In Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, Gabriel Rotello writes, for the most part, in clear sentences. But after a short outline of select AIDS epidemiology, retrospective and current, the book becomes a windy riff on a strained metaphor, as Rotello transports his reader from the stolid realm of science survey to the headier one of papal bull. This central metaphor, that monogamy equals sexual ecology, can only be sustained by an age-old fallacy common to all fundamentalism. It derives a spurious natural law from time-bound, mutable conditions: the prevalence of HIV among gay men in 1997 and the lack of effective vaccines and treatments to counter it.

Somewhere, I've heard this before. Rotello summons to gay men to march, two-by-two, under the yoke of Noah, back to a mythic Eden, is an unsettling echo of fundamentalism's equation of heterosexual union with nature. Rotello disparages conservative columnist Pat Buchanan's formulation of AIDS [92]: The poor homosexuals they have declared war on Nature, and now Nature is exacting an awful retribution. Yet if we substitute Buchanan's "Nature" with Rotello's Ecology, Buchanan's venom becomes the thesis for Rotello's book. Rotello's call for us to diminish the status of all non-monogamous sex is a muted rendition of fundamentalism's attempt to delegitimize all non-procreative sex. [103]. Both imply that anything beyond their narrow parameters is sin or willful sickness.

Appealing to a higher order, fundamentalism always places its polemic beyond argument, privileged over other positions in its very purity as an ideal. Religious reactionaries chant that God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. Sexual Ecology posits a similar pristine state that we fallen contemporaries have befouled. As suspect as the version of sex education that I as a teen learned in Catholic schools, Rotello's answer to AIDS becomes a quirky regurgitation of Judeo-Christian doctrine. Some serious diseases are airborne. We do not, however, advocate cessation of breathing. Some serious diseases are genetic. We do not advocate an end to procreation. Taking a purely ecological approach, I could argue against the existence of cities since urban concentration spawns filth and disease. But the city fulfills certain cultural needs. No serious ecologist argues that we all revert to hunter-gatherers.

Rotello contends that conditions gay men have created may be a greater enemy than the virus [4]. That's as useful as blaming cities for the flu. Periodic plagues temporarily shut Renaissance England's theaters, evidence for Puritans of entertainment's essential ungodliness. Puritan ecology could as logically argue that fags and sex don't mix at all. The human impulse to sexual activity is not less ingrained than its impulse to play, and both will survive the Puritans. Since AIDS has been spread by immunization and transfusion, we try to minimize their risk; why is gay sex different? Rotello's ecological argument with current AIDS prevention is that the condom code relies on a technical fix, a mistake of favoring the simple over the complex [24].

As if the solution of universal monogamy (one size fits all) for the diversity of gay male sexuality were not itself breathtakingly simplistic. He has similar disdain for the birth control pill and antibiotics. Recent advances in AIDS drugs, a lease on life for so many, elicit only his concern for potential slackened vigilance in the maintenance of safer sex and for drug-resistant strains of the virus. Yet even Rotello realizes cultures are adaptive strategies for survival [11]. Human history in fact is a sequence of tech fixes that we, unnatural animals that we are, devise to avoid disaster. Even most programs to restore an ecology resort to elaborate tech fixes. AIDS needs a wider menu of more effective technical fixes.

Tracking the ecology metaphor takes Rotello far afield, through irrelevant discussions of population control and species extinction, he himself has to admit that gay men are not a biotic category as the species is replenished from without. Parallels he draws between the environmental movement and AIDS prevention illuminate neither. Towing the ecological line can become laughable, as when Rotello extols our Greek forbears as sexual ecologists worthy of our imitation [224]. In fact, sex acts between Greek males (dominant men, passive boys) occurred within a hierarchy that doesn't exist for gay men today, could not be recreated, would not be condoned, and could not fulfill contemporary gay male desire. His whirlwind tour of homosexual history [225-6] finds monogamous fags (unsurprisingly) wherever there are regimented societies: tyranny induces a stability most of us would throw off.

