Reading Notes Sexuality: Week #15

Julio Capó Jr., “Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship Among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978-1994,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29 no. 4 (Summer 2010): 78-106. Jennifer Brier, “Affection is Our Best Protection: Early AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Gay Liberation,” in Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 11-44. Capó -- Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978–1994 “One might imagine that the gay and lesbian Marielitos, or Cubans who entered the United States from Cuba’s Mariel harbor, would aim to conceal their homosexuality to better their chances of being admitted into the United States. Pinilla, however, openly expressed and practiced his homosexual- ity on the military base where he was temporarily housed. Homosexuality may have officially been grounds to exclude one from entering the U.S., and consequently from achieving American citizenship, but most 2 In fact, the evidence suggests the U.S. did homosexual Marielitos like Pinilla had a different experience. not deport a single Marielito solely based on his or her homosexuality. (79) “While some recent scholarship has explored the effects of sexuality in shaping American immigration policies, very little has addressed the tension between the Cold War imperative of welcoming antiCommunist exiles and the immigration policy of barring homosexuals.4 The growing and fairly nascent field of queer migration studies has demonstrated how sexual identities and behavior (i.e., “performances”) have been interpreted, negotiated, and even compromised to achieve the goals of a particular state. In turn, research has also shown how (homo)sexuality has altered national objectives in complex and often converging ways.5 Susana Peña’s important work on the Mariel community has demonstrated how Cuba and the United States perceived the homosexual Marielitos and their individual gay “performances” in distinct and sometimes overlapping ways.” (79-80) Argument: “The essay ultimately analyzes the relationships that existed among immigration, nationality, and sexuality by examining the experiences of these Cuban exiles. In particular, it examines the role of the Refugee Act of 1980 in regulating and facilitating the homosexual Marielitos’ fate in the U.S. In doing so, it complicates the “state’s gaze” on homosexuality as the U.S. negotiated its larger national goals of antiCommunist rhetoric in response to the Mariel boatlift. The evidence suggests that the United States drastically shifted its long-standing anti-homosexual stance on im- migration and citizenship to reconcile its position as a refuge for those fleeing Cuban Communism.” (81) “Research demonstrates, as the above quotes suggest, that the Mariel boat- lift was a clear episode of the Castro regime’s “institutionally promoted homophobia.”17 Ian Lumsden has argued that the boatlift was a strategic and “explicitly homophobic campaign by the government” to purge Cuba of ho- mosexuals.18 Some American reports written from Havana also demonstrate that the Mariel boatlift was regarded as an attempt to purge homosexuals from the island.” (83) “Castro constantly referred to the Marielitos as “lumpen,” a version of the Marxist term “lumpen proletariat,” which further explains the “criminal” and counterrevolutionary stigma he attributed to the exile community.In this regard, the Castro regime regarded the lumpen proletariat—which included homosexuals—as counterrevolutionary individuals who did not represent the diligent, virile, and altruistic proletar- ian man. Homosexual “lumpen” openly flaunted their sexuality and could not properly contribute to the Cuban Revolution because they lacked the “revolutionary genes” to which Castro referred.” (84) “The Castro government largely based its in- stitutionalized homophobia on the notion that homosexuals, particularly effeminate men, represented the antithesis of Cuba’s virile machismo and hyper-masculine “Revolutionary” man.” (85) “Indeed, the hangover from the “Lavender Scare” of earlier decades greeted gay Cubans when they reached the U.S. The U.S. gay community’s fear that the Marielitos would not be admitted into the United States did not sub- side once the Cubans reached Key West, at the southern tip of Florida. The American gay press perpetuated the concern that Marielitos—particularly gay Marielitos—would be refused admission into the U.S. and sent back to Cuba.” (85) “While homosexuality remained official cause for barring an alien from the country, the status of “criminal” also played a major role in permitting or barring a Cuban from residing in the U.S. Under the regime of Fidel Castro, the definition of “criminal” was often at odds with American definitions of criminality. The alien’s “criminality” was ultimately a relative term in the American context. An officer stationed at Fort McCoy revealed that Marielitos suspected of being “hardened criminals” were sent to federal correctional institutions. They were held in these facilities until the Justice Department heard their case and determined their fate in the U.S.” (85) “The case for criminalized homosexuality in Cuba is equally complex. Although homosexuality was not an official crime in Cuba by 1980, many homosexuals in the island were often arrested for seemingly arbitrary “social crimes.” This too mirrors the way local police forces treated homosexuals in the U.S. during the pre-Stonewall era that preceded the gay liberation movement.” (86) “Arenas recalled how his identification as a homosexual hastened the process of