Saturday, May. 15, 2004 - 5:48 p.m.
The Fog of Sex

Sex for me is fanatically rooted in the Safer Sex mindset and behavioral codes of the mid-1980s when I came out. This is why I am alive and healthy, I believe. With all that's been on my plate lately, I haven't mentioned this all-important issue for a while. But man, it's so—excuse the pun—fucking important.

Another close gay male friend of mine tested HIV-positive a few weeks ago. I remember him telling me worriedly a few years ago about getting fucked in a sex club. The guy he was with had donned a condom on my friend’s request, but after it was over my friend alarmedly saw that his top man was no longer wearing it, presumably having removed it halfway through. My buddy has been, he says, as safe as I have all these years, but now he is positive, he thinks from this one nonconsensual barebacking incident.

Talk about sobering.

Being HIV-positive, of course, is not the automatic death sentence it once was. But it is still mightily unpleasant, shaving decades off your life and untold daily miseries for whatever time you have left. Another HIV-positive friend of mine who's been living a full, relatively healthy life for a decade or more is now probably on his deathbed: AIDS dementia set in a few months ago, causing him to lose his short-term memory. So he was forgetting—day after day, and hour after hour—that he'd already taken his highly-toxic cocktail medication, kept taking the pills again without realizing it, causing liver failure that's probably going to kill him.

Isn't this a cheery little entry...?

Last night I was in the perfect headspace for some raunchy amusement, so I headed down to my usual al fresco spot at midnight. There, I was the recipient of a competent blow job, one not quite fabulous enough to get me off. My favorite part was, after 10 or so minutes of his urgent attention, disengaging from him in a friendly way that he seemed to take in. I really seem to thrive on these moments of unexpected authentic camaraderie indwelling in the City of Night.

We were ensconced in the clump of bushes, not far from a tall athletic-looking ball-capped stud getting blown by a young short blond man. I stopped to gawk long enough to appreciate the length and girth of the stud’s cock before exiting to wander around a bit. I checked back in at the bushes later, where the twosome were now joined by a muscular dark-skinned man in a tight black T-shirt, who was humping away at the bent-over blond boy’s ass. He certainly wasn't wearing a condom; that much I could clearly see. But was he actually fucking the bent-over blond boy, or was this mere in-between-the-thigh frottage? I hoped for the latter, but it certainly looked like the former to me.

Once, in a similar situation last summer, I spoke up, announced my disgust and disapproval, and stomped off in a huff. Only to talk a few minutes later with the fellow I thought had been taking it up the ass unsafely; he very uncomfortably explained to me that I had not seen what I thought I had. Ever since then, I've been more reticent about speaking up.

So last night I said nothing, stood there and watched this mass of fleshly feverish writhing before me, in dismay yet with a stiffening cock. Then I walked away, wandered over to the concrete stairwell where I’ve licked and been licked by so many boys before; standing there was the Competent Fellator I'd just been with, and it looked like he was about to plow a handsome man leaning over the rail, pants down around ankles, butt offered up for the taking. Would they use a condom?

Sobered, I decided to take myself back home. Witnessing unsafe sex usually puts a damper on my horniness, and ultimately that's what happened.

I have no worries about slippage when it comes to my own commitment to play safe. But I increasingly feel like stranger in a strange land when it comes to how others conduct themselves. I don't get it. I came out in a different era, I guess, when gay men were dying in droves. Now that it is not such a swiftly-killing disease, too many seem not to care very much: about themselves or others.

Sex is such a potent life theme for me. I am heartened by the fact that the thematic has only deepened in the wake of last summer's brutal assault. I don't need to become less sexual to grow; I sense, at the core of me, that the opposite is true. But dammit, everything else that sex can be and reveal and blur and open up and invite into my life is predicated on the rule that if there is going to be any fucking going on, dicks get sheathed.

I—you—can get as screwed up and confused, as fixated and bent out of shape, by all things erotic as we like. As we need to. As we choose to. We can explore as zanily and wondrously as we please.

Condoms make the journey safe.

If there's a fog of war, there's certainly a fog of sex also. A little bit of latex goes a long way to ensuring that, whatever else the anarchy of desire might bring, we won't be dying to get laid.