Days of Grace (41 page)

I myself do not want to appear self-righteous in writing about morality in the context of sex; I know that I risk seeming pretentious and, worse, out of date. I also know, as Magic does, that to ask typical teenagers to see the moral dimensions of sex in any practical way is an act of futility. “Just Say No” is a catchy but quixotic slogan. The Nike company’s “Just Do It” is the call to which most teenagers will respond. Tell the average inner-city kid about sexual abstinence and he or she will guffaw in your face; I feel sure the same is true of most suburban adolescents. That is why I am for praising the Lord
and
passing the ammunition, which in this case consists of condoms and thorough education about sex.

I know what young men and women go through, with even the best of intentions and the best of home training. I remember my own sexual initiation, one night not long after I earned my driver’s license. I had proudly driven my father’s car to a party, and was even more proud and happy to offer to drive three friends home. The last one, a young woman who was not my girlfriend, decided to reward me in her own way. She suggested a visit to Byrd Park, a lovely woodland setting with a fountain that changed colors every few seconds. I knew Byrd Park only moderately well, because the tennis facilities there were for whites only; but I drove as deep into its recesses as I could.

We stared at the fountain, and no doubt each of us made a wish. I think we wished for the same thing. Before I knew what was happening, my companion had unbuttoned my pants and was sliding the zipper down. Her speed took me by surprise; until that moment, she had been rather shy.

Suddenly I thought about my girlfriend. I had been having a mild and completely chaste flirtation with a classmate. We certainly had never gone this far. What if she found out about us?

“I hope you don’t tell my girlfriend about this,” I blurted out.

“She won’t find out from me, Arthur,” my partner muttered impatiently, even as she shoved me up under the steering wheel of Daddy’s car. “She won’t know nothing unless you tell her.
I
ain’t going to tell her nothing, that’s for sure.”

Only much later, after I got home depleted and in a daze, did I begin to wonder about the police patrolling Byrd Park. Then I began to think about the possibility that my partner might get pregnant. Suppose I became a father? I would have to marry her, and maybe give up my tennis! But when I met her on Monday morning, she seemed not worried at all. Neither did she say anything about seeing me again. I remained nervous for a week or two, then forgot all about the dangers we had courted. I remembered only the unbelievably sweet new feeling of sex.

Facing the problem of young people as ignorant and as unprepared for sex as I had been, I want them to know the moral and religious aspects of sexuality. I want them to be familiar with the teachings of the Bible and with other religious doctrines. Because of AIDS, however, I am equally committed to the policy of giving condoms, as well as the bare, unvarnished facts about sex and AIDS, to students. I want adolescents caught up for the first time in the sizzling heat of sex to know scientifically about the penis, the vagina, and the rectum; about blood, sperm, and mucous membranes; about pregnancy, viruses, and the fatality of HIV. In the midst of an epidemic that will only grow worse, I have no time for evasions and euphemisms or other timidly genteel deceptions in teaching young people who are either sexually active or on the brink of becoming so.

Many people, however, cannot bring themselves to face the facts. When Magic, in a book about AIDS aimed squarely at adolescents, deliberately used certain terms and expressions that many young people would readily understand, more than one bookseller chain and several individual stores refused to sell the book because they considered the language too vulgar. When Dr. Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, moved to institute a complex study of sexual practices among teenagers, an alliance of the religious right and the Republican party killed the idea almost at its birth. And late in 1992 came word that, to avoid offending conservatives, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) routinely deleted information concerning AIDS from its materials aimed at the public. The CDC censored terms such as
oral sex, anal intercourse
, and
vaginal intercourse;
it even dropped the use of the term
condom
from its announcements. Surely this is discretion gone too far. A spokesman for the CDC declared that they wished to make the material “broadly acceptable”—even if, apparently, these deletions caused people to die.

