There are lots of reasons to be thrilled, to be afraid, to be for, to be against, but my hunch is that one powerful reason lurking behind the extremely negative reaction of some gay men to a drug that nearly prevents HIV infection is that it forces sex back into the public conversation about gay men after we’ve spent so much time and energy convincing the world that all we want to do is get married and have children. We’re just like you! Just don't tell anyone that we generally have a lot more sex than you.
Switching the conversation in the last ten or fifteen years from our right to have anal sex to our right to “marry the person we love” has been a boon to acceptance of homosexuality, obviously. “Straight allies” are constantly coming out of the woodwork. Our president loves us. Our lawyers are Republicans. We’ve come so far by talking about weddings, and children, and love, and families. Now you want us to talk about semen and rectums again? Whoa.
The fact that Larry "stop having sex!" Kramer is so vehemently against this drug is, well, a red flag.
It’s an incredibly complex issue, an almost incomprehensibly fraught moment for our community, and my theory is just a hunch, maybe not even a fair one, and I might change my mind. But I think the notion of injecting right now into the mainstream conversation the idea that gay men still want to have “consequence-free sex” makes lots of gay men -- who as a group have become more and more conservative in the wake of the plague years -- very apprehensive.
