Gay Home, Stay Lives

Monkeypox, COVID and the cult of homosexuality

If you need a crystalline example of modern American society’s utterly schizoid relationship with homosexuality in general and gay men in particular, look no further than this earnest, completely sincere writeup from the New York Times about the earnest, completely sincere anguish of much of New York City’s public health brigade:

The spread of monkeypox has ignited a debate within the New York City Health Department over whether the agency should encourage gay men to reduce their number of sexual partners during this summer’s outbreak.

Inside the department, officials are battling over public messaging as the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men. A few epidemiologists say the city should be encouraging gay men to temporarily change their sexual behavior while the disease spreads, while other officials argue that approach would stigmatize gay men and would backfire.

You have to chuckle at the fact that it took an outbreak of a repellent communicable lesionous disease for New York’s “public health” officials to consider “encouraging gay men to reduce their number of sexual partners.” Absent monkeypox, I suppose there’s no other reason in the whole wild world you might tell the boys to dial back the bathhouse visits a bit. It’s just the way it is.

Thirty or forty strange years of sexual activism in this country have left us with this bizarre confluence of “public health” and ideological concession, where some of the country’s most prominently placed epidemiologists are now too afraid to give probably the soundest, most practical medical advice they’ll ever have the chance to dispense in their entire careers. We know at this point how monkeypox spreads: It is appearing almost entirely among gay men, and specifically among those who engage in a considerable amount of anonymous, often group-based sex. All the doctors have to say is: Don’t do that. But they can’t, because that might “stigmatize” these men over behavior for which they should of course absolutely be stigmatized.

The irony is not lost here on those of us who were and remain sharply critical to the official worldwide COVID response. Two-and-a-half years ago they told everyone on Earth to stay home indefinitely in order to fight a virus that, for the vast majority of the world, presents as a common cold. Great public shaming campaigns were launched in which men and women and children were castigated and reviled for meeting friends and family without the government’s official permission. We reoriented our entire relationship with each other, with society, with the government, with health, with risk, with everything—all for a virus with a 99% survival rate. So it doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of respectability for the New York Department of Health to even temporarily tell the city’s gay men to stop having anonymous sex or multiple sex partners.

But apparently it is: “Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,” one activist told the paper. Case closed.

I am not sure if this whole affair is an indictment of our useless “public health” system or of the contemptible way our society approaches sexuality, particularly homosexuality. Maybe both: as it stands you have public health officials well aware of the massive risk factor inherent in this one particular activity, and yet they’re too afraid to say anything about it because for the whole of their lives they’ve been taught to be afraid of saying anything about it.

I guess that’s how you get a near-billion-dollar city health department urging gay men with open viral sores to maybe just consider covering the sores up with a T-shirt before hooking up with 12 other guys. Be sure to make it a rainbow Pride shirt to avoid the risk of stigmatization!