Bill Weintraub

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-18-2005

Guys,

There's been a lot of debate about the potential impact of this new strain of HIV.

Given that's the case, you need to use your common sense.

In the late 1970s, I was assured by no fewer than three gay male doctors that there was no such thing as an untreatable STD.

All three were good, caring, intelligent, and certainly well-educated and well-informed men.

And within ten years, all three were dead of an untreatable STD.

In 1979, around the same time I was told not to worry about an imaginary and untreatable STD, I looked around my town -- which was NYC -- and I didn't like what I saw.

A lot of anal and a lot of promiscuity.

It was repulsive to me.

It had nothing to do with the way I wanted to live.

So I disengaged.

And because I did, and because to some extent I was lucky, I'm still alive.

Whatever the ultimate impact of this new strain, the history is clear.

Gay men created this epidemic.

They didn't create HIV, but they created the epidemic.

And now, ignoring the warnings of every public health official, epidemiologist, and MD that I know, other gay men are creating drug resistant and mutant strains of the same virus which was killing their peers by the thousands less than ten years ago.

Ten years is not a long time.

Here's a quote from another article about the possible superbug:

"If people are not careful and don't take measures to avoid infection, there's nothing to say that 20 years from now we couldn't have an epidemic within an epidemic," he [Dr. Bob Shafer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, who also maintains the Stanford HIV Drug Resistance Database,] continued. "It's not of immediate risk but if we don't take measures, 20, or even five to 10, years from now, we'll be very sorry."

[Dr.] Baran[, a specialist in infectious diseases,] put it another way: "This guy had sex with a lot of people and, if this turns out to be a superbug, then we've got a problem."

Right.

And we do have a problem because the reality is that five years is not a long time, but to a guy who's on both crystal and his knees with his butt in the air dying to get fucked, five years seems like forever.

You need to put distance between yourselves and these men.

Because promiscuity kills not only the promsicuous, but those within their orbit.

You could ask my late lover, but you'd have to use a Ouija board wouldn't you?

But you can still ask Mike and Nick, who've had the courage to post about their mistakes.

And never hesitate, by the way, to bring up the unpleasant little matter of a gruesome death to the butt boyz.

We found that out in the debate on gay dot com, when the barebacker got upset with Greg Milliken for comparing people in late-stage AIDS with zombies.

"Give the dying," the barebacker said, "some dignity."

What disgusting and nauseating hypocrisy from a "man" who's out spreading disease and death.

"Death with dignity," guys, in this context, is a bad analist joke.

There's nothing dignified about dying.

Dying is a mess.

Sure, you can and should try to make a person who's terminally ill as comfortable as possible.

But when someone's dying, their body breaks down, and what happens is not dignified.

And "zombie" is an apt description of my lover at the end of his life:

He was brain-damaged, he was blind, his face and body were disfigured with monstrous sores, and he reeled when he walked.

And I said so in that debate because I wanted to punch through this barebacker's stupid, criminal, and selfish denial.

So, like I said, you need to put some distance before yourself and these butt boyz.

That's why we've started to create regional chapters.

To offer an alternative.

And that's why I'm so strict about promiscuity within those chapters.

Because it does no good to set them up if they don't offer an alternative and a refuge.

And if they don't call men to a higher standard, a standard I've termed Heroic Homosex.

Though Heroic Homosex is my phrase, I'm by no means the first man who loves men to recognize that ideal.

Among those who preceded me was one of the most famous and popular German poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Stefan George (pronounced "Gay-or-gah").

George, an ardent fan of ancient Greece, was openly homosexual, and and in the late 1920s and early 30s, by which time he was middle-aged, he maintained about himself a "kreis" or circle of young men of good character and intelligence whom he sought to educate through the socratic method of question and answer.

He didn't prey upon those guys sexually.

He simply sought their moral and intellectual betterment.

Not surprisingly, a number of anti-Nazi resisters later emerged from the "Stefan George Kreis," among them Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

By then George himself had been dead for more than a decade.

But he lived long enough to see Hitler come to power, and to show his opinion of the new regime by going into exile in Switzerland.

When George died in December of 1933, Stauffenberg and others from the Kreis stood vigil around his body for two days and nights to make sure the Nazis didn't steal it and take it back to Germany for burial.