Reading it all I kept wondering: in what way would a crabbed monogamy be more holistic than a loving, healthy promiscuity? I didn't expect nor did I find an answer. I knew this book to be no simple ecological tract. It's a reactionary morality, as if nutritionist Gary Null had been channeled through neo-con Gertrude Himmelfarb.

A problem frequent with polemic: in the rush to marshal every detail to serve an argument, the bits don't quite fit together. Sexual Ecology is riddled with significant discrepancies that at times burst into flagrant contradiction. If you disagree with any principle Rotello propounds, just stick around for a few pages and you're liable to find its contrary proposed, or at least find it vitally undermined. Not even the book's central tenet is safe from multiple reversal. After a book length argument for the essential holism of monogamy, and much ridicule of technical fixes, Rotello ends his penultimate chapter with a vision of a future. One day technology will have extinguished the final germ.

Post-microbial promiscuity will be OK with Rotello. Yet two pages later [263] he launches into another attack on medical technology: antibiotics, having fostered drug-resistant strains, have been worse than useless in the fight against Sexually Transmitted Diseases. But this cautionary tale has a trumped-up punchline. He ends by comparing the relatively small number of annual deaths from syphilis in an age before antibiotic treatments with the larger number who currently die of AIDS. Rotello compares epidemiological apples and oranges and predictably comes up with a lemon: AIDS is far from exclusively an STD and at this date its spread has little to do with drug resistance

Rotello's position on oral sex, its infectivity, its place in the epidemic, its place in prevention, its centrality to gay sex, is particularly conflicted. Early in the book [9] Rotello identifies a significant rise in anal sex in the 70s as the major behavior change facilitating AIDS among gay men. Later [43] he adds that oral sex is a difficult route for HIV transmission. It's not promiscuity per se but particular sex acts that expedite HIV. Rotello again can cite most experts [76] as believing that if gay men of the 70s had only performed oral sex with their casual partners and saved anal sex for their lovers, the epidemic could not have happened. Yet he ridicules as a gay folk construction [145] the belief that oral sex without ejaculation is a low risk activity, despite its being so classified by many health organizations worldwide.

Although he can laud Dutch prevention messages that call for a reduction in anal sex, he derides American writers like Walt Odets and Eric Rofes who today advocate a prevention strategy that emphasizes oral sex and de emphasizes anal sex. Rotello fails to see why a the panel of AIDS prevention experts might prefer to gear their efforts to the actual epidemic, rather than Rotello's construction of one in which mutant subtypes of HIV might evolve toward easy oral transmission [274]. His claim that a major goal of AIDS prevention groups is to reduce anxiety about unprotected oral sex [270] is preposterous. He quotes one brochure that designates oral sex to ejaculation as harm reduction [106].

But safer sex literature overwhelmingly qualifies messages about oral sex: there is some HIV risk, there is risk of contracting some STDs, there's a higher risk ingesting ejaculate. Gay organizations that have reclassified oral sex as lower-risk have not ignored ecology [275], only the very restricted way in which Rotello construes it: they realize that successful HIV prevention integrates low-risk activity into sexual lives that gay men might actually like to have. Rotello has himself implied that the rate of infection from unprotected oral sex would be epidemiologically insignificant.

This contradictory approach to oral sex crystallizes in his sporadic discussion of commercial sex spaces. He observes[42] that [e]ven today, gay sex in public or semi public places tends to be oral rather than anal. Does this please him? Commercial sex spaces, in fact, earn his recurring wrath. Early in the book Rotello chides New York City's establishments for failing to adopt community-enforced safer sex guidelines like San Francisco's. This is compound hypocrisy.

