I hate gay men.  I feel more and more hopeless about our community.  
Turn any corner int he ghetto and you can grab sex, but you have to search 
high and low to find real love.  I hate how narcissistic we fags are, how 
easily distracted from the hard tasks, how absurdly trivial in the face of 
death.  I hate, above all, how we expend so much energy on attracting desire 
and so little on taking care of anyone but our selves.  I don't believe that 
lesbians, faced with the tragedy of AIDS, would have failed as we have failed. 
 That thought alone keeps me hopeful.
	The AIDS crisis has been a part of us for more than a decade, the 
half-life of our community, and is so all-powerful that if any of us survive, 
we will spend the rest of our lives mourning and struggling to understand what 
all the losses have meant.  Half of us--half of our lovers and friends and 
fuck buddies and fantasy objects--are going to be dead by the year 2000.  I 
hat the way that single fact has not yet transformed us into a real army of 
lovers.  We just keep on sleepwalking through this holocaust, one year 
organizing and making trouble, the next selling out and making careers, the 
next turning our backs on it all, dancing and partying and fucking like crazy. 
I hate the way we have no sense of the future, so hell-bent on pleasing our 
selves.  I hate the way we pay so much attention to our bodies, grooming and 
dressing and tattooing and sculpting and finally displaying them, like great 
works of art, on the danc floor at the Roxy on Saturday night, or wherever, 
when everyone is pinwheeling on Ecstasy.  I know how beautiful we all are, but 
that peak moment is so fleeting, and it's not much to build a culture around.  
Still, we're determined to build that beautiful, empty culture.
	I hate the way we have unsafe sex with each other in the night, but 
when morning comes, we say nothing.  More and more, the rule seems to be, if 
you don't come inside anyone  and if no one comes inside of you, that's safe.  
We're hopping on each others uncondomed dicks because it feels so good, and 
because we're so eager to forget everyone who got sick that way, everyone who 
can't walk up the stairs anymore because they have blue lesions growing in 
their lungs, have lost their sight and their hearing and their sense of 
balance and their memories--not to mention their sex drives--to one incurable 
infection after another.  If we actually believe fucking without a condom is 
safe sex, so long as there is no cum involved, then we should have the courage 
of our convictions and make this belief public.  But we're much too cowardly 
and ashamed of what we do in bed.
	I hate the way we flock to have sex in backrooms and sex clubs, drunk, 
on drugs, with little sense of who we are or who we are with, but when the 
department of health or the cops of Channel 4 News threatens to pull the plug 
on the party, we say nothing.  We can have all the anonymous sex we want, and 
proclaim it all a great sexual liberation, but we can't talk about it in 
public, even to each other.  We don't want our mothers to know what sex pigs 
we are.  We don't even want our dyke friends to know how we treat each other 
like pieces of meat, and love it.  We lie all the time about this to our 
lovers, too.  We're so ashamed of ourselves that we can't even defend the 
places where we go to make the great sexual revolution happen.  What heroes we 
are!  What warriors!
	I hate the way sex is always more important than love, the way we have 
no respect for each other's relationships, the way everyman is a possible hit. 
I hate the way everyone flirts with your lover if you have one, and you find 
out who your friends are by learning who doesn't make a pass at him.  I'm sick 
and tired of the terms of endearment among us ghetto dwellers, how we sleep 
with someone for a few weeks or months, then move on to someone else, without 
ever looking back.  Are we such objects for each other that one person can 
be immediately replaced by another?
	I hate the way we are not, as people, very much there for each other.  
All of this makes me feel hopeless.  I fear that we will never come to know 
and love each other, or take care of each other, or fight for each other's 
lives, or help each other to die, or create relationships that teach us 
anything worth passing on to the next generation.  We aren't monsters, but our 
humanity is in grave disorder.  All we really seem to care about is our 
fantasies.  As half of us work out and jerk off in our gyms and our clubs, 
crowd our backrooms and our sex clubs, the other half are getting sick, losing 
the will to live, and becoming the absolute antithesis of our sexual 
fantasies.  How unprepared we all are for falling in love with our own, with 
our imperfections and infections.
	I hate the way we have sold each other out as AIDS activists, with all 
the well-educated and well-connected white fags making names for themselves, 
serving on boards, attending meetings, writing articles, giving interviews, 
becoming known, while women and IVDUs and children and people of color go 
untreated and unrecognized.  Anyone who spent the last five years in AIDS 
activism knows that if lesbians hadn's been there, we would never have paid 
any attention to anyone but rich white fags.  And what have we gotten?  This 
year we got the news that we can't reasonably expect an effective treatment 
for AIDS for the next 25 years.  Are you ready to lose all the men you have 
ever desired or fucked or fallin in love with or loved more than you love 
yourself?  Are you ready to help them die?  Or are you ready to fight for 
their lives?  For the next 25 years?

- Anon.

....................  
 .               .                    	    J. T. Sandone
  .             .           		    Dickinson College HUB 1984
   .           .                            P. O. Box 4888
    .         .               		    Carlisle, PA  17013-0928
     .       .                              (717)240-3273                   
      .     .          			    SANDONE@DICKINSN.BITNET
       .   .        			    SANDONE@DICKINSON.EDU
        . .	
         .      "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy
		every closet door."--Harvey Milk