The Younger Generation Says Yes To Sex

(Published in Newsweek, March 12, 1990)

For some gays, the slogan for the 90s is Just Say Yes. In New York City, 5,000 condoms rained down on guests at a "lust party" in a nightclub. Other clubs show gay-porn videos, and hire go-go boys, dressed in skivvies and combat boots, to dance on bar tops. One gay group plastered posters of nude men on the San Francisco Federal Building last summer and an activist peppered the Yale University campus with similar artwork last fall. For nearly a decade AIDS has suppressed the collective libido of gay men. Now an avant-garde movement - partly political, partly just trendy - has sprung up in New York and San Francisco, encouraging gays to practice safe sex but also to cultivate and celebrate their sexuality.

AIDS has struck hardest at a generation of gay baby boomers, now in their 30s and 40s. Watching friends and lovers die, survivors lost interest in the night life and sexual freedom that defined the disco and bathhouse hedonism of the '70s. For many, monogamy and celibacy became a way of life. "The only social activity was going to funerals," says Dave Ford, a gay journalist in San Francisco. Now a generation gap has emerged: many younger gays do not identify sex with death and believe sexual expression is a right worth fighting for, even though they may risk losing some of the public sympathy engendered by the AIDS crisis.

The pro-sex campaign doubles as a protest movement. During the controversy over the federally funded exhibit of Robert Mapplethor- pe's "homoerotic" photographs last summer, Sen. Jesse Helms proposed legislation prohibiting further funding for what he called "obscene" art. As a protest against Helms, a group of San Francisco artists called Boy with Arms Akimbo decorated the Federal Building. William Dobbs, a New York lawyer and a founder of the protest group Art Positive, was arrested on misdemeanor charges for the Yale protest. Art Positive, says Dobbs, "stands for militant eroticism. We'll put our images and our culture out there for everyone to see."

Young lesbians also are part of the new sexual revolution. In the '70s, gay women, who in large numbers were feminists, tended to pair off, settle down and stay at home. To most of that generation of women, pornography was an absolute taboo, but now lesbians even have explicit erotica magazines. "Historically, radical feminism portrayed pornography as exploitative," says Laura Thomas, 23, of San Francisco. "Now we're saying it can be beautiful." Young lesbians are shattering other gay shibboleths. Many mix with gay men in the same clubs, and wear makeup and more feminine clothes. In New York, gay women on the fashionable cutting edge call themselves "lipstick lesbians" or "girlie girls," and wear clothes that both mock and salute the stereotypical past - motorcycles jackets and Hermes scarfs, garter belts and baseball caps. As the pro-sex movement heats up, some alarming trends are emerging. Recreational drugs play a large part in the movement. In New York, Ecstasy is in vogue; in San Francisco, the drug of choice is speed. "The fatal flaw of the sex-positive message is that some gay men are not engaging in safe sex," says Michael Shriver, 26, who works at a gay substance-abuse clinic in San Francisco. "Many of them are so stoned or drunk that their judgment is shot." With any luck, taht number will remain in the minority. In a decade of grim news, one of the few hopeful notes is that the rate of AIDS infection among gay men has been dropping since 1987 - an encouraging sign that safe sex works.

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