Things Aren't So Simple

As a child of the 70s, and seeing how bad things were growing up gay in a parochial, conservative society, I realise that things would have been significantly worse had I been born a decade earlier, and assume that things would have been significantly better had I been born a decade later. Things are rarely so simple, however. Here is a poster found on the streets of Portland, Maine accompanied by the poetic words of David Wojnarowicz.

In 1983 this boy was born into the middle of a deadly epidemic. It would be decades before he understands the severity of his situation and the ghosts haunting his unclaimed and abandoned histories of sexual liberation.

Had he been born decades earlier like his sister, his lifeless diseased body would be just one among hundreds of thousands of other boys just like him rotting in the ground. But he lived, only to inherit a world steeped in fear and hatred of his tiny little body and the desires he would pursue before long.

Feared and hated because he will soon learn what it is like to find pleasure in the naked bodies of other boys. He will be faced with the all consuming anxiety of safer sex paranoia and the panic that ensues when waking up with the most mild of fevers and chills.

But he will carry on despite the daunting “I hope you die of AIDS faggot” taunting because the dangerous pleasures he will intimately know are both sustaining and addictive. “Every time we fuck, we win”, he will someday whisper in his two lovers’ ears, reassuring himself as much as them that every day they stay alive is a revolutionary act; their desperate pleasures becoming the most insurrectionary moments of defiance imaginable in a world that would just as soon leave them for dead…

Makes me think.