Rotello knows the major block to such guidelines in New York City is New York State's refusal to recognize a difference between oral and anal sex, protected or not. New York does not permit even protected intercourse in (semi)public places. He knows that San Francisco's guidelines allow oral and protected anal intercourse, something he's on record opposing. He expresses horror that the JO clubs of the late 80s gave way to clubs that allow such sex. How can he blame New York's prevention workers for not securing agreement to impossible guidelines, agreement that he, in his zeal to stamp out core behavior, would object to were it secured. After all this, he derides San Francisco's Coalition for Healthy Sex for citing as a model sex space [272]. Blow Buddies, which dares to be as oral as its name.

Has there been a second wave of HIV infection among gay men? Early in the book Rotello maintains HIV is continuing to saturate the gay male population at the rate it always has [3]. Yet a few pages later [7] he warns that other diseases are poised to strike the moment we provide them an opportunity implying our present conduct is holding them at bay. After a survey of the sketchy literature that suggests a second wave, Rotello himself questions if it's not in fact a misreading: maybe we never significantly reduced infection in the late 80s: are the data half full or half empty [123]? Rotello contends there's no conclusive evidence that gay men were ever infecting at a rate below epidemic threshold [127].

Soon he's accepting as fact [130] the hypothesis that lower infection of the late 80s resulted from saturation, not successful prevention, an implicit rejection of a second wave. Current low rates of rectal gonorrhea among New York City gay men might seem to argue for corresponding low rates of unprotected anal sex, and against a significant rise in HIV. But in order to preserve the possibility of a second wave, Rotello constructs a creative (but unconvincing) reading of the data that dismisses it. By the end of the book [268] he's calling the second wave well-documented; if so, Sexual Ecology does a poor job presenting the evidence.

Some contradictions undermine his basic position. After criticizing early AIDS prevention efforts that stressed partner reduction rather than the use of a condom for every encounter, Rotello denounces the condom code [99] as an anti-ecological technical fix, and embraces serial monogamy (which is itself stringent partner reduction). Yet his own proposal for AIDS prevention ultimately backs up monogamy with a condom code of its own.

Other contradictions merely baffle. In one chapter we're told that most heterosexuals find the notion of gay sex repugnant, but will have tremendous sympathy for a man once he has AIDS. The next chapter warns us that moderate and liberal heterosexuals, who have somehow become in the interim supporters of basic gay rights, will abandon our cause if gay men continue to seroconvert. In other words: though straights don't support our right to union to begin with, only if we commit to Rotello's monogamy will they continue to support our right to union. And: though the only lovable fag is one with AIDS, seroconversion will earn us mainstream desertion. Having constructed a lineage for gay men that disproves homosexuals are naturally promiscuous, Rotello himself comes up with the reason for that promiscuity: no women to curb us.

He then says it's OK if we're a little more promiscuous than the rest of the world, but he doesn't specify how much more promiscuous gay men can safely be, or how prevention programs can educate toward such an ambiguous goal, problematic since he's maintained that even drastic partner reduction in the late 80s was insufficient to stop the epidemic in a virally saturated population. Having painstakingly traced a tradition of homosexual moderation, he undermines it when he speaks of a traditionally low level of monogamy among gay men [228]. Yet by the end of the book Rotello maintains that gay men are demanding generally to lead the kinds of lives that moralists wish everybody would lead [285]. If we were, why the need for a book to convince us of the rightness of that institution most central to those lives that moralists would have us lead: monogamy?

Sexual Ecology is a paper inflated to book length. By the time I reached page seven, I dreaded the next occurrence of the term sexual ecology. Once the survey of epidemiological literature thins, citations, except for increasingly far fetched attempts to shore up the tenuous ecology metaphor, all but disappear. Rotello's dry, ivory tower polemic begins to feel like a protracted high school hygiene class. But the lack of any original research is not the biggest disappointment. In a book nominally concerned with gay men and AIDS prevention, the voices of the gay men who are having the sex under consideration, and the voices of real-world prevention workers are never heard. There's not even a distant sense of what life is like out in the trenches, of the real battles gay men face. For a book written by a gay man, a former activist with many grassroots contacts and a journalist, it's shockingly bereft of stuff.

