I went to your teach-in the other night. I was surprised to find myself caricatured - even demonized - by speaker after speaker as a "neo-conservative" of some note.

I suppose I should be happy, since they say that demonization brings attention to one's cause.

The problem is, I am not a neocon, or any kind of con. I want government to house the homeless, feed the poor, and provide affordable health care for everybody. I think welfare reform is a fraud, Giuliani sucks and the Cardinal is a pig. I wrote angry columns in Newsday against Giuliani's attempts to ban porn shops, against the closing of discos like Sound Factory and hustler bars like Rounds, and in favor of transgendered rights and queer power.

I think attacks by gay conservatives on drag queens and leather people are mean-spirited and freaky. I don't even know what gay conservatives mean when they say that our movement can close up shop after we win gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. I'm pro-choice, anti-war, pro-feminist, anti-racist, pro- environment, anti-death penalty, and, tellingly in this debate, pro-sex. I wrote my book in part to try to help rescue gay sex from the biological nightmare that seventies-style "sex positivity" stumbled into.

The fact that you blacklist me as a "neocon," therefore, not only goes against the progressive principle that people have a right to define themselves. It is a very large lie. And it is not the only lie you tell.

Speakers at your teach-in also told huge whoppers about my book Sexual Ecology. They said that I "blame" gay men for the AIDS epidemic. That I want to "shut down all sex clubs." That I favor "rigid monogamy for all gay men." That I believe that AIDS prevention is a "choice between condoms or monogamy." That I want to "punish" people who don't have safe sex. That I am aligned with "wacky" theorists who do not believe that HIV causes AIDS.

If these things were true, they would be damning. I would sign a petition, or go to a demo, to protest against any prominent person making such misguided and irresponsible claims. But they are not true.

In Sexual Ecology I present the well-accepted epidemiological explanation for why AIDS happened to gay men, and why it continues to happen. I do so without judgment. I overtly reject blame. The "us" we're talking about includes me. I went to sex clubs and baths. I sucked and fucked my way through the golden age of promiscuity. This is not about blame. It is about biology, and viruses, and how epidemics work, and why we are in one.

The consensus I report is this: The AIDS epidemic decimated gay men for a variety of interconnected biological reasons, chief among them our practice of anal sex with large number of partners, the fact that we formed amplifying core groups, and the fact that there was a lot of bridging between those core groups and other gay men. Also very important were our tendencies to have our multiple partners concurrently rather than one at a time (as in serial monogamy), and to play both tops and bottoms in anal sex. There were several other factors as well, which I outline in some detail.

I further demonstrate that we made a reasonable but unfortunate mistake when we based safer sex almost exclusively on condoms. The reason is this:

The first purpose of AIDS prevention is to protect individuals, and condoms can certainly protect individuals when used consistently and correctly. But the second purpose of AIDS prevention is to bring new infections down below the epidemic's "tipping point." In other words, to contain the epidemic. It is now clear that in a population as HIV-saturated as ours, and with our continued high contact rate, the condom code could succeed in that second purpose only if virtually everybody used condoms every time they had anal sex.

After almost 15 years of condom promotion, we can now safely say that such universal compliance has not occurred, and will not occur. As a result, studies indicate that up to half of all young urban gay men may be headed for eventual infection.

The most recently reported current infection rate among gay men here in NYC is about 3% per year. This translates into 30% over ten years. Similar rates exist across the nation. Research indicates that this is occurring not because of some inherent gay pathology, but because gay men are people, and that when it comes to a difficult thing like using condoms every time, people are imperfect. In our case, our imperfections are played out against a backdrop of high contact rates and high HIV prevalence, leading to continued transmission.

And so I conclude that if we truly want to contain the epidemic through AIDS prevention, we have to go further than the condom code. We have to continue advocating condoms aggressively. But we also have to examine, and try to alter, a number of other behavior patterns, several of which we once celebrated as integral to sexual liberation. Including our high contact rate.

This is not because there was, or is, anything morally or psychologically wrong with promiscuity. Some may believe that. I do not. To me, the only thing wrong with promiscuity is that it facilitated a plague that wiped out half a generation. And it promises to continue doing so indefinitely.

