The following is the fourth installment of Susan Kingston's remarks from her talk at the Center on Halsted June 27 titled: "Crystal Meth Uncensored - What the DEA and the Gay Media Won't Tell You."
Click here for the 1st installment
Click here for the 2nd installment
Click here for the 3rd installment
Click here for the 5th and final
Click here for her full remarks, all in one place.
On crystal, men seek what they wish sex could be but isn’t – uncomplicated, guiltless, indulgent. Sure, for most guys, sex on meth eventually becomes a dissociated and mechanical routine, but they keep seeking anyway. Because underneath all of that carnal desire may really be a yearning for connection.
About crystal and sex
And when we start talking about motivations, we have to start talking about sex.
Gay sex has never been “just sex”. And that’s too bad because without all the overlays of homophobic judgment, shame, AIDS, syphilis, being rejected, being too fat, not being hard enough, how should I time my Viagra … sex is really a lot of fun. So in a day when gay sex requires so much effort, it makes sense that crystal becomes popular. Crystal meth is to gay men what birth control was to women – liberating. The Pill released us from worry about the worst, life-changing consequence of sex that could happen to us– getting pregnant when we didn’t want to. I remember having sex without the Pill and with the Pill, and let me tell you how much more fun it is now! It’s just like the difference between sex with a condom and sex without. There isn’t one of you who can honestly say that you like sex better with condoms. And there’s no reason why we should have to hide that or apologize for it. If God had meant us to use condoms all the time, your dick would already come pre-wrapped, and you’d just shed layers like a snake or something. You know, we’re lazy creatures. We need things easy.
Today, all we hear about is how crystal meth is driving unprecedented rates of unprotected sex and HIV transmission. But consider this. Let’s say your city sees 300 new HIV infections among gay men each year. Because we know that roughly one-third of HIV-positive men have used crystal, that means only 100 of those infections are among men with some association with crystal. That means the other 200 have some explaining to do on their own. So crystal may seem like a convenient excuse for why HIV continues and “bad gay behavior” continues, but it isn’t.
Think about it. In the mid-west and on the east coast, stories about rising rates of syphilis and unprotected butt sex were creeping out long before meth took over the front pages in these parts of the country. We’ve been talking about this trend since 1996 and the advent of protease inhibitors and a growing population of men not dying from AIDS but instead rather living and suddenly feeling pretty damn horny. So guess what? Men had already started to opt for sex without condoms even without crystal to blame for it. So I think we have it backwards. It isn’t crystal that’s fueling risky sex. I think it’s the desire to have free, unbridled, unashamed sex the way it was meant to be that is driving crystal use.
If you asked any guy in here why, in the era of HIV, he has sex without a condom and ask another guy why he does crystal, the answers would be the same: -I just needed to feel free for once. -I love my partner. -I want to feel a connection. -I don’t feel good enough about myself to do otherwise.
And the #1 reason - IT FEELS GOOD! It felt so good that my judgment got hijacked.
On crystal, men seek what they wish sex could be but isn’t – uncomplicated, guiltless, indulgent. Sure, for most guys, sex on meth eventually becomes a dissociated and mechanical routine, but they keep seeking anyway. Because underneath all of that carnal desire may really be a yearning for connection.
When I was counseling gay crystal users, the two themes that emerged from nearly every man in my office were those of isolation and perfection. Almost every man longed for more meaningful connections with other men and thought at first that crystal was the way to facilitate that. That alone in a crowded room feeling was universal. Men were sad that gay men ask each other about cock sizes with more recall than they do their names. They were angry that gay men take better care of their dildos than they do each other.
Our culture views drug use as an entirely individual behavior. That makes it easy to isolate it from the rest of the well-behaving group. It makes it easier to frame it as a matter of weak character, moral failings, or criminality. And it makes it easier to deny that we as a community have anything to do with this. But we do. And this is a critical point:
Gay culture values the very characteristics that speed can deliver: qualities like sociability, thinness, sexual virility, the ability to get to the Kenneth Cole 30% off sale AND alphabetize your porn all in one afternoon. A lot of people explain crystal use as a cover up for the shame of being gay. I think more often it was actually a tool for guys who felt they weren’t gay enough. These values then become part of the cultural logic that shapes drug use among gay men, and until these values change, drug use will not.
How we respond
OK-we’ve de-mythed the drug, deconstructed the guys who use it, now let’s look at us. More specifically how we’re reacting to this issue.