We need to know all we can about sex and AIDS. A report such as that compiled by the New York State Department
of Health, released late in 1992, in which sex acts were rated according to their degree of danger, contains information that can save lives. Some of the findings did not surprise me, but others certainly did. For both men and women, anal intercourse offers the highest risk of infection. Next comes vaginal intercourse for women. Third is vaginal intercourse for men. In vaginal intercourse, women are twice as likely to get AIDS as men. If an infected woman is also menstruating, the man is at greater risk than if she is not. Despite myths to the contrary, oral intercourse presents a risk of infection, although it is slight compared to anal and vaginal intercourse. More open to debate is the risk offered by mutual masturbation and passionate kissing. The report defines the latter as “a kiss lasting a few minutes, with vigorous rubbing of the oral mucosa” (the inside of the mouth) in the process. “In a study of ninety subjects,” the report states of researchers, “they found [that] blood was normally present in the saliva of 50 percent of the subjects and increased significantly after teeth brushing and after passionate kissing.”

Some people think that only the receptive partner can become infected as a result of anal sex. Not so, according to the report; a man can also become infected in this way even if he is the inserter. And although I have always assumed that AIDS cannot be transmitted in lesbian sex, the report cites two possible incidents of infection that took place by woman-to-woman sexual activity.

The report also discusses such acts as individual masturbation, “dry” kissing, massaging, hugging, and stroking. While these and other activities treated in the report are not normally the stuff of polite conversation, there is nothing polite about AIDS. Around the world, heterosexual contacts make up the majority of infections, and a similar pattern is fast developing in the United States. Nothing is gained by suppressing these essential pieces of information.

For the African American community, as for other communities, condoms can protect against AIDS and also protect against an evil just as dangerous, and possibly more so:
the flood of unplanned, unwanted, and insupportable teenage pregnancies that lead in part to the army of delinquents, drug addicts, welfare recipients, and violent criminals who are destroying our community. In my work with youngsters in Newark, New Jersey, our instructors have emphasized and encouraged the avoidance of pregnancy among our teenagers. I am proud that not one of the unmarried young women in our program has given birth.

For Jeanne and me, as parents of a child about to enter the first grade in New York City, these issues are not a matter of theory alone. The clash between religion and morality, on the one hand, and practicality and science, on the other, has come close to a flash point here; I am sure that similar conflicts will arise in other parts of the nation and perhaps the world. Bitter opposition has arisen to the City Board of Education over its proposed elementary- and secondary-school curriculum. Among its goals, this curriculum aims to teach the children tolerance of both homosexuality and heterosexuality. It does so mainly by engaging the question of what constitutes a family. The simple sentence “Heather has two mommies,” which introduces a lesson designed to teach tolerance of lesbianism, has enraged many people. Frankly, I myself am not sure that I want my daughter to be taught about lesbian parents in her first year at school, when she is only seven. I am certain, however, that I want her to have a tolerant and enlightened attitude toward homosexuals.

The conservatives are not without supporters on the Board of Education, and elsewhere. At one point, the board voted to require those groups offering AIDS education to New York City schoolchildren to sign an oath stating that they would emphasize abstinence first, and prophylactics and other defenses against diseases only later. Within the health-care apparatus of the Roman Catholic church, on which many people depend for medical assistance, a debate rages about AIDS treatment, AIDS education, and the use of condoms. Late in 1992, a major Catholic hospital in New York City, breaking with years of tradition, decided
against observing World AIDS Day. The reason given by administrators was the nature of the information and materials handed out on behalf of AIDS education; they were “not in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic church.”

I believe in the wisdom of the Bible and I believe also in ascertaining the moral implications of our actions. I respect the Roman Catholic church; Jeanne, a Catholic, goes to mass regularly. Yet science and statistics tell us that AIDS in America is spread increasingly by heterosexual contact. To preach morality
only
and at the same time to ignore the practical aspects of the problem seems to me unwise. The aim of all sex education should be to inform children what it means to act responsibly, and also to convince them that they should do so. The distribution of condoms should be an essential part, but only one part, of the overall effort at education. If the aim is to stop the spread of AIDS, we must have both condoms and moral instruction. One without the other will not do the job. The result will be more young people who are HIV-positive in the suburbs, in the city, and in rural areas; poor, middle-class, and rich.

