We had to reach homosexually active men who saw their genital activity as only a sexual component of their lives, not as a social or political identity.
How could we do it? Well, one of the most effective means that I found was to do precisely what the right-wing moralists were accusing us of doing: produce pornography.
Most of the original warnings given to sexually active people concentrated on a list of proscriptions, of don’ts absolute and so rigid that they were dismissed by all but the most panic-stricken and defeatist people who read them. The inability to create a new, positive approach to sexuality meant that people just couldn’t live with it at all.
The first step, then, was to create a positive image for safe-sex acts. Those of us who could write erotica and get it published suddenly found ourselves as interested in making it desirable as we were in communicating its disease-preventative need.
