I just spent a few days in Berlin, capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and according to the brochure, the largest city between Moscow and Paris, working on an HIV-related project; of which, as it is big enough to literally affect all of us, much more detail later. But meanwhile, I’d warrant that Berlin itself deserves a story.

Start with the obvious: if you enjoy urban beauty or the elegance of a perfect cityscape, book a flight to Paris. Berlin is, to be blunt, ugly. It doesn’t have the richly layered history of Rome or London, the gilded perfection of Saint Petersburg, the raw pulsing energy of Hong Kong or New York. Berlin is too young to be profound, too compromised to be innocent or exuberant. Its nightlife can be of an order of decadence to make the Marquis de Sade blush; but alas, the local metro goes to sleep at one A.M., incomprehensibly, leaving one with a Hobson’s choice of a very long walk or the use of taxis that are literally beige. That’s right: beige. Nothing says “I just had epic sex with twin Siberian gymnasts in front of a paying audience” quite as clearly as a beige Mercedes-Benz. It is to weep. On the other hand, the city’s Lord Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, is openly gay.

Until recently divided by the monstrous Berlin Wall – one of my earliest memories is standing in front of it, and understanding even as a tot that I was looking at something abhorrent – Berlin has not yet truly become one city. What it has done instead, assisted by the largesse of the German taxpayer, is nonetheless remarkable: acknowledge the darker sides of its history with a frankness probably without equal anywhere else. That begs the question of how it got to where it is today.

Few places have been as central to the tragedies of the last century than this lightly wooded spot of sand, lakes and gravel roughly the geographic size of New York City (with rather a bit less than half as many people, no coast and no skyscrapers). It began the century as the ostentatiously nouveaux-riche capital of Imperial Germany, ruled by a man we in the English-speaking world know simply as the Kaiser, Emperor William II. He qualifies as a tragedy of his own. This is the complete jackass that practically single-handedly strangled four centuries of European world pre-eminence by dragging every great power of his day into a war none of them wanted to fight all that much, and despite most of them being ruled by members of his immediate family. He began his career as monarch by firing his chancellor, Otto Prince Bismarck, the man who in 1871 handed William’s grandfather and namesake King William III of Prussia the crown of a shiny new German Empire and then kept the peace of Europe for decades. “Jackass” may be an excess of charity, come to think of it.

His dynasty, the House of Hohenzollern, produced competent, hard-working and occasionally brilliant kings of Prussia over the course of several centuries, then two quite serviceable German emperors, but apparently had precious little left by way of talent, taste or administrative ability in the genetic larder for poor William. Those imperial buildings still standing, tragically mainly his, breathe an air more at home in a nightmare Las Vegas than the smaller, merely royal and more humanly modest Berlin that was the capital of the kingdom of Prussia. The aesthetic difference is roughly that between Wagner at his most loud and Mozart at his more sublime. What remains of Royal Berlin is one of the jewels of Europe. Imperial Berlin was then and is today a continental eyesore.

Empire and kingdom both fell in the course of a single day at the end of the Great War, the 9^th of November 1918, as Germany’s armies disintegrated in defeat on the bloody fields of northern France.  In the Commonwealth, this date is marked as Armistice Day; in Berlin, it saw the birth of the first German Republic, declared in a mix of exuberance, confusion and despair from the balcony of one of those Imperial buildings, the Reichstag or Imperial Parliament. There’s a certain irony inherent in the fact that this happened more or less by accident; the emperor had fled the capital for the Netherlands a day previously (maybe to avoid the fate of his cousin, the Czar, recently shot by the Bolsheviki), the crown prince refused the throne, no other male members of the Imperial House in the line of succession were to be found, and a republic was essentially the only option left that might prevent the full collapse not just of the already crumbling government, but of the state itself.

That republic, colloquially known simply as Weimar, was not long for this earth. It did manage to preserve the Reich as a united state, but never gained the broad legitimacy required to sustain itself. However, in fourteen short years it brought into being one of the great brilliant fireworks of human civilization, the sudden and gorgeous flowering of a new modern age. Modern cinema wasn’t born in Hollywood; its cradle rocked in Babelsberg. Without those few years in faraway Berlin, New York City’s iconic MoMA would be as interesting as a barn. A defeated, impoverished republican capital became the Chicago of Europe, a marvel of the world entirely beyond the imagination or capacity of imperial Berlin. And equally something contemporary, democratic Berlin would like to be again, but presently is not – and likely never will be.

Consider the losses:  Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, Walter Gropius, Greta Garbo, Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder and too many others to count. No modern city since the sack of Constantinople has lost so much talent, so quickly; with one obvious exception: New York City in the age of AIDS.