With few sources to fall back on, Rotello has to set up a series of unidentified straw men. (Chapter 9, Imagining a Sustainable Culture, hosts a particularly rich convocation of phantom opponents.) Throughout the book, they argue that gay men are doomed to sexual excess. That fighting for adult gay rights solves the problems of gay youth. Arguments unlike any I've ever heard. In the late 80s, it was often confidently asserted that elimination of homophobia would, in and of itself, quickly solve the problem [of AIDS]. And again, later: In this interpretation, AIDS was caused by homophobia. Rotello cites gay men's belief in our own victimization and inability to change, when no gay man I know would ascribe to that formulation, and the activism that arose in response to AIDS refused victimization and only makes sense if it believes in change. My dictionary defines destiny as inevitable or necessary fate. It's not gay men in general who've surrendered choice and change to higher abstraction. It's not they who subtitle books "the Destiny of Gay Men."

Although much AIDS writing is overwhelmingly personal, I have no quarrel with Rotello's decision to keep himself (for the most part) out of his narrative. But how can a gay man's book length discussion of gay men's sex habits fail to consider gay men's passion? [T]o modify sexual behavior in ways that many individuals would prefer not to is a startlingly obtuse way for a gay man to speak about the longing of his fellow men. Gay sexual ecology unsullied in the least by homosexual desire has no claim to holism.

No glory holes or fisting orgies for [the Greeks] sniffs the author; no musings on the meaning of semen exchange. Since fisting is epidemiologically neutral, we have to assume that Rotello's disdain is, what, esthetic? moral? If he can't at least empathize with those for whom semen exchange is crucial, how can he aspire to write about AIDS prevention among gay men? By the time the polemic hits full-stride, even the writing goes. By chapter eight, two successive sentences read: The answer is moderation. Balance. Such prose is more appropriate to a self-help audiotape; the simplistic sentiments expressed, utterly unequal to the gravity of the choices gay men face in the age of AIDS

By the final chapter, argument and style have undergone concomitant deterioration: The fact that the challenge we face is an ecological challenge, with all that that implies, is not so much suggested by theory as, it seems to me, dictated by biology. Whole chapters of blather. Toward the end of Sexual Ecology, Rotello engages in a rare flight of fancy and envisions a future generation reading the crumbling, yellowed pages of his book. His readers wonder what all the fuss was about. If his book is all they have of our era, it's for sure they won't have the remotest sense of what it was like to have been a gay man of flesh and blood, making difficult sexual and health decisions every day of the epidemic that was AIDS.

Rotello's armchair analysis will permit none of the messy stuff of a real life in our times to bleed through. The book's early survey of selected AIDS epidemiology never transcends freeze dried pastiche. Later, the evidence of real lives lived might have jolted Frankenstein to life; it never comes. Long before it ends it's clear the book is not concerned with mundane AIDS prevention. It's a lengthy brief for gay monogamy, with AIDS its occasion. There's no guarantee that Sexual Ecology would have been a better book had it been a forthright paean to gay marriage (with a chapter perhaps on STDs); but it would have been more to the point. But then, who'd have bought it? or put it out?

To fit gay men into this twisted future, Rotello has to twist our recent past. According to Rotello, only with the political revolution of Stonewall did gay men discover the anus. Before 1969, buggery was rare and rimming unheard of. So how do we explain the last hundred and fifty years of male homosexual literature? A century before the riots, Lautreamont could enthuse: O that the world were a celestial anus! I would plunge my penis past its bloody sphincter. Writing in the 30s and 40s, Genet depicts anal intercourse as central to his sexual expression (both to bugger and be buggered), and waxes poetic about rimming. Written in the 40s (and recalling an earlier time), the early fiction of the American Sam Steward (Phil Andros) paints a world in which anal sex, often reciprocal, is the quintessence of homosex; he is expert enough on rimming to warn of its health risk.