receiving permission to leave the country: “Since the order of the day was to allow all undesirables to go, and in that category homosexuals were in first place, a large number of gays were able to leave the Island in 1980.”38 There is evidence that many of those that came to the U.S. via Mariel forged fictional records as criminals— identifying themselves as burglars, murderers, rapists,even andCIA agents—to leave Cuba.” (87) “Juan Carlos, who served several sentences in Cuban prisons for theft, estimated that about 30 of the 120 people who came on his boat were homosexual. He also noted how Cuban officials asked many prisoners, pre- sumably including the incarcerated homosexuals, to leave the country. He also claimed that officials threatened the prisoners with more years behind bars should they refuse to leave the island during the exodus.42 Other reports also indicate that the Cuban state threatened homosexual “criminals” with more years in prison if they did not leave through Mariel.” (88) “Scholarship has demonstrated how Castro’s government defined the women’s rights movement in Cuba within the regime’s interpretation of the Marxist-Leninist model. In this regard, “ad- vances” in Cuban feminism were often negotiated and restricted to best suit the principles of the Cuban Revolution.” (90) “In August 1960, Fidel Castro created the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). In part, he did this to indoctrinate women as vital members of the Cuban Revolution and, on the surface, to address gender equality. The FMC seems to have been primarily occupied with mobilizing women into a Similar to the German Women’s Bund revolutionary consciousness.” (90) → “President Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980.56 The Act changed the definition of “refugee” to eliminate the “geographical and ideological restrictions contained in the prior law.”57 The Act discarded what Congress perceived as a bias in immigration policy that favored aliens who fled a Communist regime.” (91) “American policy and was particularly shaped in Cold War terms, so that refugee or asylum seekers hailing from Communist nations—including Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union—were more easily admit- ted into the U.S. On the other hand, Haitian refugee and asylum seekers, for example, were often denied admission. The U.S. defined them as economic rather than political refugees/asylees. This policy partially stemmed from the United States’ historical policy of privileging nationals from Commu- nist countries while opting to spare its ideological allies, such as Haiti, the humiliation of its citizens being granted refuge.” (92) “Since Carter and Congress had made no such suggestion for the Cubans specifi- cally, on May 2 the government ruled that the guidelines of the Refugee Act of 1980 would not permit designation of the Marielitos as refugees. They would instead be judged on a case-by-case basis. The Carter administra- tion was under considerable pressure to admit them, however, especially since the president had publicly welcomed the Cubans into the country. As a result, on June 20 the Cubans and Haitians who entered the U.S. during the Mariel period were granted a special classification that facilitated their admission to the country as “Cuban-Haitian entrant (status pending).”65 The Mariel exodus thus helped perpetuate the practice of treating Communist Cuba as an exception to U.S. immigration policy.” (92) “A product of McCarthyism and overall fears of Communism, the McCarran-Walter Act integrated language that reflected fears and concerns over national security, family stability, and sexual deviancy. It is in this context that a holdover from the American “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s—or the era’s residual attitude that linked political fears of Communism to social anxieties over homosexuality—greeted homosexual Marielitos.” (90) Use of homosexuality as a psychiatric clause in working with Public Health Services (PHS) to allow IHS to potentially not allow immigrants and refugees into the country on the basis of their sexuality “The INS historically consulted with the Public Health Service (PHS) to provide the medical language that reflected existing psychiatric concerns with immigration. While homosexuality was never listed as ground for exclusion, immigration laws, made in consultation with the PHS, broadly ex- cluded homosexual aliens under psychiatric clauses. The McCarran-Walter Act, for example, barred aliens who exhibited a “psychopathic personality” or “mental defect.”” (93) “With the whole world watching, the issue of what to do with the ho- mosexual Marielitos tested the authenticity of the administration’s anti- Communist and humanitarian platform. Should the federal government deny entry to the homosexuals, the administration would run the great risk of appearing inconsistent, contradictory, and even hypocritical in its condemnations of oppressive regimes and political systems. However, the gay Cubans’ fate appeared to be sealed when the government announced it would not classify the Marielitos as “refugees.” Following the decision to designate the group as “entrants,” the future of the homosexual Cubans was once again unclear.” (94) “In addition, some officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for Hu- man Rights Patricia Derian, noted how barring homosexuals from entering the United States was inconsistent with the Helsinki Accords of 1975 that surfaced in the midst of détente international politics.” (95) “Following the approval of the Carter administration, the Justice De- partment instructed the