It seems certain that we will be as imperfect in addressing these additional factors as we have been in using condoms. (It also seems certain that if we tried to switch from condoms to a single other strategy - like monogamy - that would be disastrous.) But by attacking HIV transmission with a combination of strategies - from condoms to contact rates to core groups to concurrency - we may provide ourselves with what we have been lacking so far. Namely, room for error.

Like any broad, ecological approach, this one will require big, long term changes in the way we live. So at the end of Sexual Ecology I describe how societies in the past - and ecologists today - have approached the thorny issue of getting social groups to change their sexual and ecological behaviors. And I offer some personal observations on how these examples might be useful to us. I present these ideas in the spirit of getting a rational debate going. I pointedly avoid dealing in absolutes. I have no firm answers on how to achieve the changes we clearly need to make. I want to help spark a discussion grounded in reason, and based on facts as we know them today.

The studies presented in Sexual Ecology appear to pose a serious challenge to many in your group, for a number of ideological reasons. And so, in the manner of people everywhere when they fear they are losing an argument, you change the subject. Instead of addressing the issue of AIDS, you charge that I have prompted a "sex panic" in New York. And am therefore to be condemned.

At your teach-in, historian Allan Berube described a "sex panic" as a phenomenon in which society panics about some aspect of sex - prostitution, porn, etc. - and embarks on an intense assault against sexual freedom. Civil liberties are brushed aside, minority rights trampled on, and freedom of expression threatened.

Berube is one of our community's most distinguished historians. But you don't need a Ph.D. in history to know what a sex panic is.

We just lived through one of modern history's greatest and best documented sex panics. That panic began with the herpes epidemic in the early 1980s and intensified a thousand fold with the AIDS epidemic. It was fostered by the media, the government, the scientific and medical establishment and just about every institution and element in society.

During the height of that panic, from around 1983 to around 1991, thousands of singles bars and other sex-related enterprises closed for lack of business. The big bathhouse enterprises mostly went under, also for lack of business. Headlines screamed danger, risk, disease. Government had little trouble targeting sex businesses for closure, but they hardly had to. Young and old, gay and straight, people zipped it up. The drop in the contact rate was so profound that many sexually transmitted diseases - those silent but accurate barometers of sexual activity - underwent historic declines.

The panic was so intense that it surpassed sex and became a general panic about contagion. Children like Ryan White were kicked out of schools because they harbored an "STD" they actually acquired through other means. I discuss this panic in Sexual Ecology. Some have called it the Fear, and argue that it marked the end of the sexual revolution. Future historians will probably consider it one of the distinguishing characteristics of sex in the eighties and early nineties.

In that context, perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of today is the ebbing of that panic. Contact rates are up for both gays and straights. STD rates are rising among both populations. Straight singles bars are back, and sex clubs and baths are reopening in gay neighborhoods across the nation, including New York.

Yet in the middle of this sexual renaissance, you charge that we are actually in the midst of a panic. "Giuliani has closed bars and dance clubs," you write in one of your pamphlets. He has "fenced off piers, zoned adult businesses out of the city, padlocked sex clubs, entrapped gay men in cruising grounds, parks and bathrooms."

"Queer New York is being shut down," you write. "Not since Stonewall have we faced such harassment."

According to your literature, the current "panic" was instigated by gay traitors - "turdz," you call us - me, Signorile and a few other gay male journalists. These are very, very serious charges. Are they true?

This much is certainly true. Giuliani and the city council pushed through a zoning bill that will, if upheld, force the closure of most XXX porn shops. But it is also true that he first proposed this law many years ago, and did so for reasons that have much more to do with real estate values than sex. And you overlook the fact that I forcefully argued and wrote against that law.

Real estate and zoning aside, it is also true that Mayor Giuliani has been cracking down on every petty offense in every corner of New York since he was elected. His very reputation is based on strict and ridiculously overzealous enforcement of even the most petty rule. He applies this to everybody except, perhaps, landlords and the very rich, so it certainly includes gay people and, sometimes, gay sexual expression.

I'm sure you would agree. And yet Giuliani's universal quality of life assault seems to undercut your claim that there's a specific "sex panic" under way, at least in the historical sense being peddled by Allan Berube. You could just as logically argue that we are in a squeegee panic, an Chinese fireworks panic, an unlicensed gypsy cab panic, a Mafia fish market panic, a diplomatic parking panic, and so on.