Because George had said he did not want to be buried in German soil, which had been profaned by the Nazis.

(George, by the way, though certainly an elitist, was not a racist: about half the members of his Kreis were Jews; and he abhorred Hitler's crude nationalism, jingoism, and thuggery.

The values which George sought to inculcate in his young men have been described by Ian Young as "creativity, balance, spiritual aspiration, loyalty, friendship, and the study and realization of aesthetic and ethical goals" -- not exactly a recipe for world conquest.)

After the anti-Hitler coup failed in 1944, Stauffenberg, though badly wounded in the fray, was summarily executed.

But he still found the strength to shout out, moments before he died, "Long live our sacred Germany!"

Stauffenberg and George were very much men of their time, and I don't agree with either in every aspect of their beliefs.

But Stauffenberg in particular is an example of a homophilic man whose life was guided by heroic ideals.

It could have been otherwise.

There was plenty of raunch, kink, and sleaze in Germany at the end of the 1920s.

But there was also an heroic alternative.

George offered it; Stauffenberg chose it.

And that's what we're doing:

Offering an alternative.

Greg Milliken

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-23-2005

I have been listening to the Terri Shiavo case all day today, and thinking about it, and I have to say that it reminds me a lot of our own fight with analism.

The people in favor of the homicide of Terri Shivo by forced negligence share the same beliefs that the analists who want to spread HIV do.

And believe me when I tell you that they DO want to spread HIV, and they DO want to kill YOU. How would they act any differently if that wasn't their goal?

1. They lie about the condition of Terri, saying she is in a vegetative state even though several doctors have said she could recover through rehabilitation, which has been (illegally) denied to her for the past 12 years.

Similarly, the analists lie about the nature of HIV, saying that it can be treated with "2 little pills" every morning. Eventually the disease is going to mutate and gain resistance, even if you take your medication every day. That's why people with HIV go from cocktail to cocktail as the disease progresses. They are simply trying to make it seem like it's not such a bad thing that they are trying to kill us. Another lie they use is that you could die tomorrow (so it's not such a bad thing that we are infecting you). While it is true that you could die tomorrow, you cannot prove whether or not you will actually die tomorrow. Then there is also the fact that being killed instantly by a gunshot or being hit by a bus (two of the more likely ways you might die) is significantly more humane than slowly dying from opportunistic diseases after working for years to simply be able to afford your medical bills. Finally, to promote the senseless death of someone in this way is only justifiable if you do not value life, since people who value life would try to prevent death in as many ways as possible. Those who value life would not be frivolous about infecting you with a terminal illness.

2. They support someone who wishes to kill another person even though the parents have already said they are willing to take care of Terri, providing a non-lethal alternative.

Similarly, the analists wish to promote anal penetration as the ultimate form of male-male sex, even though frot is the superior alternative. They support this on the false assumption that everybody wants anal, even when there are large (even superior) numbers of people who want nothing to do with it. They have no reason to want to support anal penetration, they simply do it because it's what they think everyone wants. If this was the case, then it would have been true throughout history, and not simply during the past 30 years.

3. They try to support their claims by saying it's more humane to kill Terri than to let her live in a coma.

Similarly, the analists will tell you that people don't want to, or can't, live a life of abstinence or fidelity. They think everyone lives for the instant gratification of the moment, and simply cannot be forced to aspire to higher ideals. They claim it's better to have us all die from AIDS than to change our behavior in such a way that would completely eliminate the disease from the population of men who have sex with men.

I can probably think of more, but I believe these are sufficient. The older I get, the less I think of my ideals for government as a good way to live my life. True, the legislative and executive branches of the federal government quite legally passed Terri's law in an effort to intercede and save her life, however how much of that would have been necessary if people just did the right thing to begin with? That's what we're trying to do here, provide people with the information and ability to do the right thing so that slow and ineffective legislation never needs to become a solution. Yet people live this selfish, unsustainable life and claim to be justified. They say "to each his own" like they actually have any kind of clue what they are doing. I support the idea that people should be able to do what they want, so long as it doesn't harm others or prevent someone else from living how THEY want to. I have to ask how many people who have anal "sex" have actually thought about what it's like to have HIV or any other anally transmitted STD. Or if they have ever considered the idea of anal fissures and leakage. I wonder if someone watching a "gay" porno ever considers the idea that what they are viewing is a fetish, and that real sex would be much more pleasurable. Or even if people in open relationships consider the thought that there is something intrinsic about sex that ties it to human emotion, even if that emotion isn't necessarily puppy love.

