The Mess of Sex, the Dance of Death

Inter faeces et urinam nascimur
We are born between the piss and shit
Saint Augustine


The news out of South Africa—I’m not talking about the World Cup—is promising if not yet definitive: a vaginal microbicide gel containing a retroviral drug used to treat AIDS has been shown to be effective in blocking transmission of the H.I.V. virus. A two-and-a-half year study of nearly 900 women showed that those used the gel with consistency reduced their rate of infection by nearly 54 percent.

What is exciting about this news, including the fact that the drug is not expected to be expensive, is that it will give women, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and other locales where poverty denies them power, greater control over their own health. They will not need “permission” from their husbands or lovers to vaginally apply the topical gel 12 hours before having sex; intercourse will not have to be stopped, the man will not have to be wheedled into using a condom, and the dark cloud of sexual health will not have to intrude on the moonlight of “romance.”

Indeed, those who apply the gel on a daily basis will have even greater overall protection. But as I read about this report in The New York Times, and as I watched the PBS Newshour where Dr. Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) was interviewed by Margaret Warner about this latest development in the long war against AIDS, I couldn’t help thinking how pernicious are our sentimentally seductive notions about sex as life’s great elixir. Yes, it may well be. But sex is also damned messy.

Our movies never show the mess—the condoms and gels, the intrauterine devices, the towels, the occasional accidents, the wiping up after—so it is hopeless to expect that our television programming will. This, to say nothing of negotiating the responsibility for who buys which products. And that’s just for couples in relationships. Think of how much harder it is when we are in thrall to impulsive moments with one-night stands; men and men as much as men and women, or women with women for that matter, must learn by trial and error how to get over the communication hump before the desire to hump goes ... soft. (A phallocentric way to put it, I know. I beg the forgiveness of women readers.)

All such secret knowledge is taken to be assumed by the adults in the audience, and is withheld from our children at first to protect their innocence, and then to protect us from our embarrassment when we know their innocence is soon to be plucked. I hardly ask for grade schoolers to know the varied uses of KY, but if we are in fact interested in seeing our children adopt responsible attitudes toward sexual pleasure, then we need to wipe the romantic mist from our own eyes.

It’s not that condoms never make an appearance in the movies. But if they do, they are usually a comic device in a teen comedy, a sly reference to STD and pregnancy prevention that signals some basic sense of duty on the part of the loopy kids on screen. Do we ever see anyone actually applying a condom—or at least talking about it while the camera looks elsewhere? Well, yes: Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl miscommunicate about using a rubber in Knocked Up! And tell me, if Ellen Page in Juno was such a wise, world-weary teenager—a Thelma Ritter of the suburban high-school set—how come she didn’t know how not to get knocked up?

We are nearly into the fourth decade of a sexually transmitted pandemic and the last thing our public media wishes to address is the specifics of prevention. It’s not glamorous. Oh, sure, it’s fine for teenagers to watch their silver-screen-stand-ins be bitten by vampires—our current AIDS metaphor in the Twilight series and HBO’s True Blood—but who wants to have these same pretty protagonists dealing with spermicidal gels or ribbed Trojans being put on wrong side out? (Well, if they ever get around to actual sex.) In gay coupling on screen, neither in our DVD pornography nor in our indie flicks, when was the last time one man literally “fucked the shit” out of another, with the consequence of a slightly harried, and perhaps even hilarious, clean up campaign?

The mess of sex is all too human. We are born between the piss and shit. And until we are capable of depicting this, or candidly discussing it, in our narrative art forms—our TV shows and our movies and our novels and our public service announcements—then we are not going to see a sufficiently robust response to the AIDS pandemic which has created orphans in Africa, seen a generation of gay men in their prime disappear, and become a cultural and political fault line wherever religious moralizers and right-wing zealots combine in a Devil’s dance over the graves of the dead.


To read further on the scientific study in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/world/africa/20safrica.html?ref=health

TRUE MINDS and MARRIAGE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116


When I invited a friend to join me to see The Kids Are All Right, I sensed that he wasn’t persuaded by my description. It’s a satire about a lesbian couple whose teenage children go in search of their biological father. When found, Dad enters the picture and disrupts family relations. I thought my good friend might at least be persuaded by the presence of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore co-starring as the mid-life lesbians navigating the entry of a sensitive but testosterone fueled male into the geometry of their family configuration. No deal. I had to see the movie on my own.

I understood my friend’s hesitations. For those of us who came of age after Stonewall but before AIDS, gay liberation didn’t mean entering into middle-class institutions like marriage. In fact, the idea of marriage seemed foreign if not inimical to notions of sexual freedom.

Yet The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s rueful look at the blessings of gay/lesbian family life, is interesting for what it tells us about the way we live now. Well, the way some of the LGBT bourgeoisie do. And the truth is that gay men and lesbians who have children together by whatever route look shockingly like every other middle-class family. Tell this to the constipated right-wing moralizers who support DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which includes a roster of politicians who argue that same-sex marriage is an attack on the institution of the family and marriage itself.

Au contraire, Mary. Today, same-sex marriage is a mirror of the heterosexual version, with the exception that same-sex parents might raise their children to be tolerant of, and perhaps even welcoming to, people who are different in any way. This, happily, is true of some straight parents as well.

So it is galling to be on the side (at least on the principle of equality before the law) of same-sex marriage—only because too many rights attach to marriage which LGBT people miss out on: from rights of inheritance to Social Security benefits. It is galling to have to oppose an act of the 1990s which was passed by so-called upholders of family values. Might we conduct a survey of how many of the 342 in the House of Representatives and how many of the 85 in the Senate who voted for DOMA in 1996 had at least one divorce to their “credit,” how many were in fact serial monogamists, how many adulterers, how many closet cases, etc.? To say nothing of this same Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419 (DOMA in legal speak) being signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton, hardly a model citizen when it came to marital fidelity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Here are DOMA’s most crucial provisions:

1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. (DOMA, Section 2)
2. The federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman. (DOMA, Section 3)

My own indifference to the issue of same-sex marriage was longstanding, and in many ways it was a response to the zeitgeist of my youth, when the Bloomsbury Group of the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf chief among them, was being rediscovered. Having read Nigel Nicholson’s remarkable Portrait of a Marriage, which recounted the bohemian union of his queer parents Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West (one of Virginia’s inamorata), I could hardly have responded otherwise. If being gay meant you couldn’t marry, and if (straight) marriage meant a lifetime of compromises both social and sexual, then you had better marry for companionship and put sex in its proper place: outside the domestic setting.

Here is Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage writing of his mother’s love for Violet Trefusis:

Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did ... She was a rebel ... and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?

Let’s watch what happens next. Now that Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston has declared it unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate against Massachusetts same-sex citizens who are legally married within that state, we find that the Obama administration is likely to appeal. Must it?

If it does, we can be sure that bastion of propriety, the Supreme Court, will take up the matter. Uh-oh. All bets are off.