i am scared. Over a year ago, I embraced a cavalier philosophy that accruing more bills than I could pay would function as a motivator, forcing me through the unpleasant task of finding a better job; I knew in the Summer of '99 that I needed to find a new place to work. I still haven't. The debts are of little concern, and they are certainly not the reason for my fear. I will make-good on my debts, re-scheduling them with the help of a credit counseling agency, or something similar. I have been to the negative sides of both credit worthiness, and solvency, and I have survived. This is America and I am not going to starve or freeze, and for that I am glad, sometimes. The rest of the time, I'm scared.
It is the same fear I used to hold at bay by seeking anonymous tops who wanted to bottom me, never with a rubber. It was even OK if they had a name. It was just sex. Good sex, and sometimes really great sex. You do know what I mean, because you know what you have wanted (even if you've never actually done it); you know the passion of your desires, and you know the things you caught your imagination doing when it thought you weren't looking. Some of my encounters were acts of intimacy which I thought happened only in dreams. Potent stuff for fighting essential fear. At those times—or on those few precious night-long episodes—when sex was great, I was infinitely grateful.
However, the gratitude was not for the pleasure, but for a moment's blessed relief from the constant oppressive terror of being alive. For me, good sex, bad sex, ANY sex, was always an escape from a nameless unrelenting lifelong fear, and I never knew that, then.
during the years of my promiscuity, I was certain I could die from those cocks I sucked in the bushes, or from the few hard men I successfully encouraged to fuck me. I believed the lie in the Eighties and early Nineties that HIV equaled death. Unsafe sex was the soothing dance with death which I used to control my fears. It was my 'suicide kit', my implementation of ultimate control over a life within which I felt I had no control that really mattered.
I miss those days. I can't get it as easily as I used to. Horny young men stopped thumbing on highways fifteen years ago. The first wave of efforts to stop public sex, back in the Eighties, was ostensibly for the public's health; the prudes were still timid and didn't need to be aggressive in the first decade of AIDS. And, as is the way with sex, soon it was back, in the baths and the bushes and in the cars parked too long at the notorious rest areas. Now the second wave of bath-closings and entrapments at public cruising spots is upon us, and now those repressions are blatantly moralistic. The sexual terrorism of HIV has given the New Moralists an advantageous foothold, and my favorites of you (who might still read this)—those readers who have found their same-sex soulmate and never did cruise or have a desire to—should be interested in this anti-sex campaign because its logical conclusion is to divide you from your soulmate, and insert a legal barrier between your bodies.
Now I know that HIV, and 'unsafe' sex, won't kill me. You might still feel that HIV is deadly, but I don't fear it anymore. It's not going to kill me, so now my suicide kit is gone. My dubious plan to raise my debt, and find a better job to meet it, has failed; now I am content to default gracefully and stay at the job which I promised myself I'd leave. And so, I am scared.
Or, more accurately, I am feeling the essential fear.
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