Those halcyon days will not return for one simple reason: the force that extinguished them, the Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, murdered or drove into exile the very men and women who made them possible. Obviously, Hitler – who Berliners today are quick to point out was a native of Austria and never won an election in Berlin itself, accurate statements both – hated Jews to the point of genocide, along with gypsies, communists, homosexuals, trade unionists and many, many more. Precisely the groups that provided the yeast for the city’s ferment and made it das Rote Berlin, Red Berlin. This Red Berlin became Hitler’s first victim.

The infamous Reichstag fire, likely set by the Nazis themselves, provided the pretext for outlawing the powerful communist party and imprisoning its leaders and many of the rank and file in the first concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, an hour outside of the city limits.

The Nazi paramilitary organization SA stormed and burned to the ground the world’s first gay research institute near the Brandenburg Gate. Clubs and bars within larger buildings couldn’t yet be torched without consequence, but were sacked.  Meanwhile, Berlin’s 160,000 Jewish citizens – out of a population of four million – were systematically ghettoized, first economically and then physically, from the life of the city. The silence of the majority of Berliners at this very visible persecution was and remains a moral disgrace to the city’s people; it continued during the infamous Kristallnacht and until the last Jews were deported to the death camps in 1943, at which point the city was declared Judenrein, “cleansed of Jews”. At that time and in the following months and years, though, there wasn’t much of Berlin left, either; instead of Hitler’s fabled European capital Germania, it became just one more field of rubble among many on a continent in ruins. Nor is this ancient history; not in a city where the very stones seem to weep.

It is a matter of supreme irony that the regime’s crimes hit the city as devastatingly as they did; historically, Prussia was the first country in Europe to fully emancipate its Jewish population and grant Jews the rights of citizenship, in line with a royal decree, revolutionary at the time, that granted freedom of worship to all faiths. So many French Protestants fled the radically different policy of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King (and architect of Versailles), that at one time the language most widely spoken in Berlin was French. The kingdom of Prussia was a notoriously militarized and regimented state, but its capital was a place of intellectual and artistic ferment, a place where a brilliant Jewish woman, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, in the latter half of the 18^th Century could lead the leading Enlightenment salon. She was a peer not merely of Christians or aristocrats, but of men as one of the first widely published female writers. In the late 19^th Century, the first modern gay rights group was founded in Berlin; around the same time, the first gay magazine was published there. The city that Christopher Isherwood scoured for male flesh was often a scene of hunger, riots, and pitched battles between Nazis and Communists, but das Rote Berlin had room for the outcasts of the world.

As did New York, and Toronto, and London, and all the other cities large and small scourged by AIDS. Berlin has something to teach them: how to preserve the memory of the lost. How, in the Part Two. 

Edward Irving Koch, mayor of the City of New York from 1978 to 1989 (at one time a Congressman, lawyer, and enlisted in the U.S Army), died on Friday, February 1st 2013, at the ripe age of eighty eight in Manhattan. The cause of death, so one hears, was heart failure. Naturally, speculation is rife on whether or not this implies he may actually have been in possession of one, and if so, how and for what exactly it may have been used.

As is reliably the case when someone with a television presence passes on, his last breath opened the floodgates of hagiography. First out of the gate, The New York Times: Edward I. Koch, the master showman of City Hall, who parlayed shrewd political instincts and plenty of chutzpah into three tumultuous terms as New York’s mayor with all the tenacity, zest and combativeness that personified his city of golden dreams.

The obit goes on, and on, and on, five pages in a key somewhere between solemn and sentimental. That’s how these things are done. As the saying goes, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, “Speak only well of the dead”. The media generally loves this stuff; it’s a practical, coincidentally profitable tradition. More papers are sold, web pages viewed and banners clicked, everybody’s happy. Wistful stories of the dear departed do practically write themselves or get recycled from leftover copy.

For example, did you know that the former mayor would have reporters over to his Greenwich Village apartment for grapefruit and coffee? No?

No problem, neither did I, but to civilization’s immeasurable enrichment, we do now. I’d suggest that’s just how Koch would have liked it. His favorite subject was by most accounts he himself – Ed Koch, slayer of dragons, the philosopher-king who (against all odds!) brought the world’s greatest city back from the brink of self-immolation, all the while (a man of the people!) of humble appearance, plain-spoken, all the concentrated authenticity of the outer boroughs made flesh to walk among us. Fine, he laid his head to rest every night in the West Village, with whom we don’t know, but why sweat over scenery details when the show itself makes Broadway look like a school play?

