GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JANUARY 23, 1998

SPEAK OUT

Don't mince words: This is death by stupidity

by Mubarak S. Dahir

In the past few years, an alarming phenomenon has been on the rise in the gay male community: It is commonly known as "barebacking."

Barebacking is one of those horrible cuphemisms, like ethnic cleansing, terms that the general public have been duped and coopted into using simply because they cannot or choose not--to face the responsibility that less sugar-coated language imparts.

We made the collective decision to accept the term ethnic cleansing, rather than genocide, to describe the events in Bosnia, because it assuaged the guilt of our inaction there.

In the same way, gay leaders and AIDS leaders have been wheedled into using the term barebacking because we somehow don't want to face the ugly truth of what is once again on the increase in our community.

I'm sick and tired of hearing the word barebacking. It should be banished from the vocabulary of any person who truly cares about the direction of the AIDS epidemic.

Gay men, along with those who work in and run AIDS agencies, have a particular responsibility to stand up to the lethal seduction of this idiotic euphemism. We all need to stop calling it barebacking, and start calling it what it is: Unprotected, unsafe anal inter-

course.

If you must substitute a phrase for it, use a fair one that tells the facts about what is going on. Call it "death by stupidity.” Call it "I'm going to throw away my life because I refuse to think of the consequences of my actions." Call it what it is. Call it irresponsible.

Oops! There I go, I said what has become a dirty word in the politically-correct police state of gay and AIDS dogma.

First Tribe

Right now, AIDS apologists are shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at my harsh words. "You're being judgmental," they are saying, their chins dragging the ground as they gape in amazement.

You're damn right I am. If it is judgmental to say that continuing to have unsafe anal sex, that putting your life and the life of your partner at risk, that refusing to abide by the

If it is judgmental to say

that having unsafe anal sex and putting your life and your partner's at risk is irresponsible, then I am guilty as charged.

simple and easy and proven HIV prevention rule of using a condom is irresponsible, then I am being judgmental. Guilty as charged.

I would rather be guilty of saying the unpopular truth than helping to cover up its ugliness. And that's exactly what happens every time someone uses the deceitful euphemism barebacking.

Whether we admit it or not, every time we use that word, we reinforce the absurd notion that the action of unsafe anal sex is not so bad. We reinforce the fallacy that the condom code is out of date, that what is going on is somehow not as tragic, not as dangerous, not as foolish, not as angering, not as heartbreaking, not as frightening, not as needless, not as risky as it really is. After all, if it was, would we be making it sound as innocuous as a horseback riding lesson?

It amazes-and saddens me that at the

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end of nearly two decades of death, after the loss of tens of thousands of lives of gay men, after too many funerals and memorial services, it has become unacceptable to talk about personal responsibility.

Isn't it amazing that after all we have been through as a community battling this killer virus, you are branded a bigot if you say the obvious truth: Gay men need to stop having unsafe anal sex.

But we don't want to come out and say things that plain and simple. We might be called insensitive. We might be called conservatives. We might be called "sex negative." We might be called traitors to the gay cause. Never mind if you are none of them. Never mind that you don't have to be a rightwing zealot to recognize unprotected anal sex is killing gay men. The threat of stigma is enough to keep us quiet, to shepherd us into doublespeak collusion.

I understand where the fears come from. From the very beginning, people with AIDS--especially gay men have been branded as "guilty victims” who "deserve" their fate.

We must not allow that to happen. People with HIV and AIDS must always be treated compassionately and lovingly. Discrimination and prejudice against people with AIDS must always be confronted, never tolerated.

But to do so doesn't mean we have to deny the plain truth that the increasing practice of unsafe anal sex is causing a rising rate of new HIV infections among gay men, and it should be stopped.

If we do that, we become nothing less than accomplices to death.

Mubarak Dahir is an openly gay columnist writing for the Philadelphia Daily News.

Correction

A January 9 story about Cleveland Public Theatre's New Play Festival incorrectly described playwright Mary Weems as lesbian. Information was added to this story from a previous one about Mary Player, an openly lesbian poet who performed in an earlier festival which Weems organized. Weems is heterosexual. The Chronicle regrets the error.

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