MASSAGE THERAPY

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE June 27, 2003

Brian Keating

3052 West Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44111 216-671-0663

Gay Male Retirement

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I I hope it doesn't fall off

The Wages of Sin

Sex and Disease, Past and Present by Peter Lewis Allen

University of Chicago, $17 paperback

Reviewed by Earl Pike

Peter Lewis Allen has a hybrid past. He has an MBA in health care management from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He has been a public policy associate at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York and authored a scholarly work showing how Ovid's Art of Love is the model for Andreas Cappellanus' De Amore and Jean de Meun's continuation of Romance of the Rose. You won't find anyone reading a copy of Allen's The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose on the beach this

summer.

Allen's unusual hybridization serves the reader well in The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. A surprisingly accessible but well-researched and academically sturdy work, The Wages of Sin explores the complex relationships between sexuality, religion, and culture over the last 2,000 years, focusing on "lovesickness," leprosy, syphilis, the bubonic plague, masturbation and AIDS as points of exploratory departure. Allen is a big smarty-pants (and I mean that affectionately)--he's read the relevant theological and cultural texts in their original French, Latin, German, and Italian. This elevates Wages above more standard ruminations on the history of sexuality.

What emerges is an evolutionary history in which science gradually joined God as the Stern Judge of individual behavior and morality, and in which the advent of AIDS resurrected and reinforced long-standing tensions and contradictions about who will be judged, for what, and by whom.

Worth the book's price alone is Allen's chapter on masturbation, which, until only very recently, was universally reviled as, at best, minimally injurious, and at worst, the devil's handiwork (pun intended).

Consider the words of John Harvey Kellogg, M.D. (1852-1943), who invented the cornflake that still bears his name, announcing that "the most loathsome reptile,

Peter Lewis Allen

JENNIFER TAYLOR

rolling in the slush and slime of its stagnant pool, would not demean itself" by masturbating. Consider the "scientific" devices crafted to prevent arousal (imagine a cock ring with steel spikes on the inside of the ring).

It is a testament to the sheer beauty and power of human sexuality that we have continued to survive such assaults on such an innately human characteristic; it is a cautionary reminder of how fragile our liberties are that AIDS, as only the most recent nexus for sexual castigation, has engendered new rounds of repression.

Allen's concluding chapter poses, at the outset, a question that deserves much more imaginative conversation: "What comes after AIDS?" In the daily trenches of what has become a long war, it's difficult to dream, but some day it will be over, and we will look back-and based on our recollections and accumulated wisdom, begin to live out a post-AIDS vision of sexual health and wholeness. Allen has no articulate answers; at this point, the question is enough. Even more: to raise the question, to preserve the wonder and imagination even while living through this long plague – may be the only thing that preserves us as individuals, and as cultural communities.

Earl Pike is the executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.

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