Amen! Puritanical, sex-negative attitudes worked to devastating effect during the AIDS crisis, btw. Don Orr Martin just published a fascinating historical piece in Prism in & Pen about his work with a state public health department in the 1990s.

Prevented by anti-sex government regulation from producing the kind of educational material people needed, Don and his friends turned to guerilla publishing.

I was doing the same thing in Act Up in New York City at the same time. We were a little better off than Don in that the New York City Department of Health did its best to circumvent federal regulations that prevented good educational material from being distributed. But we still had to do things on our own if we wanted them done right.

Can you imagine that? I was attending at least a funeral a week. People were dying and frightening numbers. But what were people more worried about? Not spending tax dollars to talk accurately about sex!

That’s how fucked up things were then, and it’s pretty much how fucked up things are now.