Contrary to Rotello's assertion, there is ample evidence that the homosexual targets of the Navy witch-hunts of 1919 knew of and sometimes practiced anal intercourse, as did at least one of the trade investigators [see Lawrence Murphy, Perverts by Official Order]. Sodomite has been a synonym for faggots for a long time, and sodomy for anal sex. That said, anyone who lived through the decade knows there was an exponential rise in all sex in the 70s, particularly in gay male sex, as legions came out of the closet and sex spaces proliferated. Rotello is wrong in his recurring assertion that most gay men refuse to recognize that our sexual activity in the 70s facilitated the spread of AIDS [32]; and wrong that there's been no public discussion about it [182]. All our prevention materials, in proselytizing for behavior changes, show that we've made the connection. There has been significant behavior change as a result of those prevention efforts. A core activist distinction between risky behaviors and risk groups (a distinction Rotello ridicules as a bit of political correctness that has cost the gay community prevention dollars) could only be built on such a recognition.

Unlike Rotello, I know of no gay man who's worked long and hard to obscure the connection between AIDS and risky behavior [219]. Rotello needlessly ridicules the early AIDS prevention efforts of gay writers and organizations (in retrospect pathetically misguided [96] ), made in good faith and based on the little available data. These efforts took place amid confusion and growing fear, before there was a known causative agent. To say of early campaigns aimed at partner reduction that such reductions made little difference [95] is plain wrong. It meant a great deal to the individual men who remained uninfected as a result. A page later Rotello himself presents data showing that even in an environment of 40% infection, significant partner reduction can reduce infection by one-third. Rotello's own prevention plan, universal serial monogamy, would itself be a drastic form of partner reduction. Having mocked partner reduction as a prevention effort and pointed out how much more effective advocating use of condoms for anal sex would have been, Rotello does an about face. He laments that, with the isolation of HIV came the reduction of all safer sex messages to the condom code: always wear one during anal sex and you need worry about nothing else [102].

This is revisionist history. In New York City, for example, GMHC's safer sex publications (like comic books) and safer sex classes had a much more varied palette of risk reduction procedures than condoms for anal sex. A generation of gay men literalized the early, important prevention slogan, Come on me not in me, quite polymorphously. In my observation and my own experience, in the age of AIDS the majority of casual sexual encounters between gay men do not involve anal intercourse at all. (Rotello extols a cohort of gay men in Holland for achieving a 0 rate of new HIV infection after encouragement to reduce anal sex outside primary relationships [101]; he neglects to add that the pool of infection among Dutch gay men was astronomically lower than among their counterparts in urban America.) In Rotello's version, politics largely determined the original consolidation of gay opinion behind the condom code: no gay leader would question a right to anal sex and to many partners [92]. Again bad history.

The condom code was the result of a very natural desire to make the greatest impact with the minimal intervention. For many men, a simple barrier to the fluid that carried the virus seemed the easiest way to accomplish this. (For those averse to latex, emphasizing non-penetrative sex acts might be; for others, anal sex without a barrier with a primary partner of the same serostatus. A lot of men have mixed and matched strategies in sequence or combination.) Rotello is wrong that prevention efforts have been silent about condom risk [106]. In fact, guidelines routinely suggest how to minimize risks (double bagging, using monoxynol 9, withdrawing before ejaculation). Among the darts Rotello tosses at the condom code: some gay men get high in order to have the unprotected sex they most desire [139].

Rotello speculates that if the success of the condom code requires eradication of gay men's substance abuse problems, its prospects are dim [140]; I would have thought that the success of a commitment to monogamy would require very sober men indeed. Venturing beyond the condom code, Rotello blames GMHC's guidelines [107] for assuming that some gay men would have more than one partner. But guidelines that presumed an airtight monogamy for all would have been irresponsible. By book's end [286] he accuses the new AIDS prevention movement of accepting high transmission rates and an eternal AIDS epidemic; his censure is irrational. Who would work for a movement he believed pre-doomed to fail?

