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Dec. 1st, 2003 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonSo, December 1st, and it's World AIDS Day once again.
See, here's the weird thing; I'm one of the minority of people on LJ, people in my on-line acquaintance, who's old enough to vividly remember The World Before AIDS. The '70s' ... oh yeah, baby. That brief little glimmer of time, post-birth control, pre-AIDS, when it seemed like sex--as much as you want, wherever, however, whenever, with whomever--was natural, healthy, wholly good, as simple as air and water. And we revelled in it, god, we did, in a way that I'll likely never see again in my life.
I didn't come out of it wholly unscathed; I picked up a case of HPV, which back in those days the doctors pooh-poohed, didn't even bother treating, and which led years later to my very entertaining bout of "It looks like you have cervical cancer, oh I guess you don't after all, oopsie." But I lived through it, in other words, though I might well not have. There are many, many others who did no more than I did, who didn't live through it. I lived in San Francisco, back in the early days of the plague, and I'm certain that there are people I knew back then who are dead now, who've been dead these many years. Not that I've ever gone back to find out; it's one of those things I don't really want to know for sure.
I don't really know what it'd be like to be someone younger, who's never lived in a world without that equation of sex=possible death. To live in a wholly post-lapsarian reality is different, simpler in some fundamental ways, than being someone who had a spell of time in the Garden, and then got punted out. I think sometimes that it's left me with a permanent unease about the serpents in the garden, the dangerousness of innocent and passionate connection. The lessons you learn in adulthood, against your inclinations and wishes and beliefs, hit harder than the ones you merely grow up with as baseline reality.
Sometimes I think that what we do as slash writers is a way of working against that reality, a way of trying to imagine ourselves past that sex=death equation. And for all that I'm usually a hard-core realist, I don't mind that; if anything, it makes me nostalgic for a time when sex was a simple good, a way of connecting whose costs were only emotional and could therefore be dealt with, overcome, transcended.
And of course AIDS is about far more than sex, I know that, but that's the way it's been construed in popular awareness, here in the US. It's the way I construe it, since that's how it came into my own awareness; it was like the price tag on the ticket for that incredible ride we took.
Gah. I don't know where I'm going with this. Well, I will say that a good story to read at this time of year (by which I mean winter solstice, as much as anything, the darkest time of year) is torch's In Heavenly Peace, a beautiful and heartbreaking story that I reread every year in midwinter.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. Be well.
See, here's the weird thing; I'm one of the minority of people on LJ, people in my on-line acquaintance, who's old enough to vividly remember The World Before AIDS. The '70s' ... oh yeah, baby. That brief little glimmer of time, post-birth control, pre-AIDS, when it seemed like sex--as much as you want, wherever, however, whenever, with whomever--was natural, healthy, wholly good, as simple as air and water. And we revelled in it, god, we did, in a way that I'll likely never see again in my life.
I didn't come out of it wholly unscathed; I picked up a case of HPV, which back in those days the doctors pooh-poohed, didn't even bother treating, and which led years later to my very entertaining bout of "It looks like you have cervical cancer, oh I guess you don't after all, oopsie." But I lived through it, in other words, though I might well not have. There are many, many others who did no more than I did, who didn't live through it. I lived in San Francisco, back in the early days of the plague, and I'm certain that there are people I knew back then who are dead now, who've been dead these many years. Not that I've ever gone back to find out; it's one of those things I don't really want to know for sure.
I don't really know what it'd be like to be someone younger, who's never lived in a world without that equation of sex=possible death. To live in a wholly post-lapsarian reality is different, simpler in some fundamental ways, than being someone who had a spell of time in the Garden, and then got punted out. I think sometimes that it's left me with a permanent unease about the serpents in the garden, the dangerousness of innocent and passionate connection. The lessons you learn in adulthood, against your inclinations and wishes and beliefs, hit harder than the ones you merely grow up with as baseline reality.
Sometimes I think that what we do as slash writers is a way of working against that reality, a way of trying to imagine ourselves past that sex=death equation. And for all that I'm usually a hard-core realist, I don't mind that; if anything, it makes me nostalgic for a time when sex was a simple good, a way of connecting whose costs were only emotional and could therefore be dealt with, overcome, transcended.
And of course AIDS is about far more than sex, I know that, but that's the way it's been construed in popular awareness, here in the US. It's the way I construe it, since that's how it came into my own awareness; it was like the price tag on the ticket for that incredible ride we took.
Gah. I don't know where I'm going with this. Well, I will say that a good story to read at this time of year (by which I mean winter solstice, as much as anything, the darkest time of year) is torch's In Heavenly Peace, a beautiful and heartbreaking story that I reread every year in midwinter.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. Be well.
Ah, Athens...
Date: 2003-12-03 01:32 pm (UTC)Speaking as one of the younger-ish crowd (born in the Summer of Luv)...Has there really ever been a civilization in which sex whenever, with whomever, really seemed uncomplicated to the mainstream population? The streets of Plato’s Athens, supposing you were lucky enough to be a man and a free citizen? The seventies in San Francisco?
I ask because I’m not sure how much difference AIDS made to what I would otherwise have done. Coming of age just as AIDS starting getting mentioned in the high-school sex-ed classes was a distant tenth to the real limitations on my sexual behavior: being a mostly straight female (thus having cut my teeth on stories of True Love, not one-nighters), being middle-class (ditto), living in a rural area where everyone knew everyone, being the social pariah that some if not all language geeks are in high school (thus having no recognizable opportunities to be anything but celibate) . . . any one of these was a lot more visible than AIDS in my neck of the rural woods. I can’t remember ever needing death to inhibit me; without it, I still would’ve had to negotiate the then-more-pressing concerns of guilt, fear of pregnancy (the story of my college years), fear of emotional entanglements, social ineptitude, being in a relationship at any given time, knowing the guy I really wanted to be with was in his own relationship at any given time. . . on and on.
For those of you of the proper age, did the legendary license of the seventies really negate guilt and fear of pregnancy and social ineptitude and all those inhibitory things your mothers taught you? And, if it did, what on earth did that look like? Was it really easier to hook up some night with that friend you’d always had a thing for? Could you walk up to a hunky prof twice your age and come on to him without feeling like a complete idiot? Could you go home with that married someone and the next morning walk on back for coffee with your own spouse, supposing you had one? And if you could do all these things, was it fun, without repression and inhibition and guilt and all those nice slashy emotions to give it zing? I mean, sex being simple and basic and unrestricted sounds wonderful in Marion Zimmer Bradley, or Starhawk, but those are way different (and oh yeah, imaginary) cultures. When it comes to THIS culture, Kat’s right: I can’t imagine it.