It’s a great story, and some parts of it may even be true.

"If memory serves, and I believe it does, I noticed him staring at my crotch."

I only met Koch a few times in passing, in the elevators of an office building on the Avenue of the Americas where we both worked at the time. If memory serves, and I believe it does, I noticed him staring at my crotch. Take this particular observation with a grain of salt; the morning rush, before I hit Starbucks, is a time of day I’m lucky to successfully dodge traffic, let alone competently evaluate random strangers in an elevator. That said, my gaydar was going off, not at five-alarm levels mind you, but it’s a bit odd to even remember that over a decade after it happened. 

In any event, we exchanged some pleasantries about his then-new book, snarled a bit about Rudy Giuliani (the universally despised mayor at the time, still a fascist pig today), and went our separate ways. I saw him a few more times, said hello, smiled, basic anodyne corporate politeness, nothing of great note to the easily distracted.

Over the years, Koch would turn up here and there, with no regularity or pattern, unless carnival barkers have patterns. Against the backdrop of a City scarred by the terror attacks of September 11th and the technocratic blandness of the Bloomberg administration, Ed Koch at least provided a flash of color. Anything and everything can be gentrified with some effort, but not Ed Koch. If a landmark is what seems to have always been in and of a place, its setting hard to imagine without it, then that’s what he became; part of a sense of place, of the particular fiber of New York. No matter who happened to occupy his seat in his City Hall, Ed Koch would always be the mayor of a shining metropolis that lived in perfect form only in his memory. This was the city that needed him as much as he needed it. For the rest of us, the only constant on this scattering of rocks is perpetual change; for Ed Koch, the only constant was Ed Koch. It’s a small miracle, maybe, that he chose a cemetery for his final rest over having a taxidermist prepare his remains for permanent exhibit.

"The rumors and doubts about his sexuality never went away..."

We don’t know that he ever loved a man, or a woman. All things Ed Koch were, as far as Ed Koch was concerned, matters of consuming public interest, but not that. We do know that he loved the city itself with a fierce, burning passion.  Attention spans being what they are and the man’s taste for microphones legendary, we would get occasional reminders on the continuing vitality of the affair between man and city. It is altogether fitting and deliciously, richly ironic that a documentary titled simply Koch premiered the week of his passing. Ed Koch wasn’t one to be silenced by the minor inconvenience of death, not for an instant. He didn’t so much die as switch channels.

The rumors and doubts about his sexuality never went away, to be sure, and absent some trove of Polaroids or, God preserve us, a sex tape stashed somewhere in the Tombs, probably never will.

Or we could try something new and exciting, just for shits and giggles. Why don’t we skip the sex tape idea, drop the rumor conceit, go all-in and call the same-sex preference of the late mayor what it really was: common knowledge.

I use the phrase common knowledge with deliberation. When a given fact spawns newspaper articles, blog posts, several movies and dramatic plays, along with the occasional Tony Award, maybe it’s time to claw the open secrets out from under weasel words like rumor.

"If you must know, his boyfriend’s name was Richard Nathan." 

Playwrights and authors Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner might agree, maybe even Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, film-maker Kirby Dick in his 2006 documentary Outrage, Max Read at Gawker, Yehudit Mam for Out Magazine, Americablog’s John Aravosis, the incomparable Joe Jervis of Joe My God, even the inevitable Andrew Sullivan. Not exactly, in the aggregate, equivalent to a random crazy person in Times Square with a hand-lettered sign. Now that would justify doubt. Was Ed Koch gay? Yes, and it took me one phone call to confirm it. I made more than one, just to be on the safe side, and still: if ever there was a glass closet, it was his. If you must know, his boyfriend’s name was Richard Nathan. Richard died of AIDS in 1996. Not exactly news over here in Good-Taste-Ville as far as the mechanics are concerned, one might think.

"True enough, Mayor Koch never took that step in front of the cameras to say “I’m gay”"

But when a Bill Clinton can’t even keep a quick blow job off every front page in the known universe, or a certain John Edwards his cliché-hippie mistress from blowing up into a career-destroying media firestorm, while a three-term mayor of the nation’s media capital can manage to evade basic factual scrutiny for decades, something is wrong.

True enough, Mayor Koch never took that step in front of the cameras to say “I’m gay”. He did issue the occasional weak-tea denial or fuck you, but nothing carrying the vehemence of “I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky”. If only Bill Clinton had known that fuck you is a magic spell to make journalists vanish. Or Eliot Spitzer. Or Anthony Weiner.

