Comments on: COMMENT: Hedonism, HIV and the importance of talking

By: marcolovestar

marcolovestar — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:12:43 +0000

hey alex a superbly written piece. u are spot on with your observations… gay life has gone thru a huge emotional journey since the 70s. drugs too have played huge part in opening up the minds and spirits of queers at certain times in this story. collectively we are at a low ebb, at least it can seem that way from looking at clubland.
i have been finding places away from the commercial scene where queers do it differently… where we talk from the heart and listen to each other, where we meet mind body and soul, and where we find some inner balance and recharging from nature. radical faerie gatherings in europe and the us have now taken root in the uk… at featherstone castle in northumberland: next one in february… http://www.albionfaeries.co.uk; edward carpenter community holds several retreats for men each year, some around a theme, some more freeform. At these places up to 40/50 queers at a time drop the conformities and normalities of conventional society and create queer community, as we would like to live it. faerie events are co-created consensus based, and build from the act of communicating from the heart.

In the spirit of queer community and communication im offering a series of talking circles at the play pit, a sex club on caledonian road, that is also available for non-erotic community events lol…. tuedays until xmas at 7pm, the first was last night, marking world aids day with candles, hugs, and fascinating, sometimes shocking, CONVERSATION. Gay men talking in a sex club! The horror of the idea!… of course not many came, but the night flowed and we all left uplifted. NEXT ONE NEXT TUESDAY. I TOTALLY AGREE… EVERY BIT OF CONVERSATION THAT HAPPENS IS HELPING OUR QUEER STORY TO EVOLVE AND IMPROVE

By: "post-HIV youth"

"post-HIV youth" — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:38:39 +0000

Really well written, eloquent article.

Even as someone who is intelligent, articulate, with a good job and pretty good looking I come away from a lot of clubs, particular south of the river with a lowered sense of self-esteem irrespective of the inevitable comedown. But I still love the scene – attempt to chase the unattainable, work out at the gym and go to Supermartxe. Why is it we still chase this when we know our social scene thrives on insecurities and making ourselves feel bad about ourselves?

How do we save ourselves, both individually and collectively, from what seems like a community spiraling into oblivion? Particularly those who are just coming out or new to London? How do we help them and each other avoid the pitfalls of seeking salvation from low self-esteem, loneliness, anxiety and depression though GHB or fucking bareback at Chariotts on a Sunday morning?

However hard we try, telling people HIV is bad is not going to stop the spread of HIV. It would be great if simply educating people about how awful HIV is would somehow reverse the spread of HIV. The reality is that shouting “HIV WILL KILL YOU”, along with “USE A CONDOM” repeatedly, is not going to stop a 36 hour bender on GHB, ending up in chariots with no idea whether there the guy who just fucked you was wearing a condom and not even caring either way.

The bottom line is that a campaign of fear about HIV, as so many are calling for is never going to stop guys with low self-esteem having unprotected sex. To say the issue is about educating ‘the youth of today who didn’t go through what I went through’ is patronising and irrelevant. The reality is much more harder to confront: it’s about young guys who are lonely, in a big city, unable to communicate their emotions or form meaningful, stable relationships, desperately seeking some way out, even if just for a night. Guys who’s emotional state is battered by images of THE London gay man as peddled by gaydar et al: Brazilian, buff, clubbing T.O.T.O. and having a wild sex life.

To start a campaign of fear totally misses the reason why men are having so much unprotected sex in the first place and misses a need which goes deep into the very existence of our so called ‘community’.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:23:16 +0000

A very perceptive and honest article Alex. Well done! How very strange and perverse that decades of struggle and overcoming intolerance have come to this. Who would have thought that having achieved most of the rights we fought so hard for to be accepted by the mainstream, that we would only discover that our greatest oppressors were never those outside of our community but within – each other!!! How callous and uncaring have we become as a community that we can seemingly turn a blind eye to the ignorance that has fed the normalization of HIV and in turn its rampant spread, and the many drug overdoses that seem to be claiming vital young lives on a near weekly basis? There is an undercurrent of loneliness and despair that pervades certain aspects of our scene, particularly that centred around the Vauxhall hub/ghetto, which is leading many gay men, particularly the young, into life-endangering modes of behaviour. Yet we seem content to allow it to fester while we sit transfixed in front of Gaydar or upgrade our plasma screens and iphones to the latest model. The sad thing is that the low self-esteem of such men today is not fed by a discriminating mainstream populace but by each others’ self-centred pecking order of superiority in the gay scene’s so-called social hierarchy. In blending into the mainstream we have lost the spiritual compass that drove us and, in so doing, have adopted the worst material excesses of society in the process……

By: Paul Shetler

Paul Shetler — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:31:22 +0000

i agree with every word of this article.