At least as startling, Rotello's commentary on safer sex posters is worthy of the Jesse Helms school of art criticism (where hot photos of fags promulgate faggotry). [I]t would not be surprising if they that is, posters with cute boys holding condoms exhorting an audience to DO IT were influential in teaching young gay men that the preferred form of homosex is anal sex [189]. Forget that the poster doesn't even mention anal sex. Rotello would contend that, since most gay men don't use condoms for oral sex, the presence of a condom in the poster implies an appeal to anal sex. But if they'd said: use condoms for anal sex, Rotello would have complained that they were discouraging their use for oral sex, and were explicitly promoting anal sex. Such a Catch 22 condemnation of just about any sexy, safer sex message is particularly ironic coming from Rotello. In the summer of 1995 his AIDS prevention group (GALPHA) complained that draft regulations for New York City sex clubs failed to require so many safer sex posters per so many square feet of wall space.

This proposal to divert scarce prevention dollars to such statutory micro-management raised a few eyebrows. I now wonder what dour posters GALPHA had in mind. Schoolmarms replacing cute boys? skull and crossbones over cock and balls? The fight for sufficiently explicit and engaging safer sex materials has been hard-fought; Rotello would apparently throw away our gains.

As Rotello asserts, degaying AIDS [116] may have cost us gay-targeted prevention dollars. But, given the insufficiently explicit messages of much government sponsored AIDS prevention materials, I don't know we're much the poorer for it. And degaying AIDS arguably spared many people infection in those pockets of urban America where AIDS is a heterosexual threat. But Rotello is wrong that activists promulgated the notion that millions of American heterosexuals outside of drug users and their partners would ever be infected: even most pioneer activists realized that heterosexual mating patterns would militate against massive transmission of this difficult to transmit virus. The specter of heterosexual AIDS [166] probably did gain us research dollars. Of all Rotello's twists of history, the one that most puzzles me, a gay New Yorker on the epidemic's front-lines, is his undeviating depiction of gay men's response to AIDS: always narrowly self-interested, usually delusional [257].

He underestimates us. The response of gay men to AIDS, individually and through our organizations, has been characterized by a pervasive altruism. There is little in gay culture, he sniffs, to encourage a wider sense of responsibility [268]. This is not the gay culture I know. Mutual affection has been the fuel that runs the vast network of grassroots AIDS-related service and activist organizations, and the glue that holds them together. It has fed innumerable more personal efforts among friends, lovers and relative strangers. Finding in myself the strength to carry out personal and community AIDS work has been to use a term Rotello is particularly fond of transformative. And I've found this transformation mirrored in friends and lovers and other gay men throughout the epidemic. The task of gay men now is to build upon this bedrock a vibrant culture (sexual and other) of mutual and communal support. Rotello's vision, which privileges one form of sexuality as optimally ecological, would support only those who are of like habit.

Of all the gay men Rotello's book slights, none fare worse (and with less reason) than HIV+ men. Rotello's characterization of the unmitigated self-interest [108], and irresponsibility of HIV+ men in casual sexual encounters [193] runs counter to almost all my own experience. (He quotes selectively from Scott O'Hara's deliberately inflammatory editorial, Exit the Rubberman without mentioning that O'Hara is so determined to notify potential partners of his HIV status, he's had HIV+ tattooed on an upper arm.) Contrary to Rotello's assertion, the condom code does not let HIV+ men off the hook [109]. In fact, as Rotello notes, AIDS prevention literature calls for using condoms for anal sex irrespective of serostatus it does not have a special message for HIV+ men.

