Notes on Promiscuity

This article appeared in the August 1987 issue of Christopher Street.

1. If a young man is promiscuous, we say he is sowing his oats; if a young woman is promiscuous, we say she is a slut; if a homosexual of any age is promiscuous, we say he is a neurotic example of low self-esteem.
2. Everyone has his/her own definition of promiscuity.
3. A person who is promiscuous professionally is a prostitute. Most people who are promiscuous would be shocked if you called them a prostitute, however, because they do not think of themselves that way, simply because they do not charge money.
4.  There is a tribe of people in Uganda so promiscuous that the name of the tribe is also the word for prostitute.
5. Promiscuity is thought of in two ways: as having many, many different partners; and as having no standards for the people with whom one sleeps. The second type is comparatively rare, however, and is held in contempt by the first. The worst thing we can say about someone is that he/she will sleep with anybody.
6. But the truth is that many of us will sleep with almost anybody.
7. In ancient Rome, a certain empress would slip out of the palace at night, Juvenal tells us, to take a room in a local brothel and entertain customers till dawn. This was being both promiscuous and a prostitute. (And bored.) (And an empress.)
8. Sex is a pleasurable experience repeated many, many times during our lives that, if experienced with the same person each time, is considered responsible, adult, mature; if experienced with a different person each time, is considered promiscuous.
9. Americans, products of a consumer society, with a short attention span, a bent for instant gratification inculcated by advertising, and a fairly lonesome society, are made for promiscuity.
10. Some gay men think promiscuity is a revolutionary ideal that can transform the world, release human energy, and make the planet a better place to live.
11. Others think promiscuity is the freeway to hell.
12. It takes time to become promiscuous. Married couples reading stories about AIDS are astounded to learn that a homosexual man has slept with eight hundred men; to the homosexual reader, this does not seem that bizarre.
13. The word for promiscuity in gay life is tricking.
14. Tricking depends on motive—one may not consider oneself promiscuous at all, for instance, though at the end of ten years of tricking you’ve slept with many people.
15. (Once, when someone asked me, “Do you consider yourself promiscuous?” I realized that though I’d slept with a number of different people, I had never considered myself promiscuous.)
16. Before the plague, promiscuity was a growth industry.
17. Before the plague, promiscuity was the sore point of homosexual life. Why—even gay men wish to know—did homosexuals convert liberation into promiscuity?
18. No one knows.
19. When a friend asked me, “Why are gay men promiscuous?” I started to reply, “Because they don’t marry and have children, because they feel guilty about being gay, because they’re men, because men are like dogs, because they’re lonely, because everyone would have as much sex as he could if he could, because sex is the most transcendent experience”—then I saw my friend lighting another cigarette, and said, “Why do you smoke?”
20. Promiscuity was the lingua franca, the Esperanto, of the male homosexual community.
21. Men are now weeping in doctors’ offices over the fact that they were once promiscuous.
22. Men are now telling other men in the new cities they’ve moved to that they never were promiscuous.
23. (Gay men now suspect each other of promiscuity.)
24. Gay men have been blamed for the plague by people who say promiscuity caused AIDS.
25. But promiscuity flourished in the seventies precisely because it was disease-free (or so everyone thought). That is, every disease acquired via promiscuous sex was curable with some form of penicillin.
26. In fact, promiscuity’s considerable charm may be measured by the number of afflictions people were willing to put up with as the occupational hazards of promiscuity. Until AIDS, these were: crabs, scabies, venereal warts, syphilis, gonorrhea, anal fissures, amoebiasis, hepatitis, and (the first one to give promiscuous heterosexuals pause) herpes.
27. Once, while leaving the public health clinic on Ninth Avenue, I asked a friend how he was going to celebrate the test results that showed he had finally rid himself of intestinal parasites, and he replied, “By going to the Mineshaft tonight.” Such was the allure of promiscuity.
28. Promiscuity is now inseparable from the dread of AIDS.
29. Yet promiscuity must be separated from the issue of AIDS if one wants to evaluate it, because no one in the past was promiscuous knowing it would lead to what it led to.
30. People were promiscuous in the past for a simple reason: “Sexual practices are banal, impoverished, doomed to repetition,” Roland Barthes said, “and this impoverishment is disproportionate to the wonder of pleasure they afford.”
31. And: “I have spoken of pleasure,” wrote Renaud Camus in his introduction to Tricks, “but I don’t see what… would keep me from calling such moments happiness.”
32. And: “How can we not desire, afterward, to encounter similar moments once again, even if only once more?”
33. Once more (or Once Is Not Enough) is the mantra of promiscuity.
34. The motto of promiscuity is: So Many Men, So Little Time.
35. The slogan of promiscuity is: Show us your meat.
36. Many celebrated people, including presidents, have been promiscuous—John F. Kennedy, for example.
37. Very few homosexual men are not or have never been promiscuous.
38. The nature of promiscuity came clear to me the night at the baths when I looked back at the doorway of the room whose occupant I had just fallen deeply in love with after the most wonderful, intense, earth-shattering, intimate, and ecstatic sex and watched another man walk into his room and close the door behind him with a little click.
39. Promiscuity offends that deep desire W. H. Auden said was not merely to be loved, but “to be loved alone.”
40. Promiscuity entails a double standard: We want to be promiscuous ourselves, but we want the people we sleep with to want only us.