INS to forego the questioning of an alien’s sexuality. The new policy would consider barring a homosexual only if he or she made “an unsolicited, unambiguous oral or written admission of homosexuality.”83 One’s mannerisms, form of dress, or possessing “gay” paraphernalia, such as a gay pride button or literature, would no longer warrant further inves- tigation.” (96) THE QUEER MARIELTOS’ CONTRIBUTION TO THE U.S. GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT “The PHS, however, had recently clarified that homosexuality would not constitute such a deviancy. The Hill case provided a new precedent, although it would not be applied in the same fashion throughout the country. According to the Hill decision, an INS officer could not rely on his or her own interpretations of what consti- tuted a “homosexual.”88 As a result, courts determined the fate of suspected alien homosexuals who qualified for exclusion under the new policy.” (97) “Although this was a major step forward from the previous decade of legal ambiguity, the Act also paved the way for future contentious interpretations of the law—such as in cases of aliens living with HIV or AIDS.” (98) “In February 1981, the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, established by Congress in 1978, recommended that no changes be made to the McCarran-Walter Act and its subsequent amendments that ex- cluded some aliens from entering the United States—namely Communists and homosexuals.” (98) “It is clear that government officials feared that the U.S. policy of excluding gay and lesbian aliens on the basis of their homosexuality was incongruent with the human rights initiative the Carter administration promoted to the international community, including the Soviet Union. To avoid appearing insincere about its commitment to human rights in the midst of an ideo- logical war against Communism and socialism, the Carter administration was forced to embrace a policy—albeit on a more temporary, emergency basis than subsequently—that would allow homosexuals to enter the United States without restriction.” (100) “The political discourse that surfaced following the Mariel boatlift eventually facilitated a change in the federal government’s policy of barring homosexuals from entering the United States. While the clause that excluded homosexuals from entering the country remained in the law until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, the Carter administra- tion’s informal change in practice forged a new precedent which established that homosexuality was no longer deemed a mental illness. In addition, the change also suggested that the notion of an exclusionary clause premised on one’s sexuality was contradictory to the administration’s own international human rights initiative and the anti-Communist ideology it advanced in the late Cold War. The Marielitos played a significant role in the propaganda schemes of both Cuba and the United States. The homosexual communi- ties from both countries ultimately benefited from these schemes, or the ideological messages, that both governments conveyed. They were allowed to leave Cuba as a result of their homosexuality and, in turn, allowed to remain in the U.S. because they fled a Communist nation. As a result, the Refugee Act of 1980 served to facilitate their stay in the United States. The homosexual Marielitos continued to influence U.S. immigration, refugee, and asylee procedures—easing the long-standing antigay policies of the U.S.—years after the Cuban government purged them from the island.” (101 Brier -- Affection is Our Best Protection: Early AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Gay Liberation “By reversing the feminist proverb “the personal is political,” a phrase that had acquired meaning in the feminist movement of the previous de- cades, she suggested that lesbians and gay men needed to see their collec- tive health as a political problem, even if only some of them were actually sick or personally affected by illness.” (12) “In effect, these feminist writers, both male and female,shaped their response to AIDS around both their personal experiences with AIDS and their role as activists in the social movements of the postwar era, particularly feminism, the women’s health movement, and gay and lesbian liberation.” (12-13) Argument: “In this chapter I explore the arguments made by these earliest AIDS activists who used the medium of the gay press to communicate a message that AIDS provided a moment in which to return to gay liberation, not run away from it. … Instead of calling on men to curtail sexually liberated be- havior, they sought to reinvigorate gays and lesbians in the fight for politi- cal and cultural recognition as well as to push for equality of diverse sexual practices. These women and men argued that sexual expression itself held the potential for containing the spread of AIDS. Numerous gay and lesbian periodicals echoed the theme and struggled to describe a new disease to their readership. In the process, these writers created a conversation about the possibilities for queer community and queer politics among people thinking about and studying AIDS.” (14) Argument 2.0 and Historiographical Context: “This chapter ultimately argues for a reconsideration of the periodiza- tion of both the gay and lesbian liberation movement and the AIDS activist movement. While historians have paid considerable and productive attention to finding the roots of gay liberation earlier in the postwar period, the same kind of inquiry has not been applied to the other end of the period.” (14-15) “I do not disagree with accounts that ultimately