Gay & Lesbian
Community Notes 

No Sex, Please, We’re Gay Teens 

By Michael Bronski

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This is the good news. Over the past two decades, queer communities have paid more and more attention to the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. We, and they, have fought for high school gay-straight alliances (GSAs) and created state- funded projects like the Massachusetts Safe Schools Program and California’s Safe Schools Coalition. More books, both fiction and nonfiction, are aimed at a gay-youth market, and teen-oriented TV shows, such as “The Real World” and “American Candidate,” feature gay participants. 

Now the bad news. The GLBT movement is seriously failing queer young people in matters of sex. Sure, TV talk show hosts Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have come out and we can all laugh at evangelical Christians targeting Bert and Ernie and SpongeBob SquarePants as dangerous queer role models. But where can young gay men and lesbians learn about queer sex? Probably not from their parents or from their school’s sex-ed programs. Not from safe- sex and HIV-prevention programs that, in recent years, call attention to the dangers of sexual activity. Not from TV shows like the “L Word” and “Queer As Folk” or website advertisements for circuit parties or porn sites that depict silly, overblown sexual fantasies that have nothing to do with human sexual interaction. 

The trouble isn’t learning how to put tab A into slot A or what lube to use or what two women “do together”—most people can figure that out. Nor is it with learning what one likes sexually, which can be figured out through trial and error. Rather, it concerns how to think about yourself as a sexual person, what sex means to you, and how it is intrinsic to your identity, your life, and your relationships. 

Young queer people today are growing up in a world where gay and mainstream culture give them mixed signals about sexuality and sexual behavior. The two historical circumstances that made growing up gay so unique for those born in the mid-1980s and after—the fight for marriage equality and the AIDS epidemic—are also making it almost impossible to have informed, healthy, and sane discussions about sexual desire and sexual activity. That’s because in recent years the clanging of wedding bells and the insistent bad news about HIV transmission (much of it fueled by anti-gay hysteria in the mainstream media) has distorted how the gay and lesbian community talks about sex. Over the past five years, safe sex education, seen from the mostly gay-run AIDS non-profits, has shifted from promoting healthy sexuality and sexual behavior to the “be afraid to have sex” scare tactics of the 1980s. Moreover, the fight for marriage equality—and the elevation of marriage as the idealized pinnacle of appropriate and healthy homosexuality—has moved front and center in gay politics and, to a large degree, in the imagina- tions of young gay people, much to their detriment. 

While the conservative and religious right (and even many moderates and liberals) accuse the gay movement of injecting sex into everything, in fact, the movement has been removing sex from everything. Television shows like “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that win awards from Gay and Lesbian Advocates Against Defamation (GLAAD) present us with images of asexual gay men. Transgender politics generally avoid all issues of sexuality, concentrating instead on gender identity and expression. Now, in a stunning display of political engineering, the gay rights movement has actually taken the sex out of marriage. 

In almost all the community discussion of marriage equality, the word “sex”—even the idea of “sex”—is glaringly absent. Teaching courses on gay and lesbian issues at Dartmouth College over the past five years, I realized that the first year class was born in the mid-1980s. This means that they grew up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, which was continually connected with gay-male sexual behavior. It also means they grew up in a media culture increasingly comfortable with depicting homosexuality. They grew up watching tapes of Tootsie and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and “Will and Grace.” 

They also grew up with the idea that same-sex marriage was a possibility during their lifetimes. In 1986, the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the ACLU suggested that the time had come to launch the fight for marriage equality. By 1993, the battle for same-sex marriage rights in Hawaii was headline news. Since that time, the issue has grown larger than its proponents or critics could have imagined. It is now—like it or not—the most salient political and cultural gay rights issue. Before the current shift in HIV-prevention education and before the advent of same-sex marriage, it was a hallmark of queer life that sex had positive value and that gay relationships were as valuable, moral, and honorable as any connubial union. The discussion has changed from encouraging people to engage in and enjoy sex to how to control sexual activity. HIV-prevention discussions that should be about safe sex now focus on having less sex. Discussions that were once about how to explore one’s sexuality through various types of relationships are now about how (presumably monogamous) marriage should be the goal of all lesbians and gay men. Goodbye, sexual liberation, hello, sexual regulation.  

The connection between AIDS and marriage here is not incidental or accidental. When the AIDS epidemic exploded, one of the first responses to it, both within and outside the queer community, was to urge gay men to stop having sex and to enter into monogamous relationships. Even after the specifics of AIDS transmission became known, much AIDS education focused on curtailing sexual experience altogether. For many gay male commentators, such as Larry Kramer, Bruce Bawer, and Gabriel Rotello, the curtailment of sexual activity was the only “cure” for the AIDS epidemic. 

When the same-sex marriage debates began to escalate in the early 1990s, the “pro-marriage” arguments became eerily similar to the previous arguments about AIDS. Marriage, many of its proponents argued, would help end the AIDS epidemic because it would give gay men the option—even the mandate—to pair up and be monogamous. As noted legal scholar and distinguished same-sex-marriage proponent William N. Eskridge Jr. wrote in his 1996 book The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment: “Human history repeatedly testifies to the attractiveness of domestication born of interpersonal commitment, a signature of married life. It should not have required the AIDS epidemic to alert us to the problems of sexual promiscuity and to the advantages of committed relationships. A self-reflective gay community ought to embrace marriage for its potentially liberating effect on young and old alike.” 

When I talk to my gay and lesbian students and other young queer people, there is no doubt that they are in favor of marriage equality. It’s a no-brainer: why shouldn’t there be equality under the law? But very few of them seem interested in getting married, now or later. That’s true of both gays and lesbians, although the women are more inclined to consider marriage eventually. Such ambivalence stands in sharp contrast to my heterosexual students, many of whom expect to get “hitched” sometime in the near future. 

So what’s the problem? Young queer people are growing up and trying to figure out what sex and relationships are all about. I think most young people know that there are two paths—parallel, but quite different—that will help them gain the life experience they need to find a happy, contented, exciting adult sexuality. The first is a vibrant, active, experimental, and wide-ranging sex life with a number of people through which they will start that endless journey to better and more fulfilling sexual experience. The second is an ongoing, maturing relationship with one, or maybe more, persons through which they will discover not just the intimate pleasures of an expanding emotional relationship, but the physical pleasures that come with it. 

Most of us—excluding a significant part of the religious right, which favors abstinence-only sex- ed—know that people get better at sex not only by having a range of sexual experiences, often with different people, but also by thinking and talking about sex. That is the conversation that gay men and lesbians as a community are not having and that is being stifled by the power and the enormous consequence that the same-sex marriage debate—drained of sex—has assumed in our politics and lives.