AIDS and Traditions of Homophobia

aids has been called a plague. but recently there have been doubts expressed that it is or will become one. Good news, if true. Meanwhile, it is of extraordinary cultural interest that these doubts are being translated into very bad—and very familiar—news about male homosexuals, still the primary victims of AIDS in this country. Theories that the AIDS epidemic will not extensively move into the heterosexual population and the fact that its rate of increase is declining among gays—both of these factors seem only to exacerbate the vituperations directed against homosexuals and, specifically, against what is assumed to be their preferred sexual practice: anal intercourse. It appears that the virus—unless it mutates—cannot be acquired by casual contact; it is contended that it cannot be easily transmitted by vaginal or oral penetration. But all this means for some is that the manner in which the virus nonetheless can most easily be transmitted sexually—by penetration of the anus to the point of orgasm—gives added offense to those very commentators who, it has always been assumed, are altogether unlikely to be infected in this fashion.

It is becoming clear that the stigmatization of the most likely victims of AIDS results from the fear not of physical but of moral contagion, and that the stigmatization validates itself increasingly not on medical grounds but by appeal to the most ancient of Christian abhorrences. I refer to the abhorrence of the church fathers—I doubt if this was ever shared by many of their flocks—for those forms of contraception which not only abjure abstinence but allow a promiscuous commitment to sex as a form of pleasure and not merely, or even principally, as a means of procreation. The discourse against AIDS has become increasingly a moralistic condemnation of homosexuality, empowered by the doctrinal and biblical interpretations of sex and nature that are ancient in origin and, in the Catholic and fundamentalist churches, still extremely articulate. Basically, it defines sins against nature as any sexual act that does not afford the maximum likelihood of procreation. It prohibits oral as well as anal intercourse between people of the same and also between people of different sex. It prohibits the position mulier super virum, because the woman if on top of the man was thought less likely fully to receive and retain his seed (imagine going to confession in those days?); it prohibits sex for pleasure, which means promiscuity within a marriage as well as outside it. Thus St. Thomas writes: "Whoever, therefore, uses copulation for the delight which is in it, not referring the intention to the end intended by nature, acts against nature." There must be no "disorder in the emission of seed," he says, without even having to consider emissions so wasteful as the homosexual ones.

In their designation of what is sexually unnatural, such mythologies seem grotesque and irrelevant to actual human behavior, but no more so now than they have ever been, except for the fact that the people designated as unnatural, sinful, and criminal are also dying in exceptionally horrible ways. But if AIDS increases their suffering beyond endurance it also increases the need to challenge the kind of nonsense about sex which has blighted the lives of so many millions of people over so many centuries and, quite unnecessarily, regardless of sexual preference. To expose and condemn the sexual mythologies currently at work in the discourse on AIDS ought to be undertaken in the hope that we can hand on a less cruel world than we have inherited.

HOMOSEXUALITY AS DISEASE

We are all culture carriers, as Barbara Rosenkrantz remarked in her comments this morning. While thus characterizing the AIDS crisis, I am of course also aware of exceptions, of many decent responses throughout American society. Audiences, and not predominantly gay ones, have applauded dramatizations such as The Normal Heart or A Quiet End or the television dramatization An Early Frost, all of which vividly and sympathetically represent the plight of people with AIDS. Many in the churches (including some in the Roman Catholic hierarchy), people in the theater and...