Nevertheless, no one should sneer at the idea of sexual abstinence or of self-control under certain conditions. I believe in abstinence from extramarital affairs. I think such activity is morally wrong, as well as contractually wrong in the context of the vow one takes in a marriage. I absolutely believe in the need to refrain from promiscuity. This is a term almost always applied to women and almost never applied to men, but in writing of promiscuity I am thinking above all of men and the double standard by which we have lived for centuries. Nowadays, it is true, some women measure their freedom in the same way: the ability to be sexually promiscuous. I think that this is not freedom but one of the fantasies of freedom. Both men and women should recognize that promiscuity is, as often as not, a condition of violence against our own individual best interests.

Total premarital abstinence, stressed by many churches and by those who would have young people “Just Say No”
(although this slogan was first used for a campaign against drugs), is another matter altogether. I and others of my generation or older have lived through extraordinary changes in the level of tolerance about premarital sex. Not very long ago, many hotels would not allow an unmarried couple to register and stay in a room together. Once, for instance, when I went to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with a young woman to whom I was formally engaged at the time, we took separate rooms at our hotel. A couple I know, despite the evidence of their marriage license, was once refused accommodations in a Massachusetts hotel because the wife had not taken her husband’s last name. Honestly, I am not always sure how I feel about the new freedom. As I get older, and with a young daughter, I see increasingly how rules and conventions about behavior help to protect the integrity of the family. I believe that the family, however defined, must be protected. No African American, in particular, watching the deterioration of our culture through the decline of the family, can sensibly wish otherwise. However, I know that rules about appropriate male and female behavior often work to keep women in an inferior place by permitting double standards, as existed flagrantly in the recent past and even in some areas today, as well as to intimidate gay people.

I believe strongly that homosexuals should enjoy equal protection under the law. One of the members of my family closest to me is gay, and I feel for him and the problems he routinely encounters. I am disappointed at the attitude of certain churches toward homosexuals, who are excluded in various ways, sometimes callously. Surely it isn’t hard to see the homosexual’s point of view on the question of rights. If I am gay and have been so all my life, why shouldn’t I be protected equally and given all the rights and privileges of a heterosexual citizen?

Religious opponents of homosexuals regularly cite the Bible to support their position. I am well aware that Mosaic law decreed certain unspecified homosexual acts to be punishable by death (as it also did for several other, to us, ordinary
types of behavior). In Leviticus 18:22, in a translation from ancient Hebrew increasingly called into question by scholars, the Bible says (in the New International Version, at least): “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” (The practice is called “an abomination” in the King James version.) Nevertheless, whatever the accuracy of the translation, I believe that Leviticus 18:22 must be read in the more tolerant light shed by other parts of the Bible, including the New Testament. This position is only reinforced when I consider the legal and constitutional issues raised by this question within the context of American democracy.

However, I sometimes fear that a major anti-gay backlash is coming in the United States. The repeal of a statute protecting the rights of gays in Colorado, and the narrow upholding of a similar statute in Oregon, may be warning signs. In Colorado, voters across the state passed Amendment 2 to the state constitution, which prevents the adoption of laws anywhere in the state to protect homosexuals against acts of discrimination. The voters in the resort of Aspen and in the cities of Boulder and Denver voted against the passage of Amendment 2, but anti-discrimination statutes in those communities were automatically rescinded by the passage of the amendment, which took effect in January 1993. The sponsors of Amendment 2, a group called Colorado for Family Values, evidently expressed the opinion of a large number of people concerning homosexuality and homosexuals. “What they want is a special protected status,” one of the leaders said. “They just don’t deserve it. The majority of America is with us on this.”