'If he were a dog he'd have been put down I five years ago' - so the Daily Sport on Freddie Mercury. The virulence of the hostility towards gay men that the Aids pandemic has released, it occurs to me, is directly proportionate to the idea, which was getting into general circulation in Britain around 1980, that gays were doing better with the sex-and-love questions. We seemed to have learnt a few tricks that straights had yet to develop. Gay men had organised genial ways of meeting for casual sex, and also loving couples that might manage, even, to evade gendered roles. They knew how to see other men without falling out with their partners; how to go to bed with friends; how to remain on close terms with former lovers; how to handle age and class differences. They were at ease experimenting with kinky games; they were getting the fun back into sex. For the right-wing bigot, therefore, the Aids pandemic was a godsend. It countermanded, precisely, that alleged gay advantage. It had all been a fantasy, 'the family' should set the limits of human experience. Gays, Section 28 says, have only pretended families.

LRB 13 February 1992 | PDF Download