AIDS AND SEXUALITY
THEN
DR. RON SABLE
There are gays who are self-hating, who blame themselves. I don't blame them. I blame society. I find it remarkable that any gay feels good about himself. We all grew up in heterosexual families. All the messages were: homosexuality is sick, sinful, and we'll all go to hell. At the very least, we'll get arrested and our lives will be ruined. I feel that every gay person has been an abused child by virtue of being raised in a hetersexual society. We have never been acknowledged as normal people.
We're a sexually uptight society. There are huge battles in schools concerning sexual education, yet we are bombarded daily with sexual messages in thousands of commercials from toilet-bowl cleaners to autos. The images, blatant and subliminal, overwhelm us. But don't dare mention condoms. We are crippled in our approach to sexuality, so our response is backwards. The most powerful country in the world is the most fearful. But we bristle with military hardware. There's no need for me to get Freudian about it. I don't have to.
There are very few gays who have denounced themselves as sinful. Now and then you run across one who says, "It's my fault." The much larger response is to the challenge. Friends care for their dying loved ones. In many cases, where their blood families reject victims, our gay community becomes the family. There are gay men taking in children of others stricken by AIDS. Our community has pulled together extraordinarily and has organized far more effectively than most civil rights groups. In this time of adversity, we have become stronger in many ways.
With the current hysteria, gays worry about concentration camps. They think of Nazi Germany. I don't think its so wild a notion. But I do believe the epidemic has taught people in the gay community to call upon all their inner resources. So it's not all been negative.
I'm proud of what I am. I have nothing to apologize for. It's been a privilege for me to come through the way I did and feel as I do. That's the way it ought to be for everyone. Every black child should feel good about what he, she is. Jewish kids -- in the culture of all these people, there are opportunities for this. It's never been there for gays growing up. Now we are providing it for each other. AIDS has been a devastating blow, but we're making lemonade from the lemon we've been handed.
NOW
WILLIAM HORNBY
Dr. Ron Sable (right) in 1992 at a gala for gay and lesbian policial action committee IMPACT
What I've learned about the AIDS crisis is ... there was no sexual education in schools, even for heterosexual couples, and it opened up this world where [the AIDS crisis] was possible. Especially when they did start doing sex ed in public schools, people were having sex anyway and when they used condoms they were told that condoms were an anti-pregancy device, which they are, but gay people immediately thought, "well I'm not going to get pregnant so I dont need to use a condom." Because of our society's determination not to talk about sex, just in any respect, it left the gay community a lot more suceptible to what was going to happen to them.
I think that for a long time the gay community was very much associated with each other because they were just really lonely. You saw migrations of the gay population to places like San Francisco and mainly you'll notice that New York City has a humongous gay population. In WWII, alot of men were together without women and a lot of them were given the opportunity to explore sexuality that they had never explored before. That's where the migration came from, people fighting in WWII fell in love with each other overseas and had sex overseas and when they came back they were in a country that wasn't going to accept that. So their inclination was to move together and be in communities that became the gay communities.
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Once [AIDS] started to spread through the community and they started to see everyone that they knew dying, the biggest thing that was important that brought the community together was their club life. Going to the club, that was really important to everyone in the gay community because people that they saw there, they weren't ever sure if they would see them again. If they saw their friends they felt lucky, and if they didn't see their friends they assumed they were dead because that's how bad it was.
I completely agree with [Dr. Sable's statements on the sexually uptight society]. As I was... looking at sexual education over the past it just seemed resoundingly clear that nothing has changed in respect to sexual education. Obviously you're told to wear condoms, but it's still very "just dont have sex until you're married" and until recently gay people couldn't even get married. And I personally did not get any of my sexual education from school. I was taught nothing about being gay. I had to go online and figure out everything about what I was through blog posts. That was even really harmful for a time period because the way I'd word things was from a very "I'm a Christian, I'm doing something wrong" stance and I was reading things that were meant for hate and that just made me hate myself more. I shouldn't have had to resort to the internet to get my sexual education. In the '80s that wasn't even available and anything that a teenager would need to read would be in the restricted section of the library or not even in the library.
From the time that I, in my personal experience, that I realized I didn't like girls, I cried every single night. I would pray that it would go away... there was this constant "I'm straight, I'm straight" or "please dont let me be gay" pleading going on in the back of my head all the time and whenever I said "I'm gay" it was this moment of scary honesty to myself and I would feel a bunch of my muscles that are always tense relax, and that would make me cry harder because it was something that I couldn't do anything about. And before I was able to come out to the greater community, I had to get over that self loathing.
Click below to hear a snippet of William's interview.
... it just seemed resoundingly clear that nothing has changed in respect to sexual education... I personally did not get any of my sexual education from school.