flaps@utcs.uucp (Alan J Rosenthal) (11/23/85)
This is a very strange article that I took from The Globe and Mail, one of the
major Toronto (Canada) daily newspapers, which is distributed nationally. It
was about a week or two ago, but I kept forgetting to post it, and no one has
mentioned it yet, so here goes:
Koch shuts gay sex bar in AIDS fight
====================================
Reuter
------
NEW YORK
City lawyers won court approval just after dawn yesterday to shut a
homosexual "leather" bar in a highly publicized anti-AIDS campaign.
But even as authorities tacked a cardboard "Closed" sign on the door
of the Mineshaft bar in the city's rundown meat-packing district, customers
vowed to continue their sado-masochistic sex practices.
"It's a bad joke. Dozens of private sex clubs will open within a
month and the police will never find them," said John Svennson, 38, a caterer.
Mayor Edward Koch had announced the crackdown on the Mineshaft and
other gay sex bars and bathhouses yesterday only hours after winning election
to a third term.
"What we are saying is you can't sell death (!) in our city and get
away with it," said Mr Koch, whose announcement appeared to catch city lawyers
by surprise. After a day-long scramble, the lawyers failed to get to court
by closing time.
Owners on the Mineshaft, anticipating the city's move, did not open
the bar Wednesday night.
Two weeks ago state officials, expressing alarm over more than 7,000
AIDS deaths in New York City, set new rules empowering local authorities to
shut gathering places for "high risk sex" such as anal and oral intercourse.
Though the city did not need approval for the Mineshaft closing, city
hall sources said the mayor decided to use the courts rather than police
action to head off a possible protest.
Pretty strange, wouldn't you say? It's the ole double-standard again:
straight bars are not disease centres, but gay bars are. I bet that a higher
fraction of the straight clientele of a straight bar has herpes than the
fraction of the gay clientele of a gay bar has aids. But anyway... the other
thing that really angered me about this article is that they seem to be saying
that the PURPOSE of (gay) sex is to transmit aids. As if that's what we're
trying to do. And of course there's also the assumption that straight people
never have anal intercourse, which is quite established to be false. Actually,
this article also assumes that straight people don't have oral intercourse.
Alan J Rosenthal
{ihnp4|allegra|linus|decvax}!utzoo!utcs!flaps, cbosgd!utcs!flapskbb@faron.UUCP (Kenneth B. Bass) (11/27/85)
In article <994@utcs.uucp> flaps@utcs.uucp (Alan J Rosenthal) writes: > > Mayor Edward Koch had announced the crackdown on the Mineshaft and >other gay sex bars and bathhouses yesterday only hours after winning election >to a third term. Could this be the start of another Stonewall? "Tell me why" ken bass linus!faron!kbb
sdyer@bbncc5.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (11/29/85)
>Pretty strange, wouldn't you say? It's the ole double-standard again: >straight bars are not disease centres, but gay bars are. I bet that a higher >fraction of the straight clientele of a straight bar has herpes than the >fraction of the gay clientele of a gay bar has aids. But anyway... the other >thing that really angered me about this article is that they seem to be saying >that the PURPOSE of (gay) sex is to transmit aids. As if that's what we're >trying to do. And of course there's also the assumption that straight people >never have anal intercourse, which is quite established to be false. Actually, >this article also assumes that straight people don't have oral intercourse. Um, I'm holding off on any opinion of the Mineshaft closing right now, but the Mineshaft wasn't your "typical" gay bar where you might go for a beer to meet your friends--it was a pretty raunchy sex club where unsafe sex practices remained commonplace even up until its closing. It *does* boggle my mind to imagine the mindset of the people who continued to have sex there. Although it is always hard to separate politics from practice in a situation of this kind, I am inclined to think that this closure wasn't so much anti-gay as anti-unsafe-sex, especially given the observed intransigence of the owners in encouraging the use of condoms and safe sex practices. The herpes analogy is pretty weak, since I doubt anyone would lift a finger, not to mention a court order, if herpes were an epidemic in the gay community. -- /Steve Dyer {harvard,seismo}!bbnccv!bbncc5!sdyer sdyer@bbncc5.ARPA