I don't think many people have considered these thoughts. They "live how they want" only in the sense that they have conveniently ignored anything that is not easily accessible to them. It would be the same as saying people in Africa want to starve to death because that's how they are living. In actuality, they are only starving because they have not considered the alternatives.

Worst of all is this final defense they fall back upon. They say that there is no substantial difference between frot and anal. This is again only the case if you have never actually considered frot as an alternative, and it is no different from someone saying "There is no point to Africans learning how to feed themselves better, because we all just get hungry again anyway, eventually." Of course there is reason to consider frot, even if it is not 100% safe from every disease, it is still a far cry better than anal. This is especially true when it is practiced as recommended here, with fidelity and masculinity and ALWAYS frot, never anal.

So it's important to deliver this message to people, otherwise they won't think of it on their own. My friend claims we live in a time of information overload, where we can't even leave the house without being bombarded by advertisements. I'd say just the opposite, we live in a society that spreads message after message with no real meaning, and ultimately no messages have any value. After all, the sexual revolution was about being able to express yourself sexually however you wanted, not having sex until there was no sense of expression left in the act.

We live in a time when good is bad and down is up and liberalism is conservative. Where people who support and celebrate death by their actions get away with calling themselves the arbiters of human rights and social freedom. It's time for those of us who love life, frot and other men to spread the word about what we believe in. It's time to usurp the elitists who want promiscuity, death and anal to reign forever, in the name of some false sense of liberty. The ideas are all here, all you have to do is spread them, and the rest will fall into place on its own.

Greg Milliken

Bill G

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-23-2005

Greg,

I respectfully disagree with your comparison of the those in support of Teri Schivo's right to die, without outside interference, grouping them with those who you claim want to spread AIDS.

As I do not think this forum is the place for a discussion of the Schivo case, that is all I will comment on it.

Bill G

Bill Weintraub

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-24-2005

Hey Greg and Bill G

Thank you both for posting.

You two guys are among our staunchest supporters and I know you both appreciate that we're all on the same side.

Terri Schiavo might seem a little off-topic for our site, but I understand that Greg is seeing in the religiously-motivated fight to keep her alive parallels with some of our own battles with the analists, who are on the whole decidedly secular.

Others of us, however, who may have been through the deaths of loved ones and had to struggle with the sorts of extremely complex decisions facing Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers, cannot help but see echoes of our own situations.

As this article from the Washington Post discusses very well.

Here's an example from my own life.

My mother died two years ago from Alzheimer's.

Her Alzheimer's was very advanced, and at the end of her life we in her family could not tell if she could see or hear or understand anything.

We hoped she did -- but we'll never know.

In addition, at the end of her life she was suffering from fast-moving pancreatic cancer and had had a stroke as well.

She was in a nursing home, and she had a feeding tube.

As it happens, the nursing home was an Orthodox Jewish facility, and the Rabbis who made policy there did not permit the removal of feeding tubes.

That was based of course on a typically strict Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, which does not allow the withholding of food.

But, my mother was, conceptually and administratively, in a hospice within that nursing home, and the hospice did permit removal of feeding tubes.

In other words, the hospice personnel, who were just as dedicated as the rabbis to the comfort and welfare of their patients, did not regard the removal of a feeding tube as in any way unethical.

So: people of good will and good faith may disagree on this issue.

My sister and I felt that my mother's feeding tube should be removed, since she was clearly in pain -- she was on morphine; she could not recover -- both the Alzheimer's and the cancer were terminal; and the tube therefore was painfully prolonging her life to no purpose.

But my mother had a husband, my step-father, to whom she'd been married for 35 years.

He didn't want the tube removed, because he believed she could recover.

To my sister and myself, he was in denial.

Now -- who gets to make this decision?

The hospice, the rabbis, the kids, or the husband?

In my view -- and as we've seen in the Schiavo case, often that of the courts -- it was my step-father's call.

Because he'd lived with my mother for 35 years, and because he was her husband.

I'd left home when I was 17, and though of course I'd visited over the years, he was the person who'd been with her each and every day for more than three decades.

