Subject: Patricia Nell Warren's Latest Column
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 15:40:07 -0500

******************************************************************************
*
******************************************************************************

NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV                         2/19/96

Syndicated column by Patricia Nell Warren

****************************************************************************
****************************************************************************

SODOMY LAW -- DOES IT REALLY  PREVENT AIDS?

By Patricia Nell Warren

A  Montana judge with a lot of guts  has just issued a permanent injunction
against the state's Deviate Conduct law.  District judge Jeffrey Sherlock
 sees no reason to regulate sex in private between consenting gay adults.
  The Christian Coalition and reactionaries  across the state are already
screaming bloody murder about his decision. They insist that sodomy laws
prevent AIDS and deter homosexual behaviour.

Dream on.  Sodomy laws do neither.  This is a lesson  of history that we are
doomed to repeat if we don't learn it now.

As a Montana native, I see the debates on gay sex and disease from my
 viewpoint  on frontier history.  My greatgrandparents, Conrad and Augusta
Kohrs, emigrated to Montana as escapees from  religious autocracy  in
Prussia.  They were "progressives" (the word for liberal in the good old
days) and   helped to humanize  Montana law. My greatgrandmother supported
women's suffrage, and was a partner in the Kohrs  ranch  at  a time when few
"decent" women dared to be openly associated with business.  Her daughter
Katie married Dr. Robert Warren, my grandfather -- a pioneer reformer who
brought humane treatment to the  state mental hospital.

As for the men, my greatgrandfather and his half-brother John Bielenberg
 helped write the Montana constitution and served in the first legislatures.
  Bielenberg lived with the tribes for a while.  Both men kept solid
 alliances with native peoples -- in a time where racism ruled Montana -- and
were scornfully called "Indians" by other  legislators.
  
Historians often whitewash the "good old days."  Montana was one of the
roughest of the frontier states.  Those times were hard on women, blacks,
Asians, native Americans, half-breeds of any kind,  Jews, homesteaders,
prostitutes, immigrants from south or east Europe, queers, pagans, Wobblies,
 and anybody who wasn't a purebred Christian.   

I was born in Helena in 1936, and spent my childhood visiting Augusta Kohrs
till her death in 1945. Four years later, at the age of 13, I first sensed  I
was "different."   The words "gay" didn't  enter my ken  for another two
decades, and I didn't come out  till 1974, when I published one of the first
bestselling gay novels, The Front Runner,  which is selling today. 

History shows me that those who uphold stupid and unjust laws, whether in the
pulpit or courtroom or  legislature, will  lose the respect of thinking
voters.  Over the last century, as the United States finally grew a social
conscience, many bad laws have been changed.  All state law in the U.S.  once
held it  immoral  to let women vote.   Many were the Bible verses thundered
from the pulpit in favor of keeping women barefoot, pregnant and
disenfranchised during my greatgrandmother's youth.  It was also "immoral"
 to  sell mining claims  to Chinese, let labor unions organize, allow white
people to marry non-whites, or let the tribes sun-dance. It was even
 "immoral"  to stand in the way of "divinely ordained" eminent domain -- as
my greatgrandfather  found out when he helped sue the Anaconda Copper Company
 in the historic "smoke case" -- a first effort to stop air-pollution.

In frontier Montana, "morality" was often enforced by  vigilante operations.
 Admittedly even my greatgrandfather  helped the Vigilantes  hang some of the
Plummer gang.   Indeed, the word "vigilante" was coined in Montana.  There
were  lynchings, barn-burnings, dry-gulchings, public hangings, massacres of
striking union members, assassinations of union leaders, and other  things
that cause today's saner Montanans to wince.   Not to mention that gay men
who got outed in the "good old days" were tied to a wagon tail-gate and
 horsewhipped in public, or quietly castrated behind somebody's barn.

Today, Montana and other states  tolerate  women voters, labor unions, Asians
who own property, mixed-blood marriages.  Indeed, the laws now tolerate a lot
 of things that were called "immoral" a century ago!  But two dozen states
 still forbid adult homosexuals to have consensual sex.  Other states are
seeking to re-activate their old sodomy laws.  What does this prove?  Only
that political expediency, and the most stubborn kinds of bias,  can drive
some lawmakers and voters  into the looniest kind of inconsistency.

Sodomy-law advocates aren't consistent when they hype the Bible.  Biblical
texts demand the death penalty for homosexuality.  Lobbyists and legislators
who go by the Bible ought to be  advocating death  for adultery as well --
and for  swearing, disrepect for parents, working on Sunday, worshipping
other gods than Jehovah.  The Old Testament gives American lawmakers a clear
mandate  to codify  all  these things as felonies!  But reactionary
politicians and organizations like the Christian Coalition  don't follow the
mandate,  because it would be politicial suicide to criminalize most
Americans in this broad biblical way.

Sodomy laws don't stop AIDS.  Anybody who says they do has their head in the
sand about how heterosexuals spread AIDS.

AIDS is being spread by the heterosexual sex industry.   But what legislator
is ready to criminalize  the many men, both married and single,  who keep
this  industry going by patronizing it?  Few men are ever prosecuted for
their complicity.  The  "john" gets to  take  his covert infection home to
his  wife, girlfriend, casual date and often the unborn child as well. 

