Angels in America

[gwendally]

In rural Michigan when I was growing up in the seventies, "homo" was what you called someone who was a target of bullying. The designated person to kick and beat and punch and bully. This was not something anyone examined or questioned, it was just as natural as chickens focusing their wrath on one of their flock to peck to death. Now I hear that

Comments

[aelf]

I was born in '72, and sex has always meant death to me. My husband was born in '68, and so from his perspective he was raised in a "woo hoo! freedom!" that went crashing into "sex will kill you" just as he was really getting into it. It's been interesting to me to consider what a difference those 4 years made.

It's hard for me to raise a child *without* that fear, even though I'm aware of PrEP and how successful early dosing of drugs can be when you think you might have had an exposure, and how successful long term treatment can be. I have a gay friend, in his 50's, who's fairly open about the sexual health risks that being gay entails, and his perspective of AIDS and treatment is very different from mine. I still see it is very scary, something to avoid. He sees it as a manageable illness, and something that you try to avoid but if it happens it happens. I wonder if that's his age (he remembers a time when sex wasn't death) or just that if he's going to be a gay man who's not celibate, he has to come to terms with this in a way that I, as a het-monogamous-married-woman don't have to.