And I knew the sort of suffering he was going through, because I'd lost my own spouse seven years before.

In the event, no decision was ever made about the tube.

My mother died, so far as I know, with the tube still in, though I think the hospice personnel may have cut back on her food based upon certain clinical indicators, such as her body's ability to tolerate what she was being fed.

But as you can see, the situation was very complex, involving two children, a second husband, and two facilities, a nursing home and a hospice.

My mother died quickly enough that the feeding tube never became a major issue.

But had she lingered, it could have.

In short, these sorts of situations, including that of Terri Schiavo, are very complex, and it's important that we not let them divide us.

Because again, we're on the same side.

What concerns me in the Schiavo story is the hypocrisy of the religious right, which has glommed on to the Schiavo and Schindler families, and has been throwing its weight around in Congress, which has responded by tossing our Constitution's separation of powers to the theocratic wolves.

The religious right likes to present itself as "pro-life."

In reality, the religious right is pro-life-on-its-terms -- only.

Not the same thing.

For more than two years I've been explaining to some very highly placed people in the religious right that Frot would save the lives of men who love men (MLM).

They don't care.

To them, the only good MLM is a former-MLM -- someone who no longer admits to having erotic feelings about or sexual practices with another man.

I've also explained to them that their hostility to gay marriage strengthens the hand of the multipartnered pansexualists -- that is, the promiscuous sodomites who are prolonging the epidemic.

Again, they don't care.

They would rather that "homosexuals" die than that they remain homosexual -- or be able to marry.

That's the truth about the religious right.

They are not pro-life.

Their policies, in many areas, are antithetical to life.

And in this instance, after years of preaching to us about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the religious right is actually interfering in a heterosexual marriage.

That's very troubling and actually quite scary.

Because there's no question that given the power -- which the Congress in this instance has given them -- they would do the same all the time to literally anybody and everybody.

For example:

Patrick and I cannot, thanks to the religious right, get civilly married, but we did marry in a Christian holy union ceremony -- with warrior elements of course.

Since we can't be legally married, however, we had to obtain legal documents giving each other the power, among others, to make medical decisions should either one of us be incapacitated.

We did that because we trust each other, and not our families, to make the right decision in that circumstance.

Does the religious right think that two men can be married?

No.

Does the religious right think that two men who love each other should have the right to make medical decisions for each other?

No.

Would the religious right, if it had the power, strip those rights from me and Patrick?

Absolutely.

And they've tried to put through legislation doing just that in a number of states -- to deny us not just the right to marry, but to in any way safeguard our relational rights, which are really just human rights, contractually.

That's no joke.

The religious right wants to dictate not just how the Schiavo's but *you* behave -- in every particular.

And the more power they obtain, the more dictatorial they become.

The sort of legalistic control they seek over ordinary human lives has nothing to do with Christ.

And everything to do with the human lust for power.

So the Man2Man Alliance exists between very two powerful and unreasoning forces: the analist left and the religious right.

Neither with a truly high regard for life.

The analists claim to "honor diversity" and that "it's all good," all the while lying about us and censoring us and doing all they can to denigrate the one sexual practice which would actually end HIV and other anally-vectored epidemics.

While actively promoting anal penetration and other bizarre acts, such as rimming and fisting, and, of course, promiscuity.

Which cheapen life and hasten death.

And the religious right would simply deny us our very existence by any means possible.

That's the truth.

We're pro-life; they're not.

Of course, the Terry Schiavo story is a sad story.

But there are a lot of guys in the Alliance with stories which are equally sad.

Like Mike -- who needs a new liver because of unwanted anal penetration.

And Nick -- who's got HIV because of anal promiscuity.

And Beagle -- who lost his bonded brother to analist rapists.

And me -- who lost my first partner to analism too.

In America alone we've lost about half-a-million people to HIV, most of them young guys, most of whom contracted the disease through anal penetration.

Each and every one of them suffered terribly.

It was not uncommon for example for those men when in late stage AIDS to be fed intravenously -- a grueling practice which could take up to 18 hours per day, and which in general only kept them alive a few more weeks or months at most.

The Man2Man Alliance exists to end these sorts of tragedies.

To put a stake through the heart of analism and its deadly lie that anal penetration is the truest and best form of sex between men.