It's Rotello who campaigns for targeting separate messages to HIV+ and HIV- men, complains that the condom message has been the same for all men [107], then blames prevention efforts because HIV+ and HIV- men might somehow extract a different message from the same unambiguous materials. Other sub-populations of the gay world are pictured in narrow or distorted ways. Rural gay men are closeted, their sex is shame-ridden, they lack negotiation skills [130]. Other prevention workers and theorists are blindly self-interested [160]. Young gay men routinely court infection so they won't have to practice a burdonsome safer sex any more [241]. (Rotello admits this last fact is frequently unspoken if he means it's infrequently spoken of, he's right; I've never heard such a thing) In one chapter he stereotypes lesbians as more contentedly monogamous than even heterosexuals [246], but soon approvingly quotes Torie Osborne's indictment of sexually adventurous young lesbians as consumerist [288]. (As if a queered American Dream of spouse, pet, house, and maybe a kid were not comsumerist?)

Promiscuous fags supposedly somehow infected these young dykes with their libertinism. But, contrary to Rotello's claim, not even we libertines believe in our absolute sexual freedom [290]; only absolutists believe such things exist. Gay culture is a good deal richer than the shallowness depicted here. Think of the significant figures in gay thought and politics and art and literature of the last generation, and of their impact within and beyond gay culture, and you'll begin to realize just how blind Rotello's portrayal is to most of what we are.

At the beginning of the book [3], Rotello admits he's reversed some earlier activist premises. Maybe Sexual Ecology would be better read as a book length sub rosa mea culpa. Overt Augustinian confession had been more exciting. But the resourceful reader in search of enlivening subtext will find modest reward. Like when the former party promoter preaches withdrawal from the fast lane. Or when the former editor of a magazine, the existence of which depended on ads that glorify sex, attacks ads that glorify sex [152]. Or when a former activist (and current journalist) accepts without question the dated, self-serving assertion of New York City's former Health Commissioner, Stephen Joseph, that activists have needle exchange.

In handling the activist response to the epidemic, the book captures the mood no more accurately than it captures the facts. Which argument was aggressively promoted by gay and AIDS activists? That we deserved support because we had now become desexualized good gays [277]. In the years that saw the queering of gay liberation, how could someone aggressively promoting his desexuality be designated an activist? ACT UP's profile was pro-sex and in-your-face about it. Its weekly meetings quickly gained a reputation as the sexiest place a gay man could find himself on Monday evenings. Later Rotello comes to his senses and terms most activists sexual libertarians, but by then [287] he's polarized those who adopt a lifestyle of sexual restraint and those very libertarians who drift farther into an acceptance of homosexuality as inevitably diseased and death ridden, a characterization no opponent of his would accept.

But by then, Rotello has become so rabid in his desire to mainstream gay men, he holds those gay men who've recently seroconverted responsible for the AIDS backlash that he's terrified will occur [280]. Fear of backlash will not motivate most gay men: they don't conduct their personal lives as the straight world would have them do. Early in the book Rotello valorizes lone, unheeded voices from early in the epidemic. In his few personal appearances in the book, he positions himself as heir to this tradition: delivering an unwanted message to parents of gays, failing to convince a panel of the high risk of oral sex.

He recounts near universal opposition by gay and AIDS groups [283] to his organization's proposal to remove doors from cubicles in New York sex establishments. Rotello's voice (as he realizes) may not be the majority voice among gay men [287]. But he needn't worry as much as he does that fresh HIV infection might prompt friendly editorial boards and politicians to desert gay men [281 2].

Rotello's is the voice that the mainstream wants to hear. Of recent books that deal with issues of AIDS prevention, Sexual Ecology is the one published by a mainstream house. And even among gay men, a call to monogamy might well be embraced by Our Leaders, so gaga to get us married. Though it's not my particular kink, those that want to chain themselves to one another should go ahead. But in this age of health crisis, let's first secure for the rest of us a right to healthcare irrespective of job or spouse or lack of one.