a word about gay health excerpted from Gay Bodies, Gay Selves: Understanding the Gay Men’s Health Movement" by Eric Rofes

The past 25 years has been a time when an inaccurate and phobic portrait of gay men as sick and self-destructive has been put forward, accepted as true, and taken hold as a central part of deeply ingrained public beliefs of gay men. In fact, I believe that the very systems created to protect and care for gay men—HIV prevention, addiction recovery programs, even gay-oriented mental health programs—use as foundational building blocks a pathology-focused understanding of gay men. Perhaps most extraordinarily, this same belief that gay men are damaged and dangerous has started to infuse some of the projects that are being created in the name of the “gay men’s health movement.”

In most of America today—including most gay centers, health clinics, and AIDS prevention programs — one can find others who look at gay men’s sexual practices, patterns of socializing, and cultural norms as troubling. Here one can find professionals who’ll examine gay male subculture, shake their heads, and point out what’s wrong. Whether the subculture involves urban street youth, bears, circuit boys, Black MSM’s, bare-backers, muscle boys, or leather men, you can find someone who’ll point out substance abuse, obesity, narcissism, low self-esteem, food disorders, and internalized homophobia as major themes of gay male life in America. You can create programs, write grants, establish projects, and make speeches decrying the “epidemic of epidemics” facing gay men, expressing surprise and dismay at the sexual practices of gay men, and identifying homophobia, internalized or externalized, as the dominant force influencing gay male life today.

But you’re wrong. You’ll win grant funding. You’ll get great press coverage. You’ll sell books. You’ll win community service awards. But you’re wrong.

You would be popular because you would buy fully into the dominant thinking about gay men that reigns throughout American culture today. Whether taking the form of pity or disgust, sincere concern or superficial empathy, blaming or shaming, the overarching understanding of gay men’s lives today is one of tragedy and pathos. Why are they so sex obsessed? Why do they do so many drugs? Why do they use steroids, work out obsessively, and dye their hair as they age? Why do they have to cruise all the time? You’d be affirming the overarching belief that gay male culture is immature, irresponsible, and irrational.

These views have been put forward for over 25 years by both conservative, Radical Right, up-front enemies of equality for gay people, as well as by liberal thinkers who rhetorically embrace the humanity of gay men, even as they condemn it. Why is the initial impulse of so many people—liberals and conservatives alike—to mistake creative and life-affirming pockets of gay male life as sick and self destructive? What is the difference between arch-conservative Paul Cameron citing gay men’s sex, sexual values, and sexual cultures with disgust and disapprobation, and liberal Larry Kramer citing gay men’s sex, sexual values, and sexual cultures with disgust and disapprobation? What is it about the various ways we mix masculinity, sex, and pleasure that must be censured and derided by both the left and the right?

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