in the 80’s. They became more careful about who they had sex with, and condoms, which at one time were unthinkable, became the norm.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck with your project.

 

My mother said basically all of this when she was recounting it to me one day after I came out. She was like you know you have it way better than it was in the 80's. She was 18 in 1984 and said it was very much don't ask don't tell, it was usually kept hidden most of the time. And even if people did know you were gay, it was rarely, if ever, talked about. She lost a lot of her gay friends to AIDS because they were reckless and slept around, including one she worked with who she was particularly close to. It took a long time for them to wise up (around the late 80's) and start making safe sex the norm. Like aforementioned there was little acceptance of gay people during this period, a lot of people she knows just recently came out in their 30's or 40's. This was in Massachusetts mind you, one of the friendlier places to gays, and it still wasn't that great for them during that time. Hope this helps a bit.

 

Your best resource would likely be And The Band Played On for a heart-breaking and pretty accurate look at gay life in the 1980s under the pall of AIDS. It's by Randy Shilts. Although the theory he puts forward in the book is relatively widely not accepted at this point (a Patient Zero for the spread of AIDS), the book is creative non-fiction, which is to say it's all based on real stuff but it's written nearly like a novel.

It's an amazing book overall but it would also be an excellent source of material for you. Just be prepared to cry--I bawled my eyes out through most of it.

 

Oh and the recent Sean Penn/Gus Van Sant film Milk would give you a great kinda entrée into the period, although of course Milk ends before AIDS hits. But it definitely discusses the Anita Bryant stuff. And it's a great film. It's based on another book by Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, and there's a documentary based on it that is, I've heard, much more accurate than Milk.

 

I take a lot of exception to the bolded comments--first off, in the early days of HIV/AIDS, no one had any clue what was going on, so looking back on it from the present and saying they should have all "wised up" is super-judgmental and done with the benefit of an enormous amount of hindsight. And it shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the context in which all this "sleeping around" took place. Safe(r) sex guidelines did not start getting promoted until the late 80s and even then, a huge amount of confusion existed around their genesis.

Second, talk about blaming the victims: they "all" slept around so they deserved to die horrible deaths?! Lots of people of all types of sexualities "sleep around"--you're implying that sleeping around is bad and that the punishment for it is HIV/AIDS, at least for gay men.

I'm just so sick of people, especially gay people, looking back on that period and foisting around blame, like only the "pure" and chaste gay people deserved to have lived through that horrific time. Well them and the people who got it via transfusion. Or from their mothers. Talk about a hierarchy of deserving and undeserving victims.

 

Hey, not sure you can hear me up on that high horse, Joey, but I'll say it anyway. Once the facts about AIDS became known - that it was spread through sexual contact, and that safe sex practices could greatly diminish the spread of the disease - a great number of gay men chose not to listen. They either played ignorant, or chose to (metaphorically) shoot the messenger. It took a great number of people - male and female, gay and straight - many years and a ton of effort before the gay community came around. Up until then, it was "Oh, I'll never get it" or "They'll come up with a pill for it soon enough". No, not everyone who caught HIV was well-informed, but many of them were ill-informed by choice. As I said above, we didn't want to know. We liked the way things were, damnit, and so we chose to play dumb. And many of us ended up paying with our lives.

Do I think think everyone who got HIV or died of AIDS "deserves it"? No, not at all. But neither am I going to pretend that homosexuals should be exempt from using their heads, and get a free "victim" card for not taking the known precautions.

Lex

 

Lex, however high up on a horse I may have been, it was certainly no higher than Midnight Angel. As for you, well, people in glass house shouldn't throw stones, should they? That is, I fail to see how you are any greater authority on what happened--and why it did--during the first decade of AIDS than, say, anyone else.

But you know, yeah, fine, characterise the spread of AIDS as primarily the result of poor sexual decision-making on the part of primarily gay guys. My friends and I have a term for that: we call it internalised homophobia. Maybe you've heard of it? Cuz you know, gay guys = incorrigible sex fiends. Compulsive, even. It's a fact.

Don't people ever get tired of being told we did it to ourselves? I know I do. Of course there were people who didn't want to get with the program--there always are. But the way it nearly invariably gets talked about is, as above, like we couldn't--or didn't want to--help ourselves, and that it was pretty much a group effort to (pun intended) fuck ourselves over. And funny how it's always the sexual behaviour of the gay people that's front and centre in any discussion on AIDS, as if we were also responsible for its spread through the suburbs and the straight population.

And that's not even getting into the less straightforward yet very real issues of how societal and institutional homophobia played a part in the spread of the disease. Nope, it's never about that--it's about how gay guys couldn't keep it in their pants. And now we (and the rest of the world) are paying the price. Such a convenient little morality tale.

Anyway, gotta go graze the horse...

 

To lighten the mood here (let's all smile and be gay-happy , thank you), you might want to watch The Curiosity of Chance. It's a gay comedy movie about this gay flamboyant guy in high school. NOT a very credible source, but it's a great movie and it could inspire you for a lot of details, since it's told from the guy's point of view. (Doesn't talk about AIDS at all, again, it's a mostly a light-hearted comedy.)

 

>>>But you know, yeah, fine, characterise the spread of AIDS as primarily the result of poor sexual decision-making on the part of primarily gay guys. My friends and I have a term for that: we call it internalised homophobia. Maybe you've heard of it? Cuz you know, gay guys = incorrigible sex fiends. Compulsive, even. It's a fact.

I've had this conversation - OK, argument - with others. So I'll go ahead and continue it the way I normally do.

As a pedestrian, I've been hit by a car. Twice. Each time, I was in a crosswalk, and had the right of way. But each time, I was kind of in my own world, and wasn't really paying attention. And a car, who also wasn't paying attention, made a turn and ran into me. Each time, I got knocked flat on my ass, but fortunately, nothing worse.

So whose fault was it? If I'd been hit harder, and ended up in the hosptial, no doubt a jury would have said the driver was. And I wouldn't really argue the fact. But each time, I wish I'd looked where I was going. Because I don't want to get knocked on my ass, or worse, end up in the hospital. Yes, I was "right". No, I didn't "deserve" to get hit by the car. But that doesn't make the broken bones feel better.

You call what I've said above "internal homophobia". I call it reality. And I call what you do handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards. I don't think every, or even most, gay man who has contracted HIV "deserves it". I'm not whitewashing the entire group with a single brush. Which is odd, since you seem compelled to do the same. Because I believe, much like I should've been paying better attention in the crosswalk, gays need to take all necessary precautions to protect their health. This has been suggested as far back as the late 80s, and was being preached as gospel by the time I came out in 1992. Again, this doesn't mean I think people who contract HIV "deserve it". I'm not here to play the blame game. But it's up to us to keep ourselves healthy, just as it's up to me to make sure some car isn't going to not follow the rules. It was true then, and it's true now.

Lex