Our first gestalt reaction is to demonize the drug so much we will scare guys away from using it. But there are 2 major problems with this. First, this “danger-based” rhetoric fails to understand the core psychology of guys who pick up stimulants. These are not risk-adverse guys. They like trying new, edgy, somewhat rebellious things that bring thrill and arouse sensations. If you weren’t that kind of person, you wouldn’t even want to try something like crystal. I consider myself a pretty zippy jaywalker, but that’s as racy as I get. I’m not attracted to stimulants. The more you promote the risks, the more attractive it becomes to the very guys most likely to pick it up and lose control with it. In the world of drug prevention, this dynamic actually has a name – the “boomerang effect.” Ads that portray meth as a monster or some evil lurking in our neighborhoods reach only the low-hanging fruit.
The second problem is that we can’t characterize a drug as evil without also characterizing its users as evil. We don’t separate people from their behaviors very well. We try to “hate the sin but love the sinner,” but we can’t really do that. The extent to which we stigmatize crystal is the degree to which we stigmatize men who use it.
Let’s take for example, the ad campaign from San Francisco “Crystal Mess.” One poster depicts a young men sweating, panicked, and tired with the words “Crystal Mess” right above his head. You can not possibly look at that poster and not connect the word “mess” with this man. It screams “this guy is fucked up! HE’s the fucking mess.” I know that isn’t what the designers intended, but that’s what happens. Every meth user I know who saw that ad felt utterly condemned as a human being. They felt deeply hurt that this is how the community sees them. It was enough that they often felt that way about themselves already. They didn’t need that kind of hatred from their own community.
Now think of that same poster but with a picture of gay man with KS lesions and the words “HIV Mess.” You couldn’t do it. You’d be strung up. People would be outraged that you’re making guys feel bad that they have HIV. But it’s OK to make guys struggling with addiction feel bad. It’s the double standard that says your pot-smoking, promiscuous, bare-backing boyfriend is cool as long as he’s not doing speed.
Why would I want to tell you I use crystal and need help if I thought you regarded me as trash to be made fun of? If I already felt shame and hopelessness about my use, now I have even more reason to say fuck it and just get high. My own tribe doesn’t even give a shit about me!
Segments of the gay community can be just as moralistic, harsh, and judgmental as any other community when it comes to drugs. I look out at what’s happening in cities across the country and it’s like the gay community eating its own. There are plenty of people who will judge and condemn gay men without gay men themselves helping out.
Inevitably, the men who get most fired up about taking a softer, kindler approach are men in recovery who personally experienced a hell unlike none other in their lives and who feel, quite understandably, that any approach short of all out war on this drug is coddling and/or dangerously negligent. And so begins the rifting between two camps: those who advocate for harm reduction and those who advocate for abstinence as the way out of this mess. But this divide is artificial. There really isn’t much difference between them, except for this surface rhetoric. There’s plenty of harm reduction philosophy in the cliché aphorisms of 12-step. “Keep coming back - it works.” “Progress, not perfection.” “One day at a time.” These all imply that people don’t immediately jump from using to abstinence and then stay there. The very name “12-step” itself suggests that changing drug use behavior is an incremental, long-term process. In 12-step meetings, everyone is valued and welcomed no matter how many times they’ve tried and failed.
And every single one of us who’s ever worked a needle exchange shares the deepest wish that no one be using this crap. We’d love it if we suddenly didn’t have jobs. We want abstinence for everyone just as much as the 12-step folks do. In fact, we all -12 step and harm reductionists – want the same thing. We want people to be healthy, happy and loved. Luckily, there’s enough room on the squad for all of us.
What should we do about this?
When another “crisis” or “epidemic” hits the gay community, either of two 2 things usually happens:
#1 We dissect gay men again and again and spend countless blogs and research abstracts explaining all of the psychological, historical, political, and sociological reasons why gay men aren’t perfect. This operates from a place that says gay men are inherently messed up and if we could just figure out why, we could fix them – or at least rationalize their behavior.
Or #2 - we panic. When some researcher or well-meaning public health type like me points out that a new “bad behavior” is on the loose (like barebacking or crystal…or fauxhawks for God’s sake) we quickly label this a “crisis,” “epidemic,” or at the very least a “disturbing trend” or some word that suggests everything was just peachy keen and perfect until THIS started to happen.
So I ask, “why can’t our default be one of wellness rather than disease or dysfunction? Can we accept the sick or struggling or nonconformists in our midst without the concept of a crisis? I’m weary of seeing the gay community navel-gaze at its pathologies. Before we start talking about what we should do about this meth problem, we have to challenge our thinking about who we think gay men are. If we think gay men are pools of deficits, then crystal seems perfectly logical and weaning gay men off of it seems hopeless. On the other hand, if we think gay men have to maintain this squeaky-clean image, especially in this political era, then anyone who picks up a meth pipe becomes a deviant who’s giving the rest of us fags a bad name and he should be shunned back into his filthy porn den.
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