41. The average person thinks other people have sex with him because he is good-looking, sexy, special, attractive. In a promiscuous world, however, we are picked up mostly because we are breathing.
42. The first law of promiscuous physics is: Over a long enough period of time, everyone sleeps with everyone else.
43. The second law of promiscuous physics is: Every face is new to someone.
44. The third law of promiscuous physics is: The thousandth trick is not what the first one was.
45. There is no telling where promiscuity would have led homosexual men had the plague not occurred; it is possible it might have faded away, as people grew tired or disillusioned with it; or it is possible people would have started coming to work—as a friend predicted—“with broken arms.”
46. When asked why he was moving from New York City to San Francisco in 1978, a friend of mine said with an ironic smile, “To improve the quality of my promiscuity.”
47. He is now dead.
48. Tennessee Williams said, “Each time I pick someone up on the street, I leave a piece of my heart in the gutter.”
49. Oscar Wilde said, “I lie in the gutter, but look up at the stars.”
50. (Now that it is denied them, people realize how romantic promiscuity was.)
51. Promiscuity gave rise to two terms of gay slang: fast-food sex and the sex junky.
52. No one can ever be sure why people are promiscuous.
53. One friend of mine said, “I had no choice but to be promiscuous—no one ever wanted to see me a second time.”
54. Some people are promiscuous because they are looking for a lover.
55. Others are promiscuous because they have already found one.
56. Promiscuity anesthetizes many aches.
57. Promiscuity ups the ante with each sexual encounter.
58. Promiscuity is the nightmare of Don Juan.
59. Promiscuity is the quest for what can never be attained.
60. Promiscuity is hope.
61. Promiscuity is a sadness, a rut, a daily self-degradation.
62. Promiscuity is the last true adventure, the last ecstasy, the last rain forest of industrial-consumer man.
63. Promiscuity is a means of remaining a perpetual adolescent.
64. Promiscuity is a means of growing up.
65. Promiscuity fails to satisfy that most important need—for intimacy, rootedness, shelter.
66. Promiscuity supplies these in small, ecstatic doses.
67. Promiscuity is a sexual version of chain-smoking.
68. Promiscuity is a sexual version of kneeling in church.
69. Promiscuity is a school of hard knocks, the parent that abuses all its children.
70. Promiscuity gives us something we can acquire no other way: the wisdom of prostitutes.
71. One effect of hiring a hustler, or paying for sex, is the realization afterward that sex is something most people will do with you for nothing! One night, after leaving a hustler’s apartment in New York, on my way home, I walked through a park filled with men cruising and was startled to realize that all of them would do exactly what had just cost me thirty-five dollars for free.
72. Promiscuity squanders—one has nothing to show for years and years of spent sperm.
73. Promiscuity forms character, builds men.
74. Promiscuity is always planning its next expedition.
75. Promiscuity eventually degenerates into mere habit and, like any habit, is very hard to break.
76. Harder to break than, say, cigarette smoking, because promiscuity is an attempt to escape from loneliness.
77. Promiscuity guarantees loneliness.
78. Many people enjoy promiscuity in their prime and then denounce it in middle age. (Saint Augustine is the most famous of these.)
79. In youth, promiscuity bestows the rapture of poets and saints.
80. In old age, it means haunting the truckstops on I-75.
81. When the author of Tricks jokingly told one of his partners, “You know I only like you for your ass,” the man replied, in total seriousness, “Yes, I know.” (This funny, and sad, exchange sums up the nature of promiscuity.)
82. In a promiscuous world, people come to believe they are worth no more than their genitals.
83. In a promiscuous world, they’re right.
84. When Henry James returned to visit America in 1910, he was struck by the great number of New Yorkers eating candy bars. Seventy years later, we were eating each other: the penis as lollipop.
85. It is pointless to feel guilty about promiscuity, so long as you enjoy(ed) it, and harm(ed) no one. One may after all have brought joy into the lives of others and it was, let’s face it, a great adventure.
86. Almost everyone disdains promiscuity.
87. Yet all those who think abstinence will be practiced by the majority of people during the age of AIDS—all those who think promiscuity has ceased—are deluded.
88. As King Lear said, “Let copulation thrive; the gilded fly doth lecher in my sight.”
89. (As Anthony said of Cleopatra, “She makes hungry where most she satisfies.”)
90. It took three or four years for promiscuity to slow down to its present level, after the appearance of AIDS—for a simple reason: Stopping promiscuity was like stopping Niagara Falls.
91. Promiscuity ceases the moment one falls in love.
92. It resumes when that condition fades.
93. Promiscuity was once associated with joy, travel, toothpaste, Brazil, San Juan, Paris, Berlin, hamburgers, automobiles, insurance, poppers, gymnasiums, designer jeans, designer drugs, Calvin Klein underwear, discotheques, cosmetics, vitamins, clothes, movies, airplanes, subways, men’s rooms, piers, Central Park, Land’s End, Buena Vista Park, Folsom Street, the West Side Highway, marijuana, cocaine, ethyl chloride, Mexico, the Philippines, Miami, Provincetown, Fire Island, Canal Jeans, Bloomingdale’s, the balcony of the Saint, bars, baths, sidewalks, Lisbon, Madrid, Mykonos, certain magazines, four a.m., Stuyvesant Park, the grocery store, the laundromat, autumn, summer, winter, spring, bicycles, T-shirts, and Rice-A-Roni.
94. Not anymore. ❡