explain how fights for gay liberation became fights for gay marriage over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, but the material cited in this chapter suggests that AIDS actually allowed liberation politics to define the gay and lesbian social movement well into the 1980s.” (15) BEFORE AIDS “In his memoir about AIDS, Richard Berkowitz writes that “coming of age in the 1970s, many young gay men outside cities had no concept of sex without danger — of being found out, disgraced, arrested, beaten up, etc. STIs [sexually transmitted infections] were just one more thing to be added to a long list.” (15) “Written a few months before the first cases of AIDS would be reported, Vachon’s discussion of “bonds” suggested not only his stance as a gay liberationist but also his comprehensive view that gay sexual health encompassed mind, body, and spirit. He concluded the piece by explaining, “Most medical people who don’t enjoy [anal intercourse] will tell you that it’s hazardous and painful. A lot of gay medical people see the damage that is done subsequent to no relaxation, bad lube, and excessive drugs to help ‘get into it.’ But the pleasure is real . . . trust me!” (17) “While this method had a real impact on men who defined bar life as central to their sexual liberation, it had less of an effect on men who were either excluded from this world, such as men of color or poorer men, or those who chose to avoid such obviously “gay” places and figures.” (17) “Edwards envisioned Meridian as a “further step out of the closet” be- cause it stood on the shoulders of liberation and at the same time disci- plined its unintentional consequences for men’s health.32 Membership in this type of gay community was not secured simply by becoming visible to others. Instead, men had to be willing to change sexual practices learned in the closet to achieve membership in a community of identity.” (18) “… implied activating existing friendship and commercial networks that were themselves shaped by racial and class segregation. Even though he talked about the needs of “straight, bisexual, and gay men and women who are not monogamous,” he more regularly deployed an image of a homog- enous fraternity.37 By imagining themselves as “a discreet fraternity,” Me- ridian members attempted to elevate themselves above the out-of-control, uneducated gay men they imagined surrounded them.38 As “gentlemen” they took part in a social contract that entitled them to certain privileges not accorded to the larger gay public. The “naturally masculine” nature of the “gentlemen’s agreement” resonated with a long tradition of male chiv- alry and republican values accorded to specific racial and class fractions.” (19) “Over the course of the 1970s, the efforts undertaken by people like Bolan and Vachon made gay physical health more central to the definition of healthy gay sexual expression. They were driven to make these changes by a strong desire to expel all vestiges of the homophobic pathologizing of gay desire. They combined their medical prescriptions with ideas that had roots in gay liberation, particularly that pleasure was a step toward health. At the same time, however, these examples of gay health activism before AIDS betrayed the potential for the exclusion of people who did not identify as gay or use their sexual behavior as a way of organizing their lives, a problem that would grow over the course of the next decade and is explored in more detail in the next chapter.” (19) AIDS: THE MAKING OF A CRISIS “He wrote, “Sexual frequency with a mul- tiplicity of partners—what some would call promiscuity—is the single overriding risk factor for developing infectious diseases and KS. This is not to say that sexually responsible individuals can’t get the same diseases, nor does it imply that sexually active individuals are going to contract these conditions because of immorality.”41 While the quote implied that promiscuity did not necessarily cause KS, Mass emphasized the argument that all gay men were at risk.” (20) “Within the gay community, a . . . crisis of ideology is threatening to explode. With much confusion on all sides, advocates of sexual ‘fulfillment’ are being opposed to critics of ‘promiscuity.’” (22) “During the next three years, gay men and lesbians, health profes- sionals and laypeople, argued about the best way to change the course of the AIDS epidemic and, in the process, articulated and embraced a wide range of responses to what was still a medical mystery.” (22) “Some looked to the legacy of gay liberation as defined by a kind of brotherhood among gay men, while others reminded gay men that their diverse sexual practices did not have to involve the exchange of bodily fluids; still others called for a drastic change to gay sexual culture. At the time, these differences produced animosity between community members, but in retrospect, it is possible to see com- monalities among the perspectives.” (22-23) MEDICAL Q&A “Having fewer sex partners—‘Don’t have less sex—just have it with fewer people.’” (23) “1982 article published in the Native Sonnabend wrote, “Pro- miscuity is a considerable health hazard; this is not a moralistic judgment, but a clear statement of the devastating effect of repeated infections. If we are truly to serve our patients, we must admit that our desire to be non-judgmental has interfered with our primary commitment. With this understanding, we can move on to provide the care that our patients de- serve.” (24) “Smith refused to assume that gay men were essentially careless and instead believed that a highly conscious sexual freedom could be safe. In so doing, Smith