AIDS Launches the Sexual Counterrevolution

“Barbara” takes a drag on her cigarette and contemplates her current state of monogamy with her boyfriend of four years. “It would be a lot more fun if you could sleep with whomever you like,” said the 34-year-old woman, who did not want her real name used. “I am from the age of free love; that was the whole beginning of my sexual existence. To have this happen is Armageddon.”

Ken Jones, 31, has been in a “total-abstinence mode” since November. “After reading a lot about it, I’m convinced that there are a lot of people who have it and don’t know it. I intend to be married at some point, but work is fairly demanding now, I’m putting in about 60 hours a week. That has pretty much been the focus of my attention right now.”

“When I’m thinking of dating someone,” said 37-year-old Suzanne Terry, an image consultant, “I’d think about what age group he’s in, where he grew up, where he went to school, what kinds of things was he exposed to. People in their late 20s--that was hip for them in the ‘70s to experiment with bisexuality. Certainly I wouldn’t go out with him if he had any sexual ambivalence (if he was gay or bisexual).”

The subject is AIDS; the arena is the heterosexual community. There have been 33,482 reported cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the United States; of those, 1,261 were through heterosexual contact. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta predicts that by the end of 1991 there will be a total of 270,000 cases of AIDS; 7,000 of those through heterosexual contact.

2,810 Cases in County Since ’81

In Los Angeles County 2,810 cases of AIDS have been reported since 1981, according to the Department of Health. Of those, 168 cases were heterosexual males; 51 of those had histories of intravenous drug use, 101 did not and 16 were unknown. There have been 61 cases of heterosexual females getting the disease; of those, 12 had a history of i.v. drug use, 42 did not and 7 probable causes were unknown.

These statistics--and the rate at which they are expected to rise--have created a low-grade mass hysteria, making sex and the fear of AIDS the hottest topic of polite conversation from executive board rooms to supermarket checkout lines.

Philip Miller, a 29-year-old Los Angeles oil company vice president, recalled a conversation with some co-workers about AIDS. “I saw one guy just go white. He realized he wasn’t married, and he was thinking about all the people he had been with since he moved here. He decided he probably had it--he was destroyed.”

Heterosexuals can no longer afford to be smug, believing they are not at risk. As concern grows, people are not just voicing their worries; for some the fear has changed their lives, upsetting existing relationships and posing doubts about future ones. Promiscuity is being traded for monogamy; casual dating for celibacy.

And as safety becomes an overriding concern for those afraid of contracting the AIDS virus, choosing partners may become less a matter of mutual attraction--or compatibility.

“In a way the whole AIDS drama has brought everybody back to the place where we were before the sexual revolution,” said Daphne Rose Kingma, a licensed marriage and family therapist who practices in Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara. “People are making relationships based on their sexual needs, as opposed to exploring other facets of the relationship. Back in the olden days when sex before marriage was forbidden, the whole reason to get married was to have a legitimate sex life, marriage was the way to do that. In an unusual way sex has become the issue and the other personal dimensions are in the background. And I find with the people I deal with that they are disturbed that this has become so terribly important. It’s forcing people into relationships that are not appropriate.”

Suzanne Terry said she examined her life and realized that “I can’t continue to live the way I have been, changing partners every now and then, and doing that for the next 20 years. I’m not going to be married in the immediate future. So what am I going to do in the meantime? To be celibate and without human touch is no way to live a life.”

Her Way of ‘Cutting the Odds Down’

So she has devised “qualifiers,” a method she admits is crude at best at “cutting the odds down” and determining who is safe. “I’d find out how old they are, where they had been living for the past 10 years. If, for instance, he were from Tucson that would be OK. People are a lot more grounded there.”

This intense scrutiny doesn’t leave much room for mystery. “Everyone’s qualifying each other,” she said. “When I was in my teens we flirted and enjoyed the otherness of the opposite sex. You gradually learned things about the other person. Now it’s bam-bam-bam, you have the whole skinny on someone. AIDS bringing romance back is a bunch of crap.”

Even before AIDS was an issue, Terry said dates often turned into “interviews for brood mare. Am I a fit mother for the children? Where is my family from? But along with that now, AIDS will come up, the fact that everyone is afraid of it. Usually it’s talked about after a glass of wine, when we’re more relaxed, and someone expresses the fear--that they’re looking to settle down now, that they used to fool around and don’t anymore.”

She isn’t the only one devising safety guidelines; several people have decided that having an affair with someone who is married is a pretty sure bet, not thinking there might be a history of similar liaisons.

Others, afraid to start relationships with strangers, seek out old flames instead, confident in knowing about their sexual past.

Is this normal behavior?

“What’s normal?” asked Carlfred Broderick, a USC professor of sociology and head of the marriage and family therapy training program there. “This has never happened before. The last major venereal threat was herpes and that’s a nuisance, not something that’s life-threatening. It’s a coping mechanism. In another era you would take magic potions when you felt powerless. You do the best you know how to do.”

Broderick told of two poignant scenarios, one involving a middle-age couple; the husband had had several blood transfusions before blood was screened for AIDS, making him at risk for exposure to the disease. But he and his wife decided not to be tested for the disease. They decided that the misery of knowing would be too great.