If Giuliani's actions don't support the idea that there is anything specifically sexual about the current universal crackdown, what about his rhetoric? Does he rant and rave and panic about sex in his speeches? In fact, he rarely mentions the subject.

Indeed, the moment we take what Giuliani is doing and saying about sex and gays, and situate it in what he is doing and saying about everything else, your sex panic thesis seems very dubious. Unless, of course, we produce evidence that his attacks on sex and gay expression far exceed his attacks on everything else. Yet you have produced no such evidence. Indeed, I see very little evidence of any specific anti-gay crackdown at all.

You also exhibit a rather ahistorical analysis of nightlife. Closures and the recycling of spaces has always been a fact of life in clubland. Some of the greatest gay nightspots of the 70s and 80s were closed by politicians, or by landlords reacting to political pressure, including the Loft and the Paradise Garage. For years it seemed that no lesbian disco could survive official harassment, and places catering to gay people of color have been consistently targeted. Blue's, a black gay bar in Times Square, was raided and physically trashed by cops repeatedly throughout the golden age of promiscuity.

Mayor Koch's famous eradication of the after hours scene in the early eighties was far more dramatic and far-reaching than anything happening today. An entire species of nightlife, gay and straight, disappeared in a single night. The rash of closures after the Happyland fire also surpasses anything happening now, and there was a similar crackdown after a similar fire in the seventies.

Indeed, the current scene in Manhattan's gay nightlife is dominated not by closure and shut down, but by major bars and dance clubs that have opened in recent years, including Barracuda and g and Life and Sound Factory Bar and The L.U.R.E. and Champs and Rome and King and Twirl and a million other places, including a whole species of coffee bars and neighborhood lounges that never existed before. If you want to complain about the citywide "shutdown" of gay nightlife, you can do so seven nights a week at ten different gay bars and discos and lounges a night, and never complain at the same place twice.

It is true that I devoted several of my Newsday columns a few years ago to the issue of unsafe sex in commercial sex establishments. It is also true that after unsuccessfully arguing that gay and AIDS groups like ACT UP and GMHC should monitor our own sex clubs (they adamantly and publicly refused), I finally, reluctantly, used two columns to endorse the idea that the health department should enforce its health code. I also joined a group for that purpose in 1995.

During that debate, critics argued that if we gave the health department "permission" to target unsafe sex in sex clubs, Giuliani would quickly close all sex clubs and baths. Soon, it was argued, gay men would be forced to have sex in dangerous parks and alleys, far from AIDS prevention information. And eventually jack booted thugs would be closing gay bars and pounding down our bedroom doors.

Despite these dire warnings, and partly as a result of our efforts, the health department began to address the more egregious health code violations in sex clubs. It issued warnings to clubs that allowed potential HIV transmission to occur, and then closed several that refused to comply with repeated warnings. (Contrary to Sex Panic lore, by the way, I never met with any city officials on that or any subject, secretly or otherwise, although some members of that group did.)

However, there has hardly been a sweeping "shut down" of sex establishments. Almost three years later, the current edition of Homo Xtra lists 36 advertised venues where gay men can "get off" in commercial sex establishments in New York. Other venues do not advertise but are widely known. Homo Xtra also contains column after column of ads for "models and escorts" that openly advertise their services and even their rates. (Page Joey, 24 hours, $200.) And despite the closing of Rounds in 1995 (a closing I protested in Newsday), there are several similar bars operating currently, some right under Mickey's nose in Disneyfied Times Square. A number of neighborhood bars and discos also have back rooms set aside for sex.

Indeed, despite your rhetoric, and despite continued Health Department scrutiny, there has not been a single permanent sex club closure so far in 1997. (One theater was closed in the Bronx in February, but was allowed to reopen almost immediately, with a warning.) This indicates that the policy is at least mildly successful. Sex clubs continue to flourish. New ones have opened. No one was forced into alleys. The health department is not going overboard. Men who want sex still have plenty of places to go. And hopefully the places they attend are safer than they were.

This much is true. There was a major, three day sweep in a single men's room at the World Trade Center last winter. It did not have anything to do with Giuliani, however, since it was conducted by the independent Port Authority. The Port Authority official who ordered it says that he acted because that men's room had become the focus of major complaints from commuters.