Put another way, if a simple fuck you can put a definitive end to someone’s journalistic research, they should call their journalism school, ask for a tuition refund, and invest the proceeds in a cupcake shop. More cupcakes at least wouldn’t drag down the collective intelligence of the American people or lend a helping hand to discrimination against a minority.

The principal variable of outcome in these cases is the combination of genders. Powerful men involved with women, that’s news, with other men, not so much. The next conclusion would be that a relationship between two men is ipso facto repellent, not the kind of news fit to print.

That is sexism and homophobia, pure and simple. By law, we’re considered innocent until proven guilty, and by society, straight until we bang someone of our own gender on live national television, preferably to a Lady Gaga soundtrack.

This is not a call for more and better gossip columns, by the way. Some more realism and less hypocrisy in reporting would be great, though, as mind-blowing as it might be to some that hetero isn’t the default factory operating system and gay some optional (and rare) piece of software. If someone does want to think along those lines, Windows and Mac OS are a better start; the latter can run the former’s apps if it has to, but it’s still a Mac under the spreadsheet.

The real and important question is whether Ed Koch’s lifelong stay in the closet impacted his politics or the governance of New York City during his three terms.

When Koch was first elected mayor in 1977 as a different kind of liberal, the world was not the place it is now. One can imagine posters braying Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo being shocking even today, let alone almost four decades ago. Open homosexuality would have been a career-killer for any politician at the ballot box, even a mortal personal danger, as the assassination in 1979 of San Francisco’s gay Supervisor Harvey Milk showed with chilling finality. Koch however had higher ambitions than mayor, running for governor in 1982 and sometimes talked about as a possible first Jewish President. If either seems a stretch in hindsight, it did not at the time, not for a young, ambitious politician effortlessly vaulting from Democratic district leader to the City Council and Congress right into the most powerful municipal office in the country. So what if he was that way, it’s not as if anyone needed to know.

That is the way these things work to this day.

"There have been, and still are, any number of closeted men and women in positions of power and fame."

Koch, along with many others, had every reason to expect the underlying gentlemen’s agreement to be honored. There have been, and still are, any number of closeted men and women in positions of power and fame. They’re quite secure as long as appearances are maintained. Discretion, as they say, is the better part of valor.

It’s not so much a concern for privacy as it is a witness protection program. In 1977, that made some sense for all involved; in 2013, not so much.

Nor is the glass closet merely an academic issue; LGBT rights are a political matter. The New York Times, for example, was forced to edit its ponies-and-flowers obituary of Mayor Koch to reflect the widespread fury over the mayor’s response to the AIDS crisis after the paper got savaged on Twitter. Did Koch ignore the epidemic for years because it was seen as a gay disease, and guilt by association working the way it does, possibly leading the public to suspect his own preferences and hurting his career? Larry Kramer certainly sees it that way, and he is by no means alone. In later years, after leaving office, Koch went on to support homophobic policies and politicians, opposing marriage equality in New York State, endorsing George W. Bush for re-election, the list just goes on.

At least he’s in excellent company. Consider Ken Mehlmann, George Bush’s 2004 campaign manager – gay. That little fact didn’t stop the man from working his little tail off to pass anti-gay constitutional amendments in nine states that year: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. In 2012, these states had a combined population of roughly fifty-six million, which translates to one in six Americans, more people than all but twenty-three sovereign nations.

A pretty shitty deal, you might think, not just for LGBT Americans in those states, but for all of us. Queer Americans know from bitter experience that our worst enemies are more often than not our own flesh and blood, lashing out even as they are scared shitless of what they know to be true of themselves. Nor does this hurt only us queers, given how neatly homophobia dovetails with repression of women, racism and injustice at home, imperialism and support of tyranny abroad.

Can this state of affairs change? I believe it can; but change starts with honesty. Yes, New York Times, I’m looking at you.

So Bob Leahy, that happy puppy (and editor of this site), emails me the other day and says, “Hey Michael, why don’t you write something light-hearted for the holidays? Something uplifting, easy, a present for all the poz boys and girls?”

Or something to that effect.

Well, ‘Easy’ is my middle name – not a word from the peanut gallery, please – and making Bob happy is one of my reasons for getting up in the morning (how the poor man puts up with me, I do not know), and it occurs to me that Christmas at least can be even more homosexualized even beyond the angels, elves and glitter everywhere, so here goes.

Think it through for a second: Christmas is all about consumption. Vast, awesome, garish and guilt-free consumption. So that’s our baseline, and you know what, I say go for it. If I’m going to have to listen to hundreds of god-awful, off-key renditions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer (how did he get that shiny nose, anyway? I have my theories about that little four-legged tramp), damn right there better be some material benefit. Note to boyfriend: iPad.