The other case involves a woman who contracted AIDS from a former boyfriend. Although both are involved with other people, he has since proposed marriage, saying they could care for each other during their illness.

Thomas Lasswell, a professor of sociology at USC, likens the fear of AIDS to the panic over polio decades ago. And even though heterosexual death rates from AIDS do not rival those from other diseases, “It is something that has caught the public anxiety, something to pin free-floating anxiety on,” he said. “If you’re not afraid of anything else, you can be afraid of getting exposed to AIDS.”

Ken Jones’ method of coping has been drastic; the 31-year-old real estate developer has opted for total abstinence since late last year, even cutting out dating. Before this his relationships were casual. “There was no one I was ever interested in marrying. I had broken off a long-term relationship last year for geographic reasons, and since then there was no one I was really interested in. I’ve changed my social behavior dramatically,” he said.

“After reading about AIDS, and after taking into consideration the potential delay for symptoms to show up, I was convinced that there were a lot of people who have it and don’t know it.”

His days are taken up with work and “I play a lot of sports when there’s time. And I read a lot. Yeah, it’s depressing,” he said with a sigh. “I just hope it gets a lot less depressing. I find that any AIDS article captures my attention immediately.”

Jones is vocal about getting friends to change their behavior. Some have, though no one has gone as far as he has. “In terms of the bar scene, though, I see a lot of people are still doing the same things, and that makes me worried about the population in general.”

His analysis is justified to a certain extent. Bartenders and owners of several popular clubs and restaurants in town report that it’s business as usual, with just as many pick-up lines being exchanged over white wine spritzers.

‘A Drastic Change’

Elsewhere concern is becoming apparent. At the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Strip, one of the city’s well-known singles hangouts, “there has been a drastic change,” according to Michelle Westfall, a waitress with a 12-year history there. “People are being more selective. A lot of women are saying, ‘No.’ They’re being more cautious. Years ago anybody would go with anybody. Now when guys approach the girls, they’ll just turn around and say, ‘AIDS.’ The guys just walk away. I used to get asked out a lot, but I don’t anymore.”

Down the street at Nicky Blair’s, the new hot spot on Sunset Boulevard popular with the entertainment crowd, conversations between the sexes turned into a game of Twenty Questions on a recent night. According to one woman observing the social scene, “It was so blatant. It was almost laughable. These women were grilling these men--’Were you married? Did your girlfriend sleep around a lot? Do you have any children?’ They were getting everything but the TRW report. And it was disturbing at the same time. It’s a fact of life now, you can’t ignore it.”

The AIDS panic has produced some seriocomic results: The Hard Rock Cafe has installed condom vending machines in the bathrooms; painted on the wall above them is the restaurant’s motto: “Save the Planet.”

Around the country dating services are being set up for those who have tested negative for the virus. Detroit has the Peace of Mind social club, and a singles club in New England is urging its 5,000 members to take an AIDS test.

Obviously, couples are being much more up-front about the issue. Talking about one’s sexuality in a relationship is “inescapable,” according to therapist Kingma. “Ultimately that can have a very healing effect. When the straight community became involved with AIDS, it had to see itself as part of the whole. And that’s very healing, the fact that we’re suffering together. I would hope though that people would not be threatened and terrorized by it, but that it is used as an opportunity to communicate on a deeper level.”

‘Really Scary’

It’s been years since “Emily,” (not her real name) 28, has gone home with men she met in bars. “I used to start relationships really quickly,” she said. “At certain points after college I was wildly promiscuous. Now I’m not so much; part of that is because I’m older and a little more conservative. But also, whenever it comes time to break up with someone, going on to someone else is really scary. You’re taking all those risks. And because of that I feel much more hemmed-in in relationships.”

She was never one to linger over lost loves--as soon as one relationship would end “I’d already be onto the next, so I didn’t have to feel guilty about the breakup. It was a way of distancing myself--so was having two or three satellite affairs. But now I’m going to have to learn how to deal with it. When my last relationship ended I was frozen for three months. “

And after years of falling for Don Juan types, she is now dating a man who she says is sexually inexperienced. “When I learned that he had had two other girlfriends, and that they were fairly conservative women, I was relieved,” she said. “That attracted me to him--it appeals to me that I know he’s safe.”

“Barbara” has decided to have an AIDS test; her four-year relationship with her boyfriend has included episodes with female prostitutes and one man who used cocaine intravenously. “The whole thing started affecting my life about a year ago,” she said. “A friend of mine who was very promiscuous was frightened to have the test. But the bottom line is: Do you want to be responsible for passing on a death sentence?”

Fear of contracting AIDS, she said, “isn’t going to change my sexual proclivity, it’s going to change how I act. My guidelines are different. I would still like to be experimenting--that’s what I call it--but it used to be the worst you could get was herpes. That you can live with. Now I would have to be head over heels in love with someone before I slept with him.

“Has this changed my idea of romance? Absolutely. You’re frightened to kiss someone now, let alone sleep with him. I would go through periods of promiscuity; now I’d no more ponder that than slit my wrists. If anyone said to me years ago that I would go out with someone for two or three months before I slept with him, I would have said you’ve got to be crazy. But if you go out with someone just two or three times and then sleep with him--I’d say you’re crazy.”

DR, Los Angeles Times

DR, JOHN SNYDER / Los Angeles Times