Nick Benton's Gay Science No. 50:
Our Gay Movement's Colossal Failure
http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/10170-nick-bentons-gay-science-no-50-our-gay-movements-colossal-failure-.html
By Nicholas F. Benton
Thursday, September 22 2011
When I became a vocal gay liberation leader in San Francisco after completing
graduate seminary and coming out with a bang in 1969 (shortly before the
Stonewall riots across the continent), I quickly came under fire for contending
our liberation called for fundamental socio-political change, rather than just
boundless sex.
Using my journalistic skills, I became the most prolific writer on all matters
gay in the Bay Area, contributing weekly to the Berkeley Barb, often to its
rival the Berkeley Tribe, to the Gay Sunshine newspaper, authoring its first
editorial, to my own paper, The Effeminist, and a variety of San Francisco gay
bar rags, like the Kalendar.
I co-founded the Berkeley chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, and I was voted
by my peers to be the first gay spokesman formally invited to speak at a major
anti-war rally. When the first collection of post-Stonewall gay writings was
assembled, The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973), including entries by
Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs and other big names, I was the
only one among those who had more than one entry. I had three.
This was all before the legendary Harvey Milk migrated from New York, where
he'd been a Wall Street Republican, to set up shop in San Francisco. I had many
exchanges with Milk, who dismissed all initiatives except electoral and
legislative ones.
Milk and others did a great deal to win political gains for homosexuals. I ran
on the same ballot with him in San Francisco in 1975. He ran for supervisor, I
ran for mayor, losing with a dozen others to George Moscone, who was killed
along with Milk by Dan White in November 1978.
By 1972, from my vantage point as a gay leader, it was clear that a
countercultural, anarcho-hedonistic tsunami was turning the movement away from
any sensibility for wider social change to focus solely on unbridled sex and
license to it.
The gay "The Age of Contagion" (my term) ran from 1972 to 1996, AIDS being
phase two. It was fueled by unlimited impersonal sex, which became not only
normative, but a "politically correct" imperative. It was common for gays in
urban centers to be infected with venereal disease almost monthly, compromising
immune systems to provide opportunity for the HIV virus, while crippling the
emotional capacity for sustainable romance.
I became sharper in my arguments against all this. I wrote against, and even
picketed, Allen Ginsberg, the gay beat poet with two decent compositions to his
credit, because Ginsberg bragged publicly about masturbating to images of young
boys, ran a help-wanted ad in the Barb for a personal assistant, providing a
physical description of the kind of boy he wanted, and was a founding member of
the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).
Ginsberg assailed me in the Barb, contending I was "obviously in need of a good
f**k." (My fiery redheaded boyfriend insisted on writing a reply that I was not
lacking in that regard).
Ginsberg, elevated to countercultural sainthood, and the gay French
post-modernist philosopher, Michel Foucault, were highly visible Pied Pipers of
"The Age of Contagion."
Lecturing at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1970s on the
"history of sex," Foucault was notorious for spending his nights at leather S&M
bars on Folsom Street in San Francisco.
Enticing young gay students and anyone else toward what he called "limit
experiences" that led them to degrees of sexual degradation they normally
avoided, Foucault mused, with all the trappings of academia, that the only
novel invention in all the sex of the post-Stonewall era was "fisting."
The words, "love" and "romance," of course, never appear in any of Foucault's
teachings, only "pleasure" and "limit experiences."
Foucault reportedly laughed cynically upon hearing the news that what became
known as AIDS began appearing in the summer of 1981. In 1983, he returned to
the Bay Area, manifesting symptoms of AIDS, himself, which did not deter him
from almost surely spreading the virus at nightly bath house engagements until
his death in mid-1984.
Overwhelmed by all this, I chose exile from the gay movement in mid-1973, and
bailed out. Subsequently, despite the urban gay culture's descent into
dangerous sexual excess, no one in the gay movement spoke out about it. No one.
Not one leader. Not one, except for a single angry playwright, Larry Kramer who
wrote Faggots in 1978 and was accused, as I'd been, of being "sex negative."
The terrible truth about AIDS is that, while outside factors introduced and
perpetuated the 1970s sexual excesses, virtually every lethal infection was
passed by one gay person to another. We did it to ourselves, even after knowing
the consequences. Our actions caused the "Age of Contagion," starting about
1972, and our movement failed, abjectly failed, to prevent within in our own
ranks what became the horrible, premature deaths of 400,000 of our beautiful,
very own.
To be continued.
.
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