PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus
The Edge of Horror
PUBLISHER JENNIFER GOODSTEIN
BY ED SIKOV
Jennifer@communitymediallc.com ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER & CO-FOUNDER TROY MASTERS
troy@gaycitynews.com EDITOR IN-CHIEF & CO-FOUNDER PAUL SCHINDLER
editor@gaycitynews.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Duncan Osborne
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Seth J. Bookey, Anthony M.Brown, Kelly Jean Cogswell, Andres Duque, Michael Ehrhardt, Steve Erickson, Andy Humm, Eli Jacobson, David Kennerley, Gary M. Kramer, Arthur S. Leonard, Michael T. Luongo, Lawrence D. Mass, Winnie McCroy, Eileen McDermott, Mick Meenan, Tim Miller, Gregory Montreuil, Christopher Murray, David Noh, Nathan Riley, David Shengold, Yoav Sivan, Gus Solomons Jr., Tim Teeman, Kathleen Warnock, Benjamin Weinthal, Dean P. Wrzeszcz
ART DIRECTOR MICHAEL SHIREY
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS ANDREW GOOSS CHRIS ORTIZ
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT SALES/MARKETING AMANDA TARLEY
SENIOR VP OF ADVERTISING / MARKETING FRANCESCO REGINI
francesco@gaycitynews.com
ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES JACK AGLIATA ALLISON GREAKER JENNIFER HOLLAND ANDREW MARK JULIO TUMBACO Please call (212) 229-1890 for advertising rates and availability.
NATIONAL DISPLAY ADVERTISING Rivendell Media / 212.242.6863
Gay City News, The Newspaper Serving Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender NYC, is published by NYC Community Media, LLC. Send all inquiries to: Gay City News, 515 Canal Street, Unit 1C, NYC 10013 Phone: 212.229.1890 Written permission of the publisher must be obtained before any of the contents of this paper, in part or whole, can be reproduced or redistributed. All contents (c) 2014 Gay City News. Gay City News is a registered trademark of NYC Community Media, LLC. Jennifer Goodstein, CEO Fax: 212.229.2790; E-mail: Jennifer@communitymediallc.com
© 2014 Gay City News. All rights reserved.
FOUNDING MEMBER
26
FOUNDING MEMBER
DONNA ACETO
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Christopher Byrne (Theater), Susie Day (Perspective), Brian McCormick (Dance)
T
he actor and Out 100 Artist of the Year Zachary Quinto certainly stepped in something stinky when he opined about HIV and young gay men in the Out interview accompanying his award. In case you’ve been living — with me — on Mars and need a quick sketch of who this Quinto person is, he’s the Spock in two recent, youthy “Star Trek” movies and a recurring character on FX’s “American Horror Story.” I applaud Quinto for coming out and for being loudmouthed about it, but what he said in Out is pure horseshit. The interview reads: “‘I think there’s a tremendous sense of complacency in the LGBT community,’ Quinto says, citing the rising number of HIV infections in adolescents. ‘AIDS has lost the edge of horror it possessed when it swept through the world in the ’80s. Today’s generation sees it more as something to live with and something to be much less fearful of. And that comes with a sense of, dare I say, laziness.’ Quinto is similarly candid on prophylactic drugs, like PrEP, which many gay people have embraced as a long-awaited panacea. ‘We need to be really vigilant and open about the fact that these drugs are not to be taken to increase our ability to have recreational sex,’ he says. ‘There’s an incredible underlying irresponsibility to that way of thinking… and we don’t yet know enough about this vein of medication to see where it’ll take us down the line.’” Where do I start to dissect this crock? With Mathew Rodriguez’s marvelous takedown in the Advocate, that’s where. “Isn’t any consensual sex that isn’t for procreation, by definition, recreational sex?” Rodriguez writes. “Even some sex that has the potential for procreation is recreational — hell, the whole reason sex feels good is because biology wants us to fuck ourselves into perpetual existence. It’s in our DNA to have pleasurable sex. I’m going to cast off any worries about getting too personal — since we’re talking about sex, death, and HIV — and ask exactly how much of Quinto’s sex has not been recreational? Does he define his monogamous sex as responsible and
A November 20 panel about the media’s coverage of PrEP held at Gay Men’s Health Crisis included GMHC’s Krishna Stone, thebody.com’s Mathew Rodriguez, New York magazine’s Tim Murphy, Ben Ryan of POZ magazine, Gay City News’ Paul Schindler, and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis of the city health department.
grim? Were he and Jonathan Groff trying to conceive? [Quinto and Groff were an item from 2010 until 2013.] I hope Mr. Quinto is not suggesting that single, promiscuous sex should shoulder all blame for HIV infections — especially when sound science tells us that about two thirds of HIV infections among gay men happen within the context of a relationship.” Score! That zinger about Quinto and Groff “trying to conceive” made me laugh out loud. Rodriguez hits another one out of the park when he mocks Quinto’s assumption about the supposed irresponsibility of using PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, with the drug Truvada: “Somehow, Quinto has confused the responsibility it takes to speak to one’s doctor about going on a new medication, speak with insurance to secure prior authorization for PrEP, go to doctor’s visits four times a year, swallow a pill every day, call up mail-order pharmacies to get refills on time, make sure to get payments in order, successfully manage side effects, and follow up on lab work with your doctor with irresponsible behavior.” Excellent point. But Rodriguez makes his own assumption, one worth questioning — namely, the notion that guys on PrEP will necessarily deal successfully with the many responsibilities that come with it over the long term. It’s by no means certain that all PrEPpies will strictly adhere to the regimen required to prevent HIV transmission in every case. But that hardly negates PrEP’s value. Quinto’s interviewer, Mike Berlin, gets it — dare I say — totally wrong when he describes “many gay people” as seeing PrEP as a
“long-awaited panacea.” Nobody of note thinks it’s a cure-all. PrEP is a well-studied, proven-effective risk-reduction strategy, and to suggest that these unnamed “many gay people” are too dumb to know the difference between “panacea” and “risk-reduction strategy” is insulting. Moreover, having lived through the entirety of the AIDS crisis as a sexually active and out gay man, I find Quinto’s expression “the edge of horror” to be an obnoxious and offensive way of describing the effects of AIDS in the 1980s. Having an “edge” is the way people describe a play that makes them pleasantly uncomfortable. The “horror” Quinto speaks of with callous and phony nostalgia — he was four in 1981 when the first cases of AIDS were reported — wasn’t edgy nor was it a positive life lesson. It wasn’t even an effective propaganda tool for AIDS education. Sure, some of us got too scared to fuck. Others saw no possibility of survival and fucked themselves to death. The point is, “the edge of horror” didn’t teach anybody anything worth learning.
More on PrEP At the risk of looking like Josh Barro’s media stalker, I’d like to applaud his recent piece in the New York Times about Michael Weinstein, the longtime head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who is, as Barro describes him, the only prominent opponent of PrEP. Weinstein has become increasingly isolated in the AIDS and HIV policy community by crusading against Truvada’s use by HIV-negative people as prophylaxis.
c
MEDIA CIRCUS, continued on p.32
November 27 - December 10, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.nyc