From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 1995 14:28:01 -0400

New York Newsday - Thursday, June 29, 1995
WHY GAYS HAVE A STAKE IN PORN
by Gabriel Rotello

	New York - Rudolph Giuliani's plan to virtually wipe out New York's X-rated
industry by zoning it into the furthest fringes of the city's industrial
outlands has sparked the ire of the many lesbians and gay men. The Empire
State Pride Agenda, a gay lobbying group, is putting its muscle behind an
effort to turn back what looks like an antiporn steamroller. Given the
popularity of Giuliani's proposal, ESPA is not expected to have much luck.
	There are those, including some in the gay and lesbian community, who
question the wisdom of ESPA's effort. They argue that the vast majority of
New York's X-rated establishments serve heterosexual men, not gays, and that
by being just about the only group in town opposing Giuliani on this issue
(aside from civil libertarians), gay people are positioning themselves as sex
radicals opposed to civic decorum and public decency. Let Hugh Grant,
Clarence Thomas and Joey Buttafuco demonstrate to save the sex industry, they
argue. Gays have better things to do.
	But deep connections bind the cause of gay rights to the not-so-pretty world
of porn - important connections even for gay men and lesbians who never touch
the stuff. For one thing, attacks on sex often end up as attacks on
homosexuals, and there's a chilling case in point these days in Cincinnati.
There, the official crusade against porn, having finally driven virtually all
X-rated businesses out of town, has now turned on lesbian and gay expression.

	Last fall, police busted the operators of the town's lesbian and gay
bookstore for "pandering obscenity." The alleged crime? Renting out a video
of acclaimed Italian filmmaker Pier Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom." In
light of that, and the fact that the city's last major antiporn prosecution
was its failed attempt to censor an art exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's
homoerotic photographs, even the conservative US News and World Report
commented this week that "it's difficult not to interpret much of the
antiporn activism [in Cincinnati] as fundamentally antihomosexual." 
	Historically, the sex industry has, for better or worse, been one of the few
businesses that openly caters to gays. That may have sometimes contributed to
the impression that being gay is mostly just about sex, but it has also had
the up-side of helping to carve out at least a small niche where gay people
could explore their sexuality in a modicum of safety from homophobic attacks.
Under Giuliani's rules many of the historic places where that occurred -
including some of the oldest gay institutions in the city on Christopher
Street and elsewhere - would be forced out of business. 
	Those shops are part of the cosmopolitan fabric of urban tolerance, a vivid
expression of the principle that just because certain people have moral
objections to certain things doesn't mean those things can be summarily
banished. That principle is particularly resonant to gay men and lesbians,
since there are so many people who have moral objections both to us as people
and to our gay institutions, from bars to community centers to, yes, sex
shops.
	Finally, porn is a form of safer sex we should be promoting instead of
stigmatizing. That, of course, does not excuse unscrupulous sex businesses
that promote unsafe activity on their premises, as some do. But we should
never allow legitimate concerns about HIV transmission to serve as
smokescreens for a war against sex itself. The challenge for gay men in the
age of AIDS is how to remain both sex positive and safe. Porn plays an
important role in that endeavor.
	So yes, gays have a legitimate interest in opposing Giuliani's war against
sex. Nobody wants to look back someday and say that first the authorities
closed the sex shops and I said nothing - then they closed my local gay
bookstore or bar. That might seem a trivialization of the German pastor's
famous lament, but I bet it doesn't seem trivial in Cincinnati these days. 

Copyright 1995 - Gabriel Rotello
(Gabriel's column appears every Thursday in New York Newsday. His email
address is [email-masked])