June 1991

 

Maintaining a Safer Sex Life

Part One:
Dealing with the Loss
of Sexual Options

Ed. Note: The following article deals
with sexual information in a frank and
honest manner. Rather than censor what is
potentially life-saving information, we
leave it to our readers to exercise their
discretion in reading this material.

By this point, most of us know about
AIDS and safer sex: how to use a condom;
what’s safe and what isn’t; how the anti-
body test works; how HIV gets spread.

Knowing the facts, however, isn’t
always enough. The challenge of making
changes in our own sexual practices, and
then maintaining those changes over a long
period of time, is incredibly difficult.

Ask anyone who has ever quit smok-
ing or gone on a diet how difficult it is to
stick with it. Why would we imagine that
making changes in something as pro-
foundly personal as our sexual activity
would be any easier?

There is one huge difference: while
smoking one more cigarette won’t give you
lung cancer and having one more piece of
buttercream cake probably won’t produce a
heart attack, one incident of unprotected
sex could leave you infected with HIV.

That may point out the most difficult
thing about maintaining a safer sex life: it
isn’t a temporary thing, a fad to drop when
it gets boring or inconvenient. It’s a perma-
nent, on-going necessity. Even though we
could all probably use one, we don’t get a
vacation from it.

So how do we deal with those changes
without “slipping up?” And how do we deal
with it when we do slip?

First, we need to remember that this
whole thing sucks! It just plain isn’t fair to
be expected to deal with it all, to always
have to be on guard, to worry about which
one of our friends will be next, to have to
think about AIDS any time we have sex.

AIDS imposes artificial limits on our
sexuality, and let’s face it, society already
tries to put too many limits on us. It’s sad
and infuriating and annoying and one of the
worst parts of the epidemic.

If we’re going to be able to deal with
the limits, we have to be honest about the
way we feel about them. We need to recog-
nize that we have lost many things to this
epidemic, and not the least of those losses

are the sexual possibilities. If we miss
fucking without a condom, if we long for
the old days when a carefree attitude to-
ward casual sex was the norm, if we find
real intimacy threatened by latex, if we
wish we could again enjoy free-ranging
sexual experimentation...we just can’t
pretend those feelings aren’t there. If we
don’t deal with them, we increase the
chances that we may act on them.

The first step in resolving them is
acknowledging them; it’s okay, in fact it’s
healthy, to be angry about it, to need to
grieve for all that’s been taken away.
Whether that means making sure we can
talk about those feelings with our friends,
or taking up a physical activity that gives
outlet to the anger, or seeing a counselor, or
allowing ourselves to feel just a little sad
about it sometimes — we’ve got to let it out.

Try the following little exercise, either
by yourself or, even better, with a small
group of trusted gay male friends. Set aside
an hour, and on a sheet make a list of
“Things I Miss (or Never Did But Wish I
Could Try) That I Can’t Do Any More
Because of HIV.”

Then really use your imagination and
go to it. Make the most comprehensive list
you can of everything you miss, no matter
how outrageous, sleazy, romantic, or eso-
teric it may be (see why it’s more fun to do
with friends?).

Pretty soon you’ll have a great list that
can range from “being gang-banged in the
orgy room of the St. Mark’s Bat ” to
“feeling my lover cum inside me,” with a
whole lot of stuff in between.

Now go over the list and think about
what you miss most about things (how hot
it got you, how it made you feel), what it
meant to you when it was happening, or
would mean if it could happen. Take each
item one by one. Ask yourself, “Is it really
something I have to give up, or is it safe? Is
there something safe thatl can replace it
with?”

You might be surprised about how
much you can still do safely, perhaps with
some adjustments. If your list included
something like “hot sweaty bodies going at
it,” you don’t have to give that up at all,
because the hot sweaty body part is safe.
Likewise, if you miss having lots of differ-
ent partners, having sex in off-beat places,
or dozens of other different things, they can
still be done quite safely.

Other things might involve more ad-

9

justrnents, but a little creativity can go a
long way. What if your list includes “miss-
ing the taste of cum” (assuming you are of
the school that considers oral sex risky)? At
the very least, you can always enjoy the
taste of your own safely. And perhaps there
are replacements that would be more satis-
fying — if you can’t have somebody ejacu-
late in your mouth, maybe you’ll learn to
appreciate the visual experience of watch-
ing him cum onto parts of your body. Think
about what kinds of trade-offs you can make
that might be satisfying replacements.
Besides activities that might be risky,
we’ve also had to give up activities just
because our community has changed in
response to the epidemic. While multiple
partners; anonymous sex; and the bar, bath,
and outdoor cruising scene may have been
the routine that people followed in the
1970’s — the liberating breaking of taboos
and social inhibitions — they have faded in
prominence as we’ve made dramatic
changes.
(continued on next page)

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