Then there’s the iconography. Poor Joseph; his wife gets knocked up, spins some likely cover about divine intervention (Mary must have hit him over the head with a menorah to get him to buy that story), and the poor guy winds up scurrying around ancient Israel looking for a hotel. Been there, done that, and where does the guy wind up? In a freaking leather bar avant la lettre. Really?

Or take the angels. Even as a little boy (maybe in a hint of things to come), I always thought they would have to be hot. Smoking gorgeous hot, chiseled faces, sculpted bodies, the kind of exquisite material any Catholic would be familiar with. Go to any church in Rome (or anywhere we’ve planted our flag of guilt, pagan art and lecherous clergy) and you’ll see what I mean. The Sistine Chapel might as well be in West Hollywood, and if the Cardinals had their way, it probably would be.

But Santa, now he’s a problem.

Start with the residence. Who in their right mind – sorry, Manitoba – wants to live at the North Pole? Unless you’re some survivalist freak gun nut (or Sarah Palin, but I repeat myself). Even the local bears seem to be tiring of the place, and small wonder: it’s melting.

His life/work arrangements likewise are suspect. There is apparently a Mrs. Claus, if one chooses to credit what seems fairly obviously a fabrication of some clever PR department.

But Mrs. Claus or not (now might be the right time to expound on the drag queen theory), the man lives surrounded by elves. Not Tolkien’s elves, mind you, the kind that wield swords, but a bunch of preternaturally happy, hard-working androgynous male children. What we further south call “twinks”, except for the happy and hard-working part.

Perhaps they’re the reason why he’s at the North Pole in the first place; the entire arrangement reeks of scandal, not to mention a deliberate flouting of the child labor laws that obtain in any respectable jurisdiction. Are there any paparazzi up there? Ravenous gossip blogs? No? I rest my case. If TMZ or Gawker were within a string of pearls throw of the place, we’d know the truth. As it is, we’re left with dark suspicions, vague innuendo and crucially, no sex tape. With the polar bears out of the picture, well, you do the math.

All of that said, you’ve probably met Santa; and no, I’m not talking about his deputies at the mall, vaguely disconcerting as they may be.

The simple fact is that Santa is a bear. A bit of a paunch, check. Excessive facial hair, likely stretching down his front and back into regions I don’t even want to think about, check. Thigh boots? But of course.

Face it: if you haven’t gone home with Santa yet (and I’m not ragging on you if you’d like that; no judgments), you’ve at least been asked, little cub. Forget about the presents: what kind of toys does the man really have?

Man, the stuff we do for toys. Happy Holidays. 

Oh, barebacking! The forbidden fruit of Planet Gay; so tasty, tempting, edgy, dangerous, five kinds of awesome sauce, take your pick.

And I’ve been doing it pretty much exclusively for over a decade. What am I talking about? Sex without condoms, or if you want to get all clinical, without ‘barrier protection’.

Why? Simple: because it feels great, probably even better for a top, which I’m not. Also because I’m a reckless hedonist, sensual to a fault, and because there’s got to be some practical advantage to this HIV business other than the legal steroids.

Of course, all the reckless hedonism aside, there are some ground rules. Neg guys are right out, which I imagine my boyfriend – who’s one of them – isn’t all that happy about. There was an ad campaign here in New York City some time ago, tagged ‘HIV stops with me’,  and that’s a good rule to live by. I’m not going to have anyone’s life on my conscience, no matter how late it gets. Sure, go ahead, be high as a kite and ready to fuck anything that moves; that’s not such a great look to begin with, and if that’s where a guy is, really, there’s probably someone else with a great ass for him on Grindr or RT Bareback. I’m not it.

Another requirement: an undetectable viral load. I have one, would prefer it stay that way, ergo guys who don’t take their meds or, worse yet, don’t know their status, are off the table as well. Sorry boys, no exceptions. If someone doesn’t take care of himself, I have to assume he won’t take care of me either.

As you can imagine, this approach is not without its discontents. The Conversation™ about status does get tiresome after a while. Then there are the bug-chasers; in my experience, they don’t handle rejection all too well, maybe because of a misplaced conceit that infecting them with an incurable disease is somehow sexy. Legal peril and an ethical nightmare aside, I imagine it’s not. And if that’s what gets someone off, I hear walking into traffic is quite the thrill too.

Nor is barebacking risk-free, even if you already have the big H. Then again, nothing is.