resisted the idea that gay men were unwilling to adjust to AIDS at the same time that he recognized that “sexual abandonment” needed to play a role in helping people change their actions. In the end, Smith emphasized that men could redefine what positive sexual expression meant.” (24) “Vachon claimed, “The pleasure we give each other through sex is directly proportional to our sense of responsibility for each other.”60 In other words, prevention would only be effective if an ethic of caring and a fraternal model of community was tied to sexual pleasure.” (25) “These varying accounts among health care professionals suggest that no consensus yet existed about how to deal with AIDS. Despite the disagree- ments, a majority of health professionals recalled several of the principles of gay liberation, namely the need for gay sexual expression and the ability of gay men to act with concern for their own health as well as the health of their partners. In this respect, most of the medical professionals writ- ing between 1981 and 1983, except Sonnabend, represented gay men not as selfish but, rather, as capable of healthy sexual behavior.” (26) GAY COMMUNITIES RESPOND “Still others thought AIDS provided an opportunity to combine the struggle for sexual freedom with the struggle for gender freedom. Because most of the writer-activists defined themselves as gay liberationists, the disagreements became even more vociferous, even though most of the po- sitions were compatible.” (26) “Murray refused to blame sexually active men for behaving in ways that brought on disease and ended with a call to action that in- voked the struggles of gay liberation of the 1970s: “The challenge of AIDS [is] enormous. The personal toll is tragic and immeasurable. Yet there is a potential in the AIDS crisis to catalyze the gay movement to new levels of consciousness, organization and loving bondedness.”65 Echoing the words Ron Vachon wrote in the same paper two years earlier, Murray reiterated the idea that gay liberation provided for a political solution to a health problem.” (28) “Contrary to Mass’s rhetoric, Lynch and Lewis argued that gay men were capable of making their own decisions about how to maintain sexual freedom and health at the same time. In their letter to GCN, Lynch and Lewis wrote, “Gay men are quite accustomed to accepting various risks of contract- ing STDs, and to weighing them carefully against the pleasure and nour- ishment we gain from multiple sexual partners.” (29) “We believed in upsetting the social order and in creating alternatives to traditional gender roles, definitions of sexuality, and hierarchical power structures of all kinds.” (30) “By the 1980s, GCN provided a space for self-defined progressive or Left-leaning gays and lesbians to debate how to continue the political and cultural gains of the 1970s. Beyond that, as will be clear later in the chapter, GCN also encouraged lesbians to write about AIDS, a decision shared by no other gay periodical.” (30) “Callen and Berkowitz’s attack on promiscuity by name potentially blinded readers to their equally substantive argument about gay liberation in the age of AIDS. The authors reasoned that the commercialization of gay sexual life in the 1970s and 1980s, a situation made possible by the devolu- tion of gay liberation into gay markets, produced the conditions for gay men to develop AIDS.” (30) “In refusing the viral explanation, Callen and Berkowitz’s argument re- sisted a very common image in 1982, one that continues to this day, that AIDS came from somewhere outside the United States. In 1982 that place was thought to be Haiti. Callen and Berkowitz looked for a less exotic and racist explanation: “But to go even further and imply that ‘we’ got ‘it’ from the Haitians is a particularly ugly example of the Western tradition of blaming calamity on the Third World. And it’s bad science. . . . What promiscuous urban gay men, intravenous drug abusers, hemophiliacs, and Haitians all have in common is a pattern of accumulation of risk through re-infection with common viruses.”82 In a 2005 interview Berkowitz confirmed this link when he replied to a question about how the overload theory applied to AIDS in South Africa: he said that sex without prophy- laxis created an overloaded immune system and caused AIDS in gay men, and the chronic poor health associated with poverty caused AIDS in South Africa.” (31) Callen and Berkowitz: “We are not suggesting legislating an end to promiscuity. Ultimately, it may be more important to let people die in the pursuit of their own happiness than to limit personal freedom by regulating risk…” (32) “That other gay men agreed with Jurrist and Reeves was confirmed by a new but fast-growing field of social scientific study, the psychology of AIDS. In November 1983 the AIDS Behavioral Research Project conducted a survey that seemed to confirm their position that many gay men had no intention of limiting their sexual contacts. Interviews with 1,550 gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area documented how the emerging AIDS crisis had and had not changed sexual behavior.88 Researchers found that while changes in men’s behavior depended on their “pre-AIDS” sexual practices, such as being in open relationships, going to bars, and regularly using the bathhouses” (33) “Homosexuality provided men with a unique sexual outlet: They did not have to participate in a culture that considered only marital, monogamous sex acceptable. Jurrist believed that this kind of individualistic behavior continued the struggles of gay liberation, allowing men the possibility of real desire. His