eveningsout

March 7, 2008

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

You deserve a heavy

hitter on your team. That's our stand.

An informative history of our elastic buddy

The Humble Little Condom by Aine Collier

Prometheus, $18.95 trade paperback Reviewed by Terri Schlichenmeyer

Back when you were a kid, your mother was a fountain of advice.

When it was cold, she told you to take a sweater. If it was snowing, she reminded you to take your mittens.

When it rained, she cautioned you to remember your rubbers.

On that last note, you should still be heeding Mom's advice.

One item has epitomized gay men in the last quarter-century, and it's not freedom rings or rainbow flags. It's a sheath, glove, prophylactic... whatever you call them, millions of people rely on those little round devices for birth control, disease control, and libido control, if doctors of yore were to be believed in their warnings and recommendations.

Shakespeare's father might have made them, condoms came under fire in the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. Only prostitutes and women of low reputation were said to have used them, but not just for birth control: Columbus and other explorers brought back an explosion of disease, which climaxed during that time. Doctors decried the use of condoms, but smart lovers weren't without them.

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the kerablo bubo

Find out more in The Humble Little Condom by Aine Collier.

While nobody knows who came up with the idea of using a sheath of some sort as a means of birth control, ancient Greeks and Romans knew the family planning benefits of condoms. Because time in the Colosseum was valuable then, the ideal family was small. If men weren't quick to use a device to prevent children, women surely were. Although Collier hints that

condan

Over the years, condoms were easy to have around. Small home factories were erected in most major cities, but nearly anybody with sheep, lamb, or calf intestines and a little lye could make their own.

And then Charles Goodyear came along and rubbers-real, honest-to-Peter rubberswere invented. After that, even Sears had contraceptives in their catalogs. By the 1920s, latex and cellophane gave condoms a longer wallet-life.

While prophylactics alternately were used as birth control and as disease control throughout the years, Collier says that it wasn't until the spread of AIDS that the humble little condom prevented more than inconvenient babies or pesky gonorrhea. Gay men suddenly embraced them as a matter of life or death.

While it's easy to have a ball with this book, The Humble Little Condom is actually filled with fun-to-know asides and in-

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formation that will tickle anyone who's carried one in a wallet, tucked one in a glove box, or gulped his way through a highschool purchase.

Author Collier thoroughly covers everything there is to know about the history of prophylactics and social mores over the last 2,500 years, and she does it partly tonguein-cheek and partly with a professor's eye toward scholarly facts. This is an easy book to read, with short, informative segments and plenty of trivial asides that are almost guaranteed to lighten a wooden mood.

No matter whether you love condoms or hate them, The Humble Little Condom is a fun, quirky book that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who loves odd history or unusual information. Pick up your copy today. It's simply inconceivable that you would miss reading it.

GayPeoplesChronicle.com

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