But in any case, I heartily agree with you. There are much better ways of dealing with sexual behavior in busy urban rest rooms that making arrests. I outlined some of those ways in the "Little Black Book," a pamphlet that I co-authored that is the most widely used guide for gay men who have been entrapped or arrested on lewdness charges.

But this single incident hardly signals a massive assault on gay sex. I also wrote in the "Little Black Book" that such crackdowns have been common occurrences in New York and elsewhere for years. They happen all the time, particularly in major transportation hubs. Only in the most paranoid imagination does the sweep of a single rest room signal a society-wide sex panic. And in any event, this sweep ended months ago.

That aside, there does not seem to be any larger offensive that I can see. The Anti-Violence Project claimed a huge increase in public lewdness arrests recently. But when pressed for the actual numbers, the AVP revealed that there were only 10 more complaints from gay men about so-called "lewdness" arrests in the first half of 1997 than the first half of 1996. Hardly a massive increase for a police department that makes hundreds of arrests a day. And the NYC police - who love to brag about their "quality of life" arrest records, and who, during sex panics, make a great show of their crackdowns - deny any policy of increased scrutiny of gay sex. The rumor in police circles is that if there were any additional arrests outside the WTC, they can probably be attributed to a single cop in Brooklyn, acting on his own.

On almost any level of scrutiny, it seems, your sex panic is mostly myth. One grain truth, six parts exaggeration, a dash of demonization and a pinch of hysteria, stirred vigorously. The question is why?

And the answer is very disturbing.

As I said earlier, in Sexual Ecology I tried to challenge us to reexamine the ways that our gay male sexual culture facilitated the epidemic, and continues to do so. Many of you seem afraid to deal with that challenge. So afraid that your group seems aptly named. It seems like the panic is within you.

And so you have invented a diversion, a smear campaign in which I and a few others have invited a massive crackdown on gay people. In this repressive parody, we become "enemies of the people." Now, any time a gay person is hassled by the cops, or a nightclub closes down for whatever reason, it is our fault. We become the traitors. And, more importantly, the issues we raise can be ignored.

You seem to have done this out of a deep seated fear. And your fear is not entirely misplaced. From the beginning of the epidemic, antigay conservatives have blamed gay men for AIDS. We, as gay people and AIDS activists, have always had to fight tenaciously against that agenda of blame. That fight remains as important as ever. But it would be a tragedy if, in our desire to reject blame, we also rejected the truth.

And the truth is not only that certain gay behaviors facilitated HIV transmission and an epidemic back in the seventies and eighties. The truth is that many of those same behaviors are continuing, and have helped to spawn a whole new generation of infected men. And the truth is that this process will continue endlessly until we learn to separate a message based in hate and homophobia ("Stop having sex and stop being gay") from a message based in love, and the desire to create a truly healthy and sustainable gay culture.

I want gay people to have fun. I want gay youth to be able to take risks and have adventures. I want all of us to be able to transgress to our hearts' content. I just want us to do it in an overall culture of health, one that is not steeped in illness and shadowed by plague.

I believe the science is now conclusive on this point: We can not create that culture of health and still preserve, intact, the culture of promiscuity we inherited from the seventies. I have written a book which attempts to prove that, and with which you obviously disagree. And so your task is simple. You don't need smear campaigns. You don't need to call me a turd. You simple have to prove me wrong. And do it with enough scientific rigor to convince the average objective person.

And although you may not believe it, I sincerely want you to try. I believe that in struggling to refute the thesis of Sexual Ecology on its own terms, rather than calling me names or distorting my ideas or pathetically trying to tie me to crackpot theories of AIDS, one of two things will happen.

Either you will, in fact, successfully refute it, and thereby illuminate a way in which AIDS prevention can be made compatible with healthy promiscuity, which would be totally, utterly and deliriously fine with me. Or you will fail to refute it.

In that case, some of you may adopt Scott O'Hara's position - that Rotello is probably right, but so what, promiscuity is worth a plague.

But I believe that the more thoughtful and humane among you, meaning most of you, will probably come to the same conclusion I came to. As regretfully as I came to it. But this time, on your own.

And then we can be friends again, and fight AIDS again, instead of each other. And do so with our eyes open. And because our eyes are open, we can win.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Rotello

( Ed. Note: See this week's GayToday Reviews which includes Gabriel Rotello's Sexual Ecology)