individualist, laissez-faire claims resonated with a tradition of male heterosexual privilege at the same time that he called attention to the positive health consequences of sexual liberation.” (34) “Individuals had not only the ability but also the obligation to control their sexual actions for the sake of their gay brothers. Instead of simply rejecting unfettered sexuality (what they called promiscuity), Callen and Berkowitz worked to reclaim other aspects of gay liberation such as the idea that love could be fleeting and still healthful.” (34) “In their conclusion, Callen and Berkowitz argued that a solution to AIDS would come from rewriting the relationship between love and sex. They argued that gay liberation in particular, and sexual liberation as generally practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, decoupled sex from love. Consenting people could and should have sex regardless of whether or not they loved each other. However, in the 1980s, Callen and Berkowitz claimed that by putting love back into sex, even if the love was entirely fleeting and lasted for the time it took to have sex, a different kind of liberation would be possible.” (35) → Moral Panic “Callen and Berkowitz’s addition of the word “with” after “fucking” changed the sentence’s meaning. While “fucking” someone usually meant that you were having sex without intimacy, “fucking with” suggested that intimacy could be fleeting, temporary, and substantial at the same time.” (35) “While Callen and Berkowitz’s approach suggested a fraternal model of community, it was not the same as Meridian’s ideas about brotherhood of a few years earlier. Emphasizing inclusion rather than exclusion, the authors claimed that their manifesto spoke to the particular needs of economically disenfranchised gay men. They argued that disseminating “information about how diseases are transmitted” would allow all gay men to make deci- sions about their health even if they were not “welleducated and well-off ” or did not have access to “proper health care.” (36) “All of these writers, Callen, Berkowitz, Royal, and the Red Queen, sought to decouple gay sex from materialism and recalled the powerful rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front, an organization formed in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The front hypothesized that open and honest gay sexuality was John revolutionary, and that gay liberation had the potential to free society from what historians D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have called “the manipulative images of consumer capitalism.” (37) “In 1982, he had to think about how his actions affected the larger gay community. With a sense of responsibility and duty to fellow gay citizens, this early idea about AIDS prevention valorized gay sex because of its po- tential to resist individualism, rejecting what these writers identified as a selfish potential of gay liberation.” (37) “Whether or how we regulate the sexual practices of mem- bers of our community is a decision for our community. We have been stereotyped as ‘self-destructive’ because of our excessive sexuality, but any tendency toward recalcitrance is borne out of years of having our sex lives scrutinized for immorality, psychosis, and disease.” (38) “The language of brotherhood also invoked a communal responsibility for AIDS that provided the grounds for men not blaming one another for diseases that they had transmitted, knowingly, unknowingly, or in igno- rance of the ultimate consequences.” (39) “Gordon and Slate saw potential in the idea of brotherhood as a strategy for the reinforcement of community and empowerment, two of the most basic goals of gay liberation. In so doing, they both relied on an older understanding of brotherhood that signified a familial bond that went be- yond bloodlines and altered the meaning of the term by removing it from a heterosexual context. This stance mirrored the liberationist literature of the preceding decade where gay and lesbian activists echoed the language of black power. The gay liberationist rhetoric of brotherhood held radical cooperative potential as well as the possibility for exclusion.” (40) “Fain’s rhetoric illustrated the power of a new guard/old guard analysis that becomes less clear when we look at the historical sources. While he as- serted that liberation veterans waited to no avail while a new generation of service providers ignored their elders’ political analysis, the distinction between service and activism did not appear so sharp in the historical sources.” (42) CONCLUSION “This chapter has detailed how gays and lesbians tried to define and respond to what they experienced as an emerging medical and political crisis. Because they had so few palatable medical models, activists looked to political positions articulated in the 1970s for answers about what sex could look like. Emphasizing the need for new relational models, they re- fused to be constrained by false dichotomies between sexual fulfillment and critiques of promiscuity. Whether in the form of attacking commercialization, calling for brotherhood, embracing feminist partnerships, or collecting “fuck buddies,” the first AIDS activists imagined and brought into being unique forms of sexual and platonic partnerships.” (43) “As responses to AIDS moved away from these debates about the meaning of gay liberation and focused on behavior modification alone, such as condom usage, AIDS activists and their audiences left behind some important ideas, ideas that held the potential for broader social and politi- cal change, a topic that will be explored at length in the next chapter.” (44)