And to expose the religious right for the hypocritical frauds they are, and end forever the equally destructive lie that men who have sex with men aren't men.

Thus our beliefs and goals as put forth on the Alliance splash page, and which bear re-reading:

The Man2Man Alliance is a coalition of gay, bi, and straight-identified men determined to win recognition from both gay and straight society of the genuineness of their feelings for one another; and of the validity of the expression of that affection through Frot, phallus-on-phallus sex, which is not only life-affirming and masculine but mindful of both participants' shared mutual enjoyment.

The Man2Man Alliance is dedicated to putting forth the truth that two men can have a physically and emotionally loving relationship without any surrender or sacrifice of either's masculinity.

This central premise flies in the face of beliefs cherished by both the dominant heterosexual and homosexual cultures. ...

Like I say, that Man2Man Alliance credo bears re-reading.

For, as Greg said,

It's time for those of us who love life, frot and other men to spread the word about what we believe in. It's time to usurp the elitists who want promiscuity, death and anal to reign forever, in the name of some false sense of liberty. The ideas are all here, all you have to do is spread them, and the rest will fall into place on its own.

Bill G

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-24-2005

Very well said Bill!!

BillG

Bill Weintraub

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-24-2005

Thank you Bill G.

Once again I want to emphasize that I understand where Greg is coming from in his concerns about the Terri Schiavo case.

And Greg is correct that not just barebackers but analist culture in general is shockingly careless of human life and in particular of the lives of men who have sex with men.

For example, in the debate on gay dot com, to which Greg's contributions were enormous, the barebacker claimed that for people who were HIV+ and living in the *Western* world, HIV / AIDS was now a completely manageable illness.

Not only is that not correct -- first of all, in the United States, African-Americans continue to die at a very high rate from AIDS, while the virus continually evolves around the various anti-retrovirals themselves -- but it blithely ignores what's happening in Africa, Asia, and countries like Russia, where HIV continues to kill millions yearly and where mutant strains developed by barebackers in Western countries like the US have the potential, should they get loose in Asia and Africa, to wipe out millions more.

Fact is, from the beginning, the politics and policies of safer-sex and risk reduction have put the preservation of the dominant culture of anal penetration and promiscuity ahead of the goal of saving the lives of gay and bi men -- and the women they have sex with.

As Gabriel Rotello explained in his 1998 book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men

The question then became, if anal sex and promiscuity equal liberation, and AIDS is spreading due to anal sex and promiscuity, how can gay men control the spread of AIDS without sacrificing liberation?

These two challenges created a dual imperative that has characterized gay AIDS prevention to this day: to prevent the spread of HIV, but only in a way that defends gay men against attacks from the right and preserves the multipartnerist ethic of the gay sexual revolution. In what was undoubtedly one of the tallest orders a prevention strategy ever had to fill, safer sex was to be a political and social as much as a medical or ecological construction.

(Rotello, p. 92)

[emphasis mine]

In sum, says Rotello: "The desire to avoid 'transformative' change in gay sexual culture was a cornerstone of prevention." (p. 109)

So: the goal was "to prevent the spread of HIV, but only in a way that ... preserved the multipartnerist ethic" -- i.e., promiscuity -- and anal penetration.

Inevitably, under such a system, lives would be lost.

Because the very two behaviors which spread the disease -- anal and promiscuity -- were to be protected and indeed nurtured; while the only technological intervention available -- the condom -- was well-known to be deeply flawed:

Condoms fail, men have trouble using them correctly, and men don't use them consistently.

At the same time, the gay community and in particular those who conceptualized and developed "safer sex," understood completely that "transformative change," as Rotello correctly terms it, was the alternative.

That gay and bi men could be moved away from anal and promiscuity and encouraged to choose non-anal alternatives and fidelity.

To have done so however would have required acknowledging that without Life there can be no Liberation.

And that behaviors which endanger life are not liberating, but deadly.

The two behaviors in question of course were anal penetration and promiscuity, and that's what the gay male leadership could not and cannot to this day bring itself to do: admit that anal and promiscuity are not liberating, but oppressive in the most fundamental sense, and must be abandoned in order for Gay Liberation to realize its goal of freeing men and women to be their authentic sexual selves.

And to thus bring into being not the phony "communities of men who have sex with men" which are so prominent in analist cant, but a Culture of Men who Love Men.