All of which is presumably why a bunch of ostensibly negative gay men choose to forego condoms these days. I say ostensibly, because even an undetectable viral load in your top’s bloodstream does not equate to the same for semen. Nor is undetectable quite the same thing as zero. Take it from a raw bottom; if you’re getting fucked without rubbers, sooner or later, your luck will probably run out. Certainly if you have my voracious appetite.

What a downer, right?

Well, not really, when you think about it. Assume for a moment that you’re on pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP; that cuts your risk by about 80% or so. I wasn’t when I started barebacking; just a horny young man convinced of my own immortality and with a remarkable ability to avoid STDs – I’d say two in as many decades counts as such – and made a more or less deliberate choice: satisfying sex in the here and now was worth the possible risk of a future treatable disease. To be sure, this wasn’t a choice I arrived at quickly or easily or even entirely rationally; I’m pretty sure that a rather large number of stunning men and freely available narcotics played their role, though ultimately the responsibility rests on my shoulders alone. As it should.

Now comes the part where I’m supposed to tell you how I feel terrible about all that, bemoan foolish choices, rend my garments and so on. But that’s unfortunately not how I feel.

Sure, HIV is not a walk in the park. Would I actively talk anyone into making the same choices I made? Absolutely not. At a minimum, I am going to have to take some very strong medication for the remainder of my natural life; we all are. There are side effects, possible damage to neurons, liver toxicity, a few more. HIV is, at the present state of our knowledge of the virus, likely to slice a few years off anyone’s time on this mortal coil, including mine. There is a price to pay for everything; the question is whether the price is worth the purchase.

But if life is a series of moments, I have been lucky. Breathtaking intimacy. Transformative friendships, even love. An awareness of mortality that transcends the concerns of the everyday. A sense of living without fear or shame that, quite frankly, I never thought I’d know when I was just a fledgling. A daily pill seems a tolerable price to pay for that and so much else. A woman on birth control risks pregnancy and much else besides; and one could argue that there is a certain symmetry to our respective predicaments.

They say the truest test of a choice, good or bad, is whether one would make it again. This choice clearly hasn’t run its full course yet. It’s also true that the answer I would give today, at this writing, is different from the one I would have given two years ago or maybe from what I’ll think in the future.

Today, sitting here at my desk in this endless horizon that is the City of New York, I don’t think I’d do much of substance differently. I would have taken better care of my health in general, no question, but the fundamentals, no. The experiences, physical, emotional, even intellectual, I’ve had because of this little string of DNA romping around my cells have too much meaning and value.

Let me close with a caveat: nobody should read any of this as a manifesto for sero-conversion. Make your own choices based on your own circumstances. My argument, rather, is this: if you engage in behavior that places you at an elevated risk of contracting HIV, be very sure you do so with your head, not just your dick. There’s only one person who’s going to live your future, and that’s you; make choices that you think will make it worth living.

As you may have heard, the U.S. Presidential election is over at last, after an epic two-year slog. Now, because our Byzantine system of governance baffles even many Americans, and given the stakes – for us, our friends and our neighbors – I thought I’d explain some of the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the system to PositiveLite.com readers. Key to understanding it is that America is not actually a democracy, it is a republic substantially devised at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Astonishingly enough, it still works more or less as originally planned.

Every four years since 1790, we have gone to the polls to fill the highest office in the land, the Presidency. In war and peace, famine and plenty, Americans have voted. None of these elections have been direct, in the sense that you vote directly for a candidate; rather, you vote for a member of the Electoral College, allocated by state under a formula that gives each one as many votes as it has members of the Federal legislature. Hence, the breathless reportage from ‘swing states’ like perennial nail-biters Ohio and Florida.

Over the decades and centuries, these elections have been of greater and lesser consequence; the election of George Washington, the first President, solidified a young nation, the third, Thomas Jefferson, stripped the office of its monarchical trappings and began the transition from an aristocratic republic to one governed by yeomen and merchants. Decades later, Abraham Lincoln steered the union through a cataclysmic civil war and extended the suffrage to men of color. Again decades later, Theodore Roosevelt broke the power of overweening capital and created the greatest jewel in the national fabric, America’s splendid preserve of National Parks. His distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the greatest President of the last century, won an unprecedented four terms in the White House, vanquished the Great Depression, established the foundations of the modern welfare state, the New Deal, and, perhaps most importantly, first in fits and starts and then openly, threw American power and wealth into a global war against the barbarity of fascism.

