COMMENT: Hedonism, HIV and the importance of talking

Everyone has had the odd lost night once in a while. The type when you find yourself stumbling on to the first tube in the morning or, heaven forbid, precariously negotiating your way through the rush hour commuters. There can be something refreshingly beautiful about the experience. At their best these nights can represent a moment of epiphany.

Gay men have a perhaps not underserved reputation for hedonism. After decades of closeted persecution, the 1970s became our moment of unadulterated freedom. Shame was no longer our default mechanism, but a wasted emotion. The lost nights all merged into one in a gloriously wild celebration of sexuality. We created new ways of exploring our bodies and minds and fathomed out a defiantly different, uncompromising lifestyle – the polar opposite of the society that had condemned us for so long.

The spell was broken with AIDS. A decimated community rebuilt itself from ground zero. Men who until then could have been accused of being shallow and living only for selfish pleasure came together to form a supportive family. There were no other choices – kinship was the only key to their survival.

In an age where we have perhaps lost that need for such an obvious political struggle we have also lost that need to care, communicate and support one another. I say we have lost the need for an obvious political struggle, yet conversely it is blatantly obvious to me what we need to struggle to achieve.

The drug abuse, the unsafe sex, the rise in HIV rates and the crushing loneliness I see on London’s gay scene are perfectly obvious – frighteningly so. Do we really have to wait for yet more new HIV infections to emerge before something is done? How many more GHB overdoses do we need to hear about? Is the elimination of all of this not reason enough to fight?

Just as it was in our darkest hour in the 1980s, communication is the key to addressing these issues. People need to come together and discuss how they feel. People’s behaviour needs to be challenged – the low self esteem that leads to this behaviour must be confronted. Opportunities and forums for this in today’s gay community are few and far in between.

There is something disarmingly faceless about gay London now. The need to conform to a macho stereotype is almost stifling. Difference is often ostracised, or even worse simply ignored. Talking is not fashionable. Look at the profiles on gay ‘dating’ websites with their ubiquitous body shots. Where are the faces?

The figures who dominate these sites are, not infrequently, the ‘Vauxhall Tribe.’ They will spend all week in the gym before hitting the same weekend clubs. Even if they didn’t take so many drugs that they could not remember the weekend’s shenanigans it would make no difference, simply because there is nothing different or worthwhile to remember anyway. It’s a learned pattern of behaviour based on purely visuals – the way they flex their muscles to catch the strobes, that over practised pose in the sauna every Sunday morning.

These lost nights represent nothing new or beautiful. Meaningful interaction and conversation is often non-existent. Yet slouched against the walls of the club or sauna, the unspoken cry for attention often betrays a crushing loneliness and desperation at the inability to find the right words to express numbed feelings.

Sex and drugs have always played a part in our culture and always will. In the past, however, we used them to explore exciting, fresh dimensions of our collective psyche. There was a bold sense of being in control. We used the self discovery they offered to show the straight world that we were as good as them and ten times more innovative – and most importantly, we did this as a more unified body. That pioneering spirit has gone. What’s left is a deadened march of purposeless zombies, as stale and bleak as any Tuesday comedown.

Feelings are not particularly fashionable in modern gay life. They are not commercial. They do not sell magazine copy like the Aussie Bum and Abercrombie and Fitch models. These are the people that we are told to emulate – it is these lives that the ‘Vauxhall Tribe’ strive to adopt with the ruthless gym and drug toil. In their minds the more they stick up their noses and swallow the closer they are to this Peter Pan fairy tale version of gay life.

The images that we are taught to consume as gay men help precipitate the feelings of loneliness, isolation and the subsequent playing out of self-destructive behaviour that is swamping and threatening to obliterate today’s gay scene.

Talking is the only way that an individual can build sustainable, meaningful relationships. It is the only way that we can analyse, deconstruct and make sense of our actions. It is the only way that we can create intimacy and grasp some semblance of solace. The further we move away from the ability to hold a conversation into the impersonality of the merely visual, the further we stray from reality. Everyone needs the escapism of the odd lost night, but when it becomes our only way of interacting, we surrender to an anaesthetized universe that is ultimately as dark and companionless as the depths of any railway arch.

Alex Hopkins is a writer and journalist. His blog can be found at http://alexhopkins.wordpress.com/