Quote:
Originally Posted by jonn3
It really changed everything - before the general public became aware of AIDS I remember a buddy of mine talking about how sex with another guy was safer - no chance of getting pregnant.
As the disease and knowledge of it grew people were talking about how "gay sex can kill you" - and a few guys I knew who were "casual bi" - in other words way more into girls but in the right mood with some beer.... well they just stopped fooling around at all. The idea that no one would ever know - what could go wrong - the one time "oh what the hell" that happened as kids was over.
For myself it scared me deeper into the closet and made masturbation look like it was going to be my way of life.....
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You hit the nail on the head reminding us all that at the time and age, the idea of having sex with women, attractive as this may have been to the str8 guys, was seen by many men as a possible or even probable trap with very far-reaching consequences. A dude thought he was using her for sex, and she thought of using him as a convenient source of income.
Men were neither going to say anything to anyone nor were they going to be asking for anything afterwards. It was simply a mutual sex release, occasionally mixed up with some light emotions adding a bit to the pleasures of our encounters. The NSA really reached its full meaning in those days...
Surprisingly, very few of my buddies really stopped, once the news reached us that, well, 'gay sex could kill you'. By that time we must have had so much of it already that we reasoned: if it was meant to kill us, we would be all 6 feet down and under...
Yet, the nastiness of the Hep C mixed with the previously mentioned practicalities made us all use condoms all the time. Sure, the exceptions must have happened but those must have been far and few between.
In practical terms, our inner coterie rarely exceeded 2 dozens of actively playing guys. The outer interference was relatively minimal, and basically the pool stayed largely protected by the very idiosyncrasies that we very much disliked in our time and day.
Sadly, couple of guys did catch the bug once we all graduated, and our closed coterie became a matter of the past.
Most of us knew that what held us so tightly together were actually our specific college-life related circumstances. We were all there doing the same thing, and a few of us enjoyed sharing some intimacy among ourselves. Convenience is often overlooked as being a powerful motive of human behavior.
KD