Queer Tensions in Middle America

I admit, I have, on occasion, harbored some sexual attraction to my friend The Counselor, but I don't know that I've ever really considered him as a prospect for a long-term relationship of greater depth than a casual friendship, largely because over the past few years I've found him to be preachy...and condescending...and arrogant. Which isn't to say that I don't occasionally succumb to those same impulses, but damn it I'm right when I do. I suppose I'm just frustrated with the direction he's taking the little gay young-adult community outreach/ AIDS awareness group he directs. Admittedly, we haven't spoken in depth about the program or the constraints placed upon the directors by their funding agency, but in a nutshell they seem to be teaching that gay is bad, and then they wonder why they can't get anybody over 22 to participate in their events.

This may be an unfair characterization, but damnit, this is my forum and I'll vent my spleen as I see fit. The message that queer kids get from the dominant culture is, largely, that being gay is bad. Gay sex is bad. Alcohol is bad. Drugs are bad. Queer cultures and communities that engage in sex and the use of alcohol and other drugs are bad. Nobody should do those things, and if they didn't the world would be a safer, happier, better place and we could all live in one big, happy, culturally homogenized, whitebread world where we all believe in one theology about one god and had one sexual partner because sex is good and appropriate only when it's used to make babies, and nobody ever uses any drugs. That's the message the dominant culture pumps into schools, advertising, radio, TV, motion pictures and any normalizing social scientific training program, like medicine, education, psychology and law, it can get its hands on. And with a minor variation, that's the same bullshit the funding agency is pumping out through this community group my friend directs (instead of sex only being about babies it becomes a statement about love and affection for one partner).

The message is all wrong, and it's impossible to market an AIDS awareness program to young men when it's predicated on abstinence. That, and the fact that their demographic is 18-30. How many 18-year-olds do you know that have anything in common with a 29-year-old, other than the fact that they both like to have sex with men and share a statistical likelihood for contracting HIV? The entire system just pisses me, and it bothers the hell out of me that I feel powerless to participate in it, let alone change it.