If you didn't think you were worth caring about in the first place, why would you care if you caught HIV? News that rates of the virus in gay men remain stubbornly high is depressingly predictable. Despite the "it's great being gay in the UK" mantra, people are dying, and not just because of Aids. There is an epidemic of chronic alcohol and drug misuse, fuelled by society's homophobia. It plays out in a gay culture that celebrates obliteration and quick, easy sex...
Matthew Todd, The Guardian, Cif.
Oh Matthew, you should know better...
How is gay men going out and having fun on a Saturday night "an epidemic of chronic alcohol and drug misuse"?
I dream about it.
How is having "quick and easy sex" bad?
I dream about it.
Things like this make me glad to be gay.
How is two men dying a "spate of drug deaths in saunas".
I could go on.
"Gay Shame" is a bourgeois concept, but such complaints are not unusual from middle class children.
PS I agree with you that there is a lot of "gay shame" out there, but I think it lies elsewhere, and reveals itself in how we see other gay men, and how you try to damn them and distance yourselves from them.
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Surely "shame" is the wrong word for what they're getting at?
ReplyDeleteLow self-esteem, maybe.
As you say, it's mostly people diagnosing others - rather than themselves - but isn't that what you're doing in your last paragraph (just placing the "shame" elsewhere)?
Homophobia (current and past) obviously has an effect on self-esteem or is likely to.
I mainly come here for the conversation...
ReplyDeleteOooh you're so edgy with your edgy drug message. Like, REAL edgy, edgy, edgy, man. And RADICAL.
ReplyDelete#The revolution won't be anaesthetised
Edgy edgy edgy is what I do.
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"Sure, they're taking lots of fantastic drugs and having untold amounts of hot sex, but are they happy?"
ReplyDeleteANY HAPPIER???
ReplyDeleteSo vague and malleable is the notion of self-esteem that it could as well be high self-esteem as low. I mean, if I'm wonderful and fabulous, then everything I do must be *good*, right, and no nasty viruses can touch *me* because I'm *special*.
ReplyDeleteSchoolteachers who tell kids that rotten or average work is wonderful, "because we have to boost self-esteem", have a lot to answer for.
Society needs to go back to telling everyone that they are worms and dust and of no account.
Sorry?
DeleteIs that you mother?
DeleteOne of the fads of counsellors and suchlike is to attribute what they regard as undesirable behaviour to low self-esteem. Hence here: these guys don't use protection because...because...yeah, it has to be, low self-esteem. Such would-be understanders of human beings can go to astonishing lengths to squeeze the phenomena into the explanatory template they favour, because they think they have an a priori guarantee that their explanation must be true. You may have been put on your guard against that sort of intellectual jiggery-pokery when you did your philosophy degree.
ReplyDeleteJust been enjoying a bit of "quick and easy sex" myself. Not so happy about Chariots jacking up their prices though. Now that's what I'd definitely call "undesirable behaviour".
ReplyDeleteSuch a ridiculous whiny article. He needs a cock up his arse and some crystal meth.
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