I keep wondering how “sex-positive” became a buzzword at the exact same time everybody started having less sex. When we live in a reality where medication protocols like PrEP and DoxyPEP can prevent a person from acquiring or shedding HIV and STIs, when U=U, why are we having less sex now than when sex was literally deadly?

Race Bannon, who writes the Substack Love At The Edges, shared a story in his post, From Passion to Performance, that may explain some of it.

“I was attending a large gay men’s kink play weekend. One of my friends there said he had talked to a guy who my friend had noticed was not interacting sexually or erotically with anyone, running counter to the weekend’s intent. My friend said the guy told him “he was afraid to do anything because he might make a mistake.”

In the United States, the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s made it seem like we were finally abandoning our sexual hangups. Then, pandemics, socializing on screens, and educational efforts, in both academic settings and niche sexual enclaves like the one Race shared, make us all feel more like we’re taking a final exam than experiencing sexual liberation.

If the idea of sex fills you with trepidation, like you might make a huge mistake engaging in it, that makes perfect sense. You have been told sex is physically, socially, and intellectually scary for decades.

But, with isolation and loneliness now killing men at an alarming rate, with gay men being impacted even higher than non-gay men, it’s foolish to ignore the positive physical, mental, social & romantic, and spiritual benefits of skin-to-skin orgasm.

There are many reasons why people think sex is bad, and once we admit to having that feeling, we might be able to ask why we feel that way and be able to move past it.

Let’s go way back.

The authors of Sex at Dawn, an anthropological study of human sexual behavior, argue that humans didn’t care about who was fucking whom until we started owning things. Before that, when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, the sperm donor was not all that important. Caring for the tribe’s offspring was.

When we became farmers, land and property ownership became tied to paternity: Who’s your daddy?” became a critical question, and sex started getting weird. It was no longer just about fucking; it was about property and power. Kings and peasants. Law and order.

In 1620, Puritans and Pilgrims settled in North America, bringing their hyper-paternal ideology with them that we still feel today: monogamous, baby-making sex is the only holy sex: end of message.

American politics illustrates our country’s ongoing devotion to scandalizing sex. Here’s a lengthy list. Sexual scandal is an old political fetish that never goes out of style.

The Sexual Revolution

In 1960, birth control pills were invented, paving the way for straight people to experience sexual liberation.

With sexual liberation in the air, gays flocked to San Francisco and other major cities where they harnessed their sexuality as a form of power. Sex was a unifying rite of passage. Alluding to and consummating dude-on-dude shenanigans was a political act of solidarity and liberation.

Then, AIDS

I was lucky enough to sample gay sex before AIDS, before I saw it mercilessly kill my best friend, Alvin, my boyfriend, Tony, and my mentor, Gustav, and a quarter million other gay American men over 12 years.

That kind of trauma does not occur without leaving a mark on the soul of a community anchored in sexuality. It was truly traumatizing and has left a permanent mark on the psyche of gay men.

Guys now in their early 40s learned sex education from the Grim Reaper himself. “BANG YOU’RE DEAD!” “No ifs, ands, or cures.”

Sex will kill you.

Bathhouses and sex clubs were closed, regulated out of existence, or left limping along in a legally dubious state, making them unattractive to investors. We see the rotting corpses of those establishments still languishing in Los Angeles: FLEX, Slamer, and North Hollywood Spa.

The appalling facilities and our inability to make them legal again manifest our collective attitude toward gay sex, and the Google reviews illustrate what we think we deserve.

“The whole place smelled of urine, and it is not maintained. It’s filthy, neglected, and has seen better days.”

The fallout of AIDS is still with us.

Gay sex was against the law in 13 states until 2003.

Until the 2003 Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS) decision, Lawrence v. Texas, butt sex was still forbidden in 13 states (including Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, where I grew up). Before that, even if you were doing it in your own home, behind closed doors with another consenting adult, you were breaking the law.

That kind of institutional threat is hard to shake off.

Pre-Exposure Porphylaxis (PrEP)

With the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication in the summer of 2012, we finally had a tool to thwart the horrific menace of AIDS.

This should have been a good thing, like something we would have thrown a parade to celebrate.

Instead, in a bizarrely ironic flame-out, the President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), Michael Weinstein, hated the new treatment, calling it a “party drug” and “a public health disaster in the making.” Weinstein is one of the most significant forces behind the “sex is bad” narrative, spending tons of time and money to keep sex dangerous and scary.

Many guys went on PrEP anyway, but very discreetly, because the largest AIDS care institution in the world said it was bad.

Quietly, we went from seeing pages and pages of obituaries, the names and faces of dead gays in every issue of Frontiers Magazine, every two weeks, to seeing practically none.

For those with access to healthcare, HIV transmission rates plummeted.

“But PrEP doesn’t protect you from other sexually transmitted infections!” the naysayers pointed out.

Sex is still bad!

So, the gays wanting to be perceived as good people (that’s most gays) stayed quiet.

Marriage Equality

How could this be a bad thing? Stay with me.

In 2015, the SCOTUS decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, gave same-sex couples the right to marry. Gays could now legally participate in one of the most over