Many gay men have criticized the CDC’s recommendation because they fear a slippery slope. They point to the history of HIV/AIDS and how government authorities pathologized gay culture—and gay people—as aberrant and shut down bathhouses, including the Everard Baths, which Mayor Ed Koch ordered closed in 1986. As a gay man and a historian of infectious disease, I know about the harm that comes when public policy becomes infused with homophobia. Yet protecting gay men from discrimination and stigmatization today does not require public-health officials to tiptoe around how monkeypox is currently being transmitted. Drawing imprecise historical parallels between Williams’s day and ours—or between HIV and monkeypox—adds confusion to an already contentious public-health crisis, and it makes the straightforward decision to simply refrain from high-risk sex far more politically fraught than it needs to be.
Two years ago, public-health officials urged the public to stay home to stop COVID-19. But some agencies have become so wary about advising sexual abstinence of any sort that they won’t even tell men with symptomatic monkeypox infections to avoid sex for a few weeks until they recover. Officials in New York and elsewhere have suggested, as a harm-reduction measure, that sufferers cover up their lesions during sexual activity. (In many patients, those sores are excruciatingly painful and are in locations that are difficult to cover.)
When contemporary gay activists scoff at talk of limiting sexual activity, they often imply that the impetus for any such restraint has historically come from the government. Yet even before the devastation caused by HIV, criticism of anonymous sex had been building within the gay community. In 1978, Larry Kramer—who later became a leader in AIDS activism—published Faggots, a novel that called into question the sexual libertinism of the era. Loosely based on his quest to find a meaningful relationship, Kramer’s book indicted orgies, urban bathhouses, and sex-filled summers on Fire Island, which, he believed, prevented gay men from having intimate, monogamous relationships.
Others shared many of Kramer’s concerns. Craig Rodwell, a gay political leader who helped spearhead the first Pride march, worried that the emphasis on sex within the gay community would undermine efforts to sustain the movement. He founded the first-ever gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, a venue that offered an alternative to the sex culture. Rodwell was not a prude and often cruised parks himself; by some accounts, his infidelity led to the demise of his relationship with the legendary activist Harvey Milk. But Rodwell also wanted to create nonsexual ways for gay people to interact.