Roosevelt’s immediate successors, Harry Truman and Ike Eisenhower, cemented the American involvement in the world beyond our shores, often for good, sometimes for ill, that has been characteristic of the postwar United States. Their America, supremely confident and possessed of a sense of mission, imposed by suasion or fiat a liberal international order of free trade, an end to (European) imperialism, and supranational bodies to if not govern, then guide this new, interconnected world, with their country at its apex, Henry Kissinger’s “indispensable power”.

"American conservatism..this school of thought is in many ways not comparable to its brethren in Europe and the Commonwealth who claim the same nomenclature."

Unseen or ignored by the bi-partisan liberal establishment of Washington and New York, however, something grew within this country defiantly at odds with this new domestic and international order: American conservatism. This school of thought is in many ways not comparable to its brethren in Europe and the Commonwealth who claim the same nomenclature; its roots are rather, say, in the orbit of one Father Coughlin, a radio personality of the 1930s, vehemently nativist, distrustful even of duly elected public authorities, rigorously anti-communist, and after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, imbued with distinct strains of racism, misogyny and homophobia. It sought, as polemical author William F. Buckley memorably phrased it, to stand “athwart history yelling 'Stop!' “, all the while preserving and if possible expanding the historically relatively new global power of the United States.

The first modern conservative President, Ronald Reagan, was elected in 1980. Domestically, Reagan faced a liberal order grown stale and, in frankness, in many of its manifestations irrelevant to a world different from the one in which it had been built. Under his administration, the post-war liberal consensus, that government has a role to play in the life of the governed, that capitalism functions best under the constraints of common purpose and that America abroad would seek to act in concert with others, began to collapse.

Historically, it’s not entirely an accident that the AIDS epidemic first began to rage in those years; a government unconcerned with its more undesirable citizens certainly saw little cause to act on what, even a decade earlier, would have elicited a full-spectrum public response.

This conservative ascendancy, strengthened by the end of the Cold War and the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, began to fracture as the Iraq War descended into practical defeat and cracked in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States.

"There is a certain poetry inherent in these milestones being marked by the country’s first black President."

His reelection in 2012 may deliver the fatal blow to American conservatism as we presently know it.  It seals the legislative achievements of the President’s first term, including equal pay for women (in 2012, imagine that), the ability of LGBT Americans to serve in the armed forces, and most importantly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as Obamacare, which establishes, more or less universal healthcare (and contains within it the nation’s first comprehensive HIV and AIDS strategy, along with the levers to put it into effect). There is a certain poetry inherent in these milestones being marked by the country’s first black President, one might add.

Very often in life and in art, the saying “there is more to the story” applies, and there is indeed more of note to November’s results than just a second term for Barack Obama, important as it may be.

Under our small-R republican system of government, the President is not in fact the final arbiter of the body politic. In the Cold War, it is true that the chief executive became rather more powerful than his historical predecessors in what has often been referred to as the Imperial Presidency, a term coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger in a 1973 book of the same title.

Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, however, the power of the purse resides in the lower chamber of the legislature, and broad powers of advice and consent in the upper, the U.S. Senate. In that chamber, the election of November 2012 returned a larger (and more progressive) Democratic majority; the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, is still held by people who in some cases think Jesus rode around the state of Missouri on a dinosaur.

Obviously, this latter fact is a bit of a problem for progressive Americans, and it very much remains to be seen how consequential that problem is.

One thing, however, is clear: the sound defeat of Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney is enormously important to this country for quite a few reasons.

Chief among these is what a putative President Romney will not be able to do: cut existing public expenditures on healthcare, research and foreign aid (including PEPFAR, the program that pays for HIV treatment in the Third World). He will also not be nominating any judges to the Federal bench or get this country into any more wars overseas. Or strip LGBT citizens of every single advance in rights we made over the last four years. Or re-impose the HIV travel ban lifted by President Obama, which lets people with HIV again travel to the United States. Or “end Obamacare on day one”. Or move the embassy of the United States in Israel into the tinderbox of Jerusalem. Or establish a precedent that allows a handful of billionaires to buy a superpower.

Politics is as much poetry as prose, as much art as it is naked power, and seen from that point of view, there is something thrilling about the 2012 elections. They brought into focus an emerging new country; a place of the heart, not just of the gun, one where who you love, what you look like, where you come from, is a matter of indifference to the state. America is not perfect, never has been, never will be; but we can be better than we thought possible, a better friend to our friends and a better neighbor to our neighbors. Our fabled American Dream doesn’t have to be a nightmare for us or anyone else.

And that, at the end of a long day, is what this entire drawn-out battle was about: choices. God alone knows we haven’t always made the right ones; but this time, I think we did. 

or find sex?