Hard times are spreading AIDS.  Many homeless and unemployed women and
teenagers inevitably turn to prostitution for economic survival. As I  listen
to the Americans who vent  their outrage about  teenage hustlers, I wonder
how many of these self-righteous loudmouths ever fight  AIDS in a real-world
 way, by starting  job programs for hard-up kids.  

Prison rape spreads AIDS, as convictions rise.  This is a nasty subject, but
heterosexuals must wake up to  it.  According to Stop Prisoner Rape, an
estimated 350,000 men and boys are raped each year in our overcrowded
prisons.  SPR emphasizes that straight men usually do the raping.  Possibly
one third of the victims (usually young first-timers) may seroconvert. Most
straight inmates are prohibited by machismo from revealing their rape.  Once
released, these infected men can transmit HIV  to  the unsuspecting wife,
girlfriend, casual date, unborn child. 

Heterosexual machismo itself helps spread AIDS.  Unlike gay sex, which is
pursued  by only a small percentage of American men,  freewheeling straight
machismo  affects a high percentage of men.  A macho man in the throes of
lust doesn't give a hoot about health, his own or anyone else's. This is the
kind of guy who slaps his girlfriend around  if she wants him to wear a
condom.  Even in the most church-going of times, American machismo has
operated  blatantly.

As a child of Montana history, I know that machismo and disease have old,
conmingled roots. Staunch pioneer family men contracted  syphilis and
gonorrhea from  the Victorian sex industry, and  infected their wives and
children with these (then) incurable diseases. Syphilis was the dread plague
 of the frontier. Yet nobody dared to criminalize those heterosexual men as a
group -- those  tobacco-spitting  miners, those  businessmen in mutton-chop
whiskers -- the way  homosexuals have been today!

Gay stigma on AIDS has led to heterosexual lying  that directly threatens all
of us.  From the many celebrity deaths that are  fudged as "pneumonia" in the
obituaries,  one can only guess at the cover-ups among all the
non-celebrities among us -- especially in conservative communities, where a
desperate  family might do anything in its power  to keep an illness or death
 from becoming known as AIDS. 

Sodomy laws also  don't prevent people from being gay.    If it is true that
 heterosexuality can be inculcated and  enforced by law,  then perhaps
legislators should codify all parents of gay kids as felons, and put them in
prison too.  After all, these parents  have violated the sodomy law by their
"failure to teach heterosexuality."

Every gay person my age grew up in defiance of universal sodomy law.    In
1949, when I was a freshman in high school, homosexuality was not publically
discussed.  There were no gay books or AIDS education in Powell County High
School in Montana.  I was never molested by a lesbian teacher.  There was no
liberal media,  no  free condoms -- none of the "permissiveness" that today's
reactionaries love to rant about.  Church conservatism was in complete
control of my childhood  world -- in fact, I was raised in Presbyterian
sunday school.  So how, in  this vast heterosexual vacuum, did I ever "get
taught" or "recruited"  to be a  dyke?

Let's face it -- sodomy laws are USELESS.  They don't even prevent the
estimated 200,000 forcible penetrations that happen annually in our penal
system!  In fact, sodomy convictions  send gay  men into prisons where they
are expected to be "punks" or "queens," and service the "men" (meaning the
heterosexuals).  Prison officials mostly look the other way as they hear the
screams of young straight and gay  men being "turned out."  According to SPR,
many male inmates who went to prison as heterosexuals  leave prison  as
functioning bisexuals.

Who are the advocates of sodomy law kidding?

I feel profoundly  angry  as I see  the worst attitudes of the "good old
days" re-occupying my native state, and my country.   We're back to the
whippings at  the wagon-tailgate.

Attitudes, like wolves,  run in packs.  Voters and legislators  will  find
themselves more and more pressured to accept  the whole reactionary  package.
 Anti-gay goes along with anti-feminist, anti-sex, anti-race, anti-ethnic,
anti-free speech, anti-Earth, anti-any religion that isn't Christianity.  

Montana has already legalized some of  this reactionary package.   The new
English-only law has its roots in the worst historic dirt  of hate  for
"furriners". The recent  disenfranchisement of Montana's tribes through
re-drawing of voting districts is a disgrace, and harks back to frontier hate
for  "redskins". New censorship laws in  several counties are shockingly
invasive.  If my greatgrandfolks were still around, they'd have some scathing
things to say. And my greatgrandmother might fix her blazing blue eyes on the
hordes of  women who don't vote, and ask them if they deserve the rights that
her generation fought so hard to get.

It's hard to believe that the majority of Americans want this kind of
reactionary law, or the  violence and agony  that go with it.  But  are the
saner  citizens in EVERY state willing to do the hard lobbying  to get our
 legislators and political candidates  off this bloodthirsty  reactionary
bandwagon?

The 1996 Presidential campaign will show us ever  more starkly what Remedial
American History 101 will be like, if this trend isn't stopped at the polls.

***************************************************************************

Patricia Nell Warren and her Wildcat Press are one of 20 principal plaintiffs
in ACLU vs. Janet Reno, the lawsuit challenging  the constitutionality of the
Communications Decency Act.

*************************************************
Copyright 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren.  Permission granted to repost on the
Internet.  Permission to reprint in print media must be obtained  by faxing
213/933-0999 or emailing [email-masked].  Warren's books are in print
with Wildcat Press. Visit Warren's awardwinning web page at
http://www.gaywired.com/wildcat/wildcat/htm.

*************************************************