The Serpent Raises Its Head Again, and We Re-Learn a Lesson in Sex

The ‘60s were an exhilarating time, the time when we all grew up. Some of us were called Flower Children then, and there was a childlike quality about the way we all lived. Everything we did was OK. You could wear your hair funny and dress any way you wanted, you could make love with anybody, any time, because you now had The Pill, and you could have a lot of fun with “psychedelic” drugs because they just bent your mind a little--they didn’t break it. And there were no more taboos about words; you could say them all out loud, even the four-letter ones.

We had been liberated totally, and permanently. Or so we thought.

Then a few years ago we heard for the first time about another four-letter word, and it was an ugly one. It was a bad business, no question about that, but for a while it didn’t bother us very much. It only affected Haitians, gays, drug users--people familiar to us only from the pages of L.A. Weekly and National Geographic. We weren’t going to say it’s their own fault or God’s punishment; still, if they had been a little more like us . . . . It can’t happen to us, we thought--we who live in the suburbs, have white skins, brush our teeth and believe that we are heterosexuals.

We know now that that smug immunity was an illusion. Heterosexuals can get it, and even “innocent” children through blood transfusions. It’s spreading at an alarming rate, and there’s no cure in sight.

We’re scared. After all the sophisticated contraceptives we’ve seen come onto the market, each one better than the one before, we’ve come back to that old joke of our high-school years, the condom. (We used to say it was “like taking a shower with your socks on.”) We’re not reassured by the doctors telling us that we’ll be OK if we don’t do certain things. What if they’re wrong? And what if I make a mistake?

In matters of love it’s getting dark all around us. In the Middle Ages lepers were denounced from the pulpit and driven from human company, forced to wear bells to warn others of their presence--a crude analog of the quarantining and compulsory testing now called for in some quarters. Some doctors and nurses have refused to treat gays. Will we be the next ones they refuse to treat, we who have always made love missionary-style?

The fear of sex is coming back, the fear we had when we were very young, the fear of pregnancy, the fear of disease. And it seems that drugs aren’t all that hot an idea, either. We see newspaper headlines that might have been written by A. E. Housman back in the darkest of Victorian times: “On an athlete dying young.” Next the Ultimate Censor will appear and tell us not to use dirty words.

When I was a child we were all terrified of polio. Everyone knew somebody who had gotten it; even the President of the United States was not spared. In those pre-Salk days there was no cure for it. Now we’re back where we were then. And it’s not just a matter of staying out of swimming pools in the summer; you can get a fatal and incurable disease for what you do in the privacy of your bedroom.

Sin has been reinvented, and we are reminded of something we had forgotten--that the wages of sin is death. Taking our showers with our socks on, we know once again the sour and ludicrous compromises of our youth.

What’s going on anyhow? Have the ‘60s been repealed? Can we do whatever we want or not? We have gained, or regained, knowledge--that knowledge of good and evil that is the fruit of Eden. We know now that no matter how often the Fat Broad in the cartoon strip B.C. hits the snake with a club it will creep back into the funny papers. We know now, in 1987, that there is no pill you can take, nothing you can shoot into yourself, that will make you happy, not without making you a lot unhappier in the long run. We know now that dirty words are not very eloquent; they’re boring and disgusting, as our mothers told us. We know now that love is never free, that everything has a price.

Maybe they will find a cure for AIDS, but the ‘60s are over and they’re not coming back. We suspect now that this shadow that hung over us when we were young, and hangs over us again, was meant to hang over us. The fear of night, the fear of death, is permanent. It is something we have to live with. It does not mean that happiness has been abolished, and it doesn’t mean that you have to stop being gay, however you take the word. We can still love one another, but now we have to do it with caution, and with one eye to the doctors to be sure the way we’re doing it is all right. We’re back where we were, and it serves us right.

The ‘60s were an illusion. In the heady atmosphere of those days we believed that we had emancipated ourselves from the Human Condition, in which everything that men do is necessarily imperfect. Now we’re back with the Existentialists we read in the ‘50s; we’re responsible for everything we do, for every flea we kill. Looking at those doomed people in the news, we know that we will always be human and that there is no real progress--not in the arts, certainly not in politics, perhaps not in medicine, and above all, a thing we should have realized, there is no progress in sex. Milton had it right in the 17th Century; he hailed Wedded Love but he hated that Serpent, the one that has now raised its head again.