"I'm looking for mostly str8 guys with gf / wife. Not into fem / openly gay guys at all. MUST BE TOTALLY CLEAN! I am DDF [Drug and Disease Free, ed. note] and expect to stay that way, so if you show up with a dirty cock and ask to to fuck or be fucked bareback, I'm going to ask you to leave.

– Craigslist personal ad, Men Seeking Men, New York City, spelling as in original

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

– Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

Just go ahead and admit it: you too have a profile on what we usually euphemize, tactfully, as a gay dating site. Which is just a polite, family-friendly way of describing an online service primarily useful for those people – you know the kind – that really truly need to get laid right this very instant. All in good clean fun, of course, and boys will be boys. Even for the merely casually interested, these sites open a window into the desires of gaydom, stripped down to their glossy essentials; sex tweets, I call them, photo-enhanced portraits of desire.

What they’re not, I’d warrant, is an accurate glimpse of gay men themselves. This has little to do with the wonders of Photoshop, and more with the standards we seek to impose on complete strangers or portray ourselves as meeting. Fat? Sorry, buddy, you’re out of luck. Old? Nice try, next please. Not straight-acting enough? When the entire point of the exercise is, wait for it, gay sex? Really?

They also, often enough to be noticeable, reflect a chilling complacency about sexual health, if not wanton ignorance. Take that nice little word ‘clean’. Presumably, it’s not in reference to skincare, but to STDs, HIV among them.

There are two problems with verbiage like this. One of them is that it’s blatantly offensive.

Words have unique power. The words you read, think, speak or hear shape your world like so much molded clay. Words don’t just articulate reality, they create and structure it. For you, for me, for everyone. The idea that someone with HIV isn’t clean while someone without is should give decent people pause; both in terms of the value system of the person who uses the term and of its effect on the un-clean, the dangerous, the other. Not to put too fine a point on it: this kind of language, marginalizing and cruel, is one of the stigmata that have historically preceded mankind’s periodic convulsions of barbarism, from the slaughter of Native Americans through the Holocaust to the AIDS epidemic.

The other problem is, quite simply, that dividing up people into clean and unclean , disease-free or poxed is ineffective as a tool of sexual health. It might be otherwise in an ideal world where every man speaks or even knows the truth, always and without exception; but that’s not the world we live in, is it now? If it were so, internet inches wouldn’t be a phrase that elicits reactions from amusement to dismay.

Guy1: How long is your penis? 
Guy2: 7 inches... 
Guy1: So that's like 8 and a half adding internet inches.

Between deception and cruelty – and it is cruel, sometimes, the way gay men treat one another, and not just as far as HIV is concerned – what is the point of all this? Why do some, many, a few of us do any of it? It is quite ironic, isn’t it, that good people from the President of the United States on down make videos about bullying and hurtful language, all the while we slap each other around in the online meat markets.

Allow me to theorize. I think it’s a synecdoche, a surface glimpse into the deeper problems gay men, poz or otherwise, have with one another and ourselves.

For one thing, gay men in the western world have never entirely come to terms with the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic. We don’t have an institutional memory articulated as it is at, say, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust foundation in Jerusalem. Every year, the Jewish community across the globe marks Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day; in Israel, the entire nation falls silent for several minutes.

Granted, we have World AIDS Day, but what of it? Do we mark it as a community, remember those we lost, come together in grief, or are we just quietly glad that the cup has passed us by, many of us at least, and let the day fade as it may?

Just consider the raw numbers. We have lost, in North America alone, anywhere between a tenth to a third of gay men. Those are mortality rates that easily make AIDS a genocidal event, and before anyone gets complacent, one that’s certainly not over yet. Nor will it be anytime soon, if present numbers hold.

The Jews of Europe – or the Armenians, or Stalin’s kulaks, or any number of other peoples subject to decimation – weren’t held responsible for their own fate.  We are, by society and often enough by our own.

Of course, there are differences between our losses and the supreme evil of the Shoah. No totalitarian state, Cuba aside, interned gay men, or sent us into gas chambers; no Arbeit macht frei for us. But it wasn’t necessary to do so, was it? All that was required, certainly here in the United States under the Reagan administration, was simple malign neglect. Ignorance and fear did the rest.

We have never come to terms with that betrayal or the fear it nurtured or created. Combine that with ongoing pervasive discrimination and our own Darwinian aesthetics, and the result can’t but be toxic.

I’m under no illusions that a single magazine piece can change this. But the next time you log on to get off, try being just a little bit kinder to strangers. Hey, it’s free, and even pretty boys like yours truly will notice.

Especially when we’re pissed off that you seem unable to distinguish inches from centimeters.