The latter is a true "culture of life," and that's the difference: if you love a man, you will not, through an act of commission or omission, endanger his life.

Analism is a culture of mass consumption, in which young men dutifully and regularly go to the gym, turning their bodies into commercially reliable products, available to be "purchased" at a bar or online and "spent" in an act of rigorously orchestrated top-bottom, transactional, sex.

Which is why there's so much disease and other types of dysphoria among gay men:

It's easy to be indifferent to the fate of a sexual partner who's a sex toy and eye candy, to treat him like any other disposable and indeed homogenous and interchangeable product.

What difference does it make if he's damaged or destroyed in the act of sex?

Every day fresh analist recruits are instructed in the rigors of top and bottom, sent to the gym to be buffed, and then stationed in the bars, sex clubs, and on the net, ready to be "picked up" and consumed.

That's a culture of death, and Greg and Bill G and every other man who rebels against it is right.

The religious right too, however, while claiming to be pro-life, also embraces a culture of death by denying the right of Men who Love Men to exist, and by consciously pursuing policies which strengthen the destructive forces among gay and bi men.

Only we in The Man2Man Alliance present a true Culture of Life for Men who Love Men, one built upon Frot, mutually pleasurable and simultaneously genital male-male sex; Masculinity, which is essential to the lives of Men; and Fidelity, without which there cannot be true love and thus true life.

Or, in Oscar Vallejo's felicitous phrase:

As Greg said,

It's time for those of us who love life, frot and other men to spread the word about what we believe in. It's time to usurp the elitists who want promiscuity, death and anal to reign forever, in the name of some false sense of liberty. The ideas are all here, all you have to do is spread them, and the rest will fall into place on its own.

Mark

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-25-2005

Some good and thought provoking comments here. I do think it is important, however, that we not get too sidetracked with issues like the Sciavo case where we may have some disagreements. Heck, we all aren't going to agree on every issue here, but we are united in opposition to analist pansexual promiscuity. It is possible to come to this position from different philosophical perspectives---for example, I'm a totally secular atheist unlike Bill W. and Patrick, but when the rubber hits the road we're on the same page.

I appreciate Bill W.'s comments about the religious right. While they yell and scream about the gay "deathstyle," it turns out that they are actually against healthy gay sexuality. It's all just a smokescreen for rancid homophobia, under the guise of concern about public health. In contrast, we are the ones truly concerned about gay men's physical and psychological health. Lifetime celibacy is just not a good option for 99% of us, and it's just cruel to trot that out as the only option for young gay men, who then fall prey to the pansexualists. Even crueler are attempts to change gay men into straight men.

I hope Bill W. was not implying that gay men should stay away from the gym. Certainly a gym routine can be part of a healthy lifestyle, and goodness knows a lot of us could benefit from more exercise. The problem arises when the sole purpose of the buffed bod is to get laid by multiple partners.

Mark

Bill Weintraub

Re: Mutant HIV: drug resistant and vicious

3-25-2005

Hey Mark,

I didn't say gay men shouldn't go to the gym.

I said that the gyms are used by gay culture to turn men into sex toys, interchangeable and disposable:

Analism is a culture of mass consumption, in which young men dutifully and regularly go to the gym, turning their bodies into commercially reliable products, available to be "purchased" at a bar or online and "spent" in an act of rigorously orchestrated top-bottom, transactional, sex.

Which is why there's so much disease and other types of dysphoria among gay men:

It's easy to be indifferent to the fate of a sexual partner who's a sex toy and eye candy, to treat him like any other disposable and indeed homogenous and interchangeable product.

What difference does it make if he's damaged or destroyed in the act of sex?

Every day fresh analist recruits are instructed in the rigors of top and bottom, sent to the gym to be buffed, and then stationed in the bars, sex clubs, and on the net, ready to be "picked up" and consumed.

That's a culture of death, and Greg and Bill G and every other Frot man who rebels against it is right.

So:

Within gay culture, and for most gay men, the gyms function as factories whose sole purpose is to mass produce sex objects.

The gyms in that respect are major players in the intense objectification of human beings which is one of the most distinctive, dysfunctional, and dysforic characteristics of gay male / analist culture.

This is a culture of surfaces and consumption, with virtually no regard for human beings as people.

