Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs – World AIDS Day

‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs’ hosts a World AIDS Day special, including a gay scene ‘Older & Younger Discussion of HIV’. Patrick Cash writes on what the event is about. 


Being gay, being a drug user and being HIV positive all have one thing in common: whether you’re just one, or all three, you can still be fucking fabulous. But it’s often surprisingly difficult for people who aren’t gay, don’t use drugs or aren’t HIV positive to see past the paint drying and understand gay doesn’t mean deviant, drug user doesn’t mean addict, and HIV doesn’t mean AIDS. And so another factor unites the gay, drugs and poz: prejudice.

Pride exists to show the world how fabulous LGBT people are, and happy in their sexualities. Rose McGowan may make negative comments about gay men dancing around in Speedos, but come on, Charmed was cancelled in 2006 – Rose who? Babes, your ever-lengthening rock climb back to cultural relevance ain’t gonna be through bashing the gays.

Yet for a gay teenager discovering his sexuality for the first time, outlets like dancing in Speedos at Pride are sparse. It’s not like you shoot your first load over whatever hardcore gay anal porn Google for an iPhone delivers, and then rock up at school the next day in a ‘Fists Across America’ T-shirt. The next stage, from hitting puberty to however long it takes to come out, involves performance.

You’re pretending to be the perfect, straight supermarket product. Even if you are the campest thing since Alan Carr dressed up Cher’s Chihuahua in pink stilettos, there’s still a strong likelihood that you’ll deny your sexuality at some point during your adolescence. This creates not only a gulf of intimacy with your family and friends (referencing David Stuart’s theories), but it’s also a silencing of your own voice; essentially you’re living your life like Paris Hilton on auto-tune.

Nowhere does this stigmatised silence around being gay rear its rubber-gagged mouth more than in the muffling of gay male sex. That rimming scene in Queer as Folk is still probably the most explicit TV has got, a series now fourteen years old. No one’s seeking to shove a gay cock down every mouth, but the lack of speech around the subject contributes to the widespread myths around anal sex in general; in particular that it must involve a lot of literal shit. See my arts review of the National’s John this week.

Then there’s coming out. Finally, you’re free. You’re in London, you’re gay, and the scene’s before you like a glittering sports day of holes to pole and poles to vault. But behind the glitter, it’s a massive, very anonymous city and sometimes a lonely city. So ‘when in Rome…’, and the Romans, you’re finding out from your hook-up app, take a fuckload of drugs. Maybe you’ll try mephedrone or G or crystal meth to fit in.

Or you might try them, as gay porn star Kayden Gray said in our Young People’s Discussion of HIV, ‘to connect with people’.

Hedonism and partying are hardly gay-only pleasures; straight girls in bunny ears vomming after one-too-many VK Blues abound in Leicester Square, as there are Essex lads buying overpriced MDMA in Elephant & Castle. But pleasure can be chased for the wrong reasons, especially when the drugs are intertwined with a sex that may reflect rippling psychological shimmers. Problems can arise when the drugs in question take away inhibitions, and rational thinking, and bothering to reach for condoms.

Intimacy is one of the key issues slipping through and under these words, like coiling snakes and ladders.

Intimacy is created, on a surface level, by the sharing of speech and speaking of secrets. As well as the intimacy of two people together, there is also the bonding intimacy of a community. This is why we’ve set up the community forum ‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs’, where we talk about gay sex, drugs and HIV, because they exist, they’re important to us as gay men and anybody should be able to have their say.

On World AIDS Day, we’d love for you to come and join in the sharing, whether you want to speak or listen. All welcome.

 

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Dylan & Jack, Writers & Podcasters

Dylan B Jones and Jack Cullen are two writers and close friends who met as freelancers for Gay Times in 2010. “Dylan & Jack” is their podcast in which they relay their adventures on the London gay scene today.

Episode 8 of their podcast was entitled “London’s Mephedrone Meltdown” and so the boys will be revisiting and developing this discussion.

https://soundcloud.com/dylanandjack/dylan-jack-episode-8-londons-mephedrone-meltdown-and-desert-island-dicks

 

Tom Perry, National AIDS Trust

“NAT (the National AIDS Trust) is the UK’s leading policy and campaigning charity dedicated to transforming society’s response to HIV. We champion the rights of people affected by HIV and campaign for positive and lasting change.

Drugs have always been both a well-being and HIV prevention issue. However, over the past few years, patterns of problematic drug use among gay and bisexual men have been changing.”

 

Greg Mitchell, Writer & PrEP advocate

“Though we may not yet have a cure for HIV, and may not yet have a vaccine, we do now have something that can stop us being infected. For me it seems like a miracle, and I would like to dispel the myth that those men who go on PrEP are behaving irresponsibly, when actually the reverse is true.”

 

Dan Glass, SHAFTED?!

Dan Glass is an award-winning activist, performer and writer. He mobilises on a range of issues whether racial, environmental, social or economic. Dan is a graduate and educator from the Training for Transformation.

SHAFTED?! is an audacious, daring and unashamedly deviant HIV cabaret show, exploring and exposing the realities of HIV in today’s society.

 

THE OLDER & YOUNGER DISCUSSION OF HIV

Following on from our ‘Young People’s Discussion of HIV’ in September, there will be a short panel discussion of HIV, and a Q&A, featuring two older and two younger well-known figures on the gay scene.

 

Stewart Who?, Writer & DJ

I’m unsure if LGBT youth are interested in listening to the experiences and ‘wisdom’ of a greying gayer like myself, but I’m always curious to hear what the kids think. Frank chat between the generations is one of the best ways to maintain and nourish what we loosely call a community- and HIV/AIDS is still OUR hoo-ha, like it or not. It has to be said, I learned an awful lot off the old clones smoking weed at the back of The Colherne in the mid ‘80s.

 

David Stuart, Drug Use Advisor at 56 Dean Street

24 years living with HIV. My HIV tainted my sex and polluted what should have been an innocent rite of passage. My HIV robbed me of my innocence. I shared my HIV with my gay brothers; my HIV made me a killer. My HIV made me untouchable to half of my community, and a chem-play thing to the rest. My HIV destroyed me, and my HIV re-made me. My HIV tears my community apart in prevention debate, and unites it in crisis. My HIV stole my health… For a while.

But I got that back.

I also have a voice, an opinion and no shame.

 

Sam DMS, DJ

If the younger gay community had more of an understanding as to what this virus is and how important it is to know your status I think maybe it would encourage people to get tested more often and know their status. Talking about HIV is almost taboo with some people and I think it is this that needs to change! Let’s talk about it peeps!

 

Pretty Miss Cairo, Performance Artist 

I remember being at school in a PHSE lesson with the teacher giggling every time she referenced the penis. I don’t, however, remember being told about the ins and outs of HIV and AIDS, or many other important things for that matter. Education is important, and we must continually learn and grow as we get older.

 

• ‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs – World AIDS Day’ is on Monday 1st December at Manbar (79 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0NE) from 7.30pm. Free entry. Sign up for a five minute slot at the venue, or online at:  www.facebook.com/LetsTalkAboutGaySexAndDrugs 

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