What about that Internet? Has it been responsible for mind-boggling innovation, or what? Consider: the proliferation of international satanic conspiracies, the institutionalisation of electronic spamming and of course, the perennially popular Orwellian overview of high school kids supposedly engaged in homework research.
“You know son, to my certain knowledge, Messrs Burke and Wills did not traverse Australia via www.hugebouncingnorks.com, though admittedly, it’s intriguing to reflect on how differently things might have turned out — for all concerned — had they done so.”
don’t these kids know about covering their hot ’n’ sweaty tracks with Window Washer?
A little 21st-century technical know-how is called for. Gone are the days when all you needed to do was secretly stash your Honcho magazines and a grubby old cum rag under the bed where your vacuuming Mum knew not to “find” them. Now it’s cyberspace combat — Net Nanny versus advanced geek evasion techniques.
Where are the election policies aimed at skilling-up kids to avoid parental prying? That’s what I want to know.
I should concede however that the most recent moral panic around “sweet young things stumbling over hot virgin sex with elephants while Googling for new Barbie dress patterns” did have one major benefit. It got Aussie gay boys off the hook of yet another media beat-up about the infamous homosexual propensity to net-connect for a meeting — ?chat and maybe more, yr pic gets mine” — that came, as so many strange things do, out of the USA.
At the 8th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections held recently in Boston, a paper presented by the Medical and Health Research Association of New York City offered the moderately bizarre view that “the Internet serves the same hazardous purpose as gay bathhouses did in the early 1980s, when the AIDS virus first spread rampantly among homosexual men. It’s a new venue associated with high-risk sex, a quick and easy way to meet new partners.” So said one Ms Sabina Hirshfield, one of the Report’s authors.
CBS News went on to inform us, breathlessly, that Hirshfield’s report “was based on online surveys filled out by nearly 3000 men using the Web site gay.com. They were mostly white, college-educated men from all over the United States, and half were under 30. The survey found that 84 percent said they met sex partners online, and about two-thirds had recently had anal sex without condoms. About one-quarter of the men said they had had more 100 sex partners during their lives.”
You’ll understand that my initial reaction was one of total shock — that 2,250 out of 3,000 gay men had failed to rack up a lousy 100 roots in 10 or 15 years of trying and worse, that they would waste precious time chatting about it online with someone named Sabina Hirshfield. can’t they put two and two together? Ms Hirshfield is unlikely to be hot/hung/vers/buzzcut/tats, in the area and up for it now.
My second response was a slow burn about the presumption of Ms Hirshfield’s bathhouse comparison.
Online chat rooms are nothing like pre-AIDS bathhouses, believe me. You can strip off, lube up, have yourself handcuffed to the hard drive with your face mashed into your new plasma monitor and absolutely nothing whatsoever will happen unless you have made extraordinarily detailed prior arrangements for it to do so.
“Online chat rooms are nothing like pre-AIDS bathhouses, believe me”
Providing your Mum doesn’t pop in, unannounced, with the vacuum cleaner of course.
Not so in the pre-AIDS bathhouse. Tied to any convenient extrusion you could confidently anticipate exceeding the “Hirshfield 100” in about as long as it took to run the latest Al Parker porn flick. And without so much as an introduction let alone a detailed profile.
The truth is that gay chat rooms operate on the basis of a selection process as exacting and full of potential pitfalls as that for the SAS. Indeed, the gay chat room hook-up exemplar and the ideal SAS candidate share many attributes — though I’d caution over-eager researchers against imprudent pursuit of this line of enquiry.
Firstly there’s the “profile”. Here’s a few culled from a slow Monday morning in a well-known Sydney chat room — nicks have been changed to protect the anything-but-innocent:
“Boi44 Darlo 28 gym bod into speedos and jocks PVT ok with Pic.”
Translation: 38 year old who rarely manages to hit the gym more than twice a month, despite best intentions. Will drone on endlessly about your undergarments once you’ve sent the pic of your head Photoshopped onto Chad Donovan’s body.
Verdict: Is much more interested in your undies than what’s inside them. OK if you’re into getting wedgies.
“Erko32 Home-alone slut looking for filthy top, yr place pref. Must have pic.”
Translation: In a monogamous relationship (boyfriend at work but can sniff illicit trade onsite from 10 kilometres) or lives with unpredictably vacuum-fixated Mum. Will expect you to provide not only the 10” uncut but also the enhancements and a suitable range of porn movie scene setters — preferably the one, you know, with that guy with “black” and “white” tattooed on each tit. Will have own amyl but — shit! Must have left the top unscrewed, so guess he’ll need that as well.
Verdict: Tell him to strip, lash himself to the hard-drive and you’ll be there in a tick, then move on.
“Mascbi49 str8 actg non-scene inner-east looking fr yngr”.
Translation: I dunno??Butch florist? Certainly not smart enough to work out that residence in the inner-east kind of works against the credibility of “non-scene” — unless he’s incurably agoraphobic. How does he mean Str8 acting? Does he hoon up and down Oxford St in a ute shouting “poofter!” on a Friday night? Owns to 49 — a dead giveaway. Always add five years on to any claimed age ending in “9”.
Verdict: Pass Erko 32’s address to him and hope they’ll be happy. Switch off PC and head to bathhouse. It’s all too fuckin’ complicated mate.
Look. It doesn’t matter a good goddamn where you do it or how you got to the point of doing it. The Internet isn’t responsible for spreading HIV anymore than bathhouses, sex clubs or the beat at Gough Whitlam park in Tempe. It’s what we choose to do and against what criteria that matters.
In fact, it’s the only thing that does matter in this context. And it always was.
I don’t know about you, but I’m up to here with increasingly frantic attempts to scare gay men into compliance with a concept of grim reaper HIV prevention philosophy that ceased to work shortly after Tom Hanks got the Academy Award for the greatest number of candles ever assembled in a hokey AIDS movie death scene.
We’ve normalised disease. We’ve made it part of our lives and our culture. After twenty years we’ve recognised the inevitability of risk: it’s all around us and for the most part we’re managing it well. To sustain that effort, we need to go where we’ve always had most success, the place where gay men are living and doing it:
Community hot, upfritnow, lkg for pragmatic vers sane prevention advice re F/S/WS/BD/FF & Speedo wedgies. No grim reapers/internet viral spread theorists need apply — unless 12+”, with pic and leak-proof amyl.
*Geoff Honnor* is a Sydney-based writer, activist and iconoclast.