And while, as Mark says, "a gym routine can be part of a healthy lifestyle," for most gay men it is not.

Rather it's part of a sexually compulsive lifestyle which is focused on the body as a surface and a tool.

You can see that clearly on a gay site like BigMuscle dot com, with its obsessions with body fat and biceps size.

Indeed, when I was living in San Francisco, a gay man, who was otherwise young and healthy, died on the operating table during a liposuction.

Friends described him as very muscular -- a description which his pictures amply supported -- but obsessed with body fat.

The body fat was in his head, and he didn't need that surgery, which was completely elective.

Obviously, for him, the gym was not part of a healthy lifestyle.

It was part of a deathstyle -- and it killed him.

In my view, then, gay men spend far too much time at the gym in pursuit not of health, but of a sexually desirable body.

And that's not healthy.

I support, and have since the early 80s, when I was a founding board member of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project, MARTIAL ARTS and other combat sports training for gay men and indeed for everyone.

Because a martial art is both great exercise and imparts to the student self-defense and assertiveness skills which are virtually priceless, potentially life-saving, and of very great importance to gay men especially, many of whom simply do not know how to fight.

Which is to say, how to be appropriately and effectively aggressive.

That's a very great liability.

In my reply to nakedwrestler's balls against balls, I quote him as saying that "combat sports are definitely one of the doorways males need to go through to be complete men."

And while I know it won't make me popular, I agree with him.

Men need to know how to fight.

Doesn't mean you have to be a contender.

But every man should have some combat sport training.

That's a lot healthier than the gym.

The buffed bodies which litter the streets and sex clubs of the big gay ghettoes are like stage-sets.

Pretty to look at, but they won't keep out the wind or the rain.

Translation: It's not enough to have muscles.

You have to know how to use them, and you have to confront that part of your past which says that as a gay man, you shouldn't.

That's one of the reasons that we so often find trapped in those buffed bodies -- screaming, vicious, queens.

Because these guys don't know how to use their bodies, and in a fight, they're little better than 98 pound weaklings.

And, you see, they know that.

Which does not make them more pleasant to be around.

In The Buttfuck Dictatorship, I talked about how that played out during the switch from the androgynous gay male body of the 60s to that of the 70s clone, which is still with us:

So entered the clone, a new type of gay man defined by his muscles ... . The fact that beneath the veneer of hyper-masculinity there might still lurk a screaming and sometimes vicious queen bothered a few people, but since sex was becoming increasingly anonymous, it wasn't really necessary very often to discover what your partner was actually like. He looked good, and that was enough to get you both off.

"He looked good, and that was enough to get you both off."

That's what the gym is about.

Whereas a martial art, properly taught, is about the skills you need to get you through life.

Including how to throw a punch.

Finally, guys, this is it for the Terri Schiavo part of this thread.

I tried to pour oil on troubled waters, going so far as to dredge up very painful memories of my own mother's death as way of a personal example of the ambiguities in feeding tube situations.

Did I get any replies saying "Sorry about your mom Bill"?

No.

Instead, I got more posts rehashing the Schiavo arguments which are all over the web and other media.

Terri Schiavo may take weeks to die.

I can't have weeks spent on this discussion on this board.

So please take it somewhere else.

The truth about Terri S. is that the Repubs are cynically using the Terri Schiavo story to cover up what's really going on in the country:

Over the last few weeks, the Republican "pro-life" Congress has passed legislation which will negatively impact literally millions of Americans and I am sure, result not just in one brain dead woman being removed from a feeding tube, but in tens of thousands of deaths:

Restrictions on class action suits -- the last resort of the little guy in an age of massive multinationals which have crassly bought and sold the congress and legislatures.

A bankruptcy bill which will work many people to death and bring others to commit suicide.

Cuts in medicaid and food stamps and many other programs for the neediest.

And more tax cuts for the greediest.

Currently, Congress is in recess.

They come back on April 4, and that's when many of these measures, which have been passed by the Senate, will be passed by the House and signed into law by the president.

It's in the interests of the Republicans to keep the Terri story boiling and bubbling as long as possible to divert the public from the brutality of their legislative program.

But it's not in the interests of this board.

Nor that of the average American, who has a lot more to fear from the Republicans and the rich than he does from Michael Schiavo and the caregivers at his wife's hospice.

Happy Easter everyone.

Bill