A ‘hermit crab style’ lyrical essay, by Dave Wiseman
Background : In 1990, whilst working as a programme officer in the UK’s ‘Health Education Authority’ (an autonomous authority briefed with develop government funded health education campaigns for the UK population on different themes) I was briefed to oversee, develop and arrange distribution of a short A5 style leaflet for gay men about ‘safer sex’. This short essay contains extracts from the leaflet, interwoven with my reflections and recollections of writing them, today.
What Safer Sex means
Everyone talks about HIV and AIDS but many gay men have been living with the epidemic and practising safer sex for many years now. This leaflet provides up to date information on safer sex and AIDS and how to talk it through with your partner. the language is straightforward to ensure that the message is clear,. Safer sex ensures that you care about yourself and your partners.
So this is it then? It seems so innocuous now: this purple and black short A5 leaflet, though its message is anything but. It belies many years of fear, tears, sweat, love and shame by gay men; by my friends, by my lovers, by my colleagues. And every word I now read which seems sensible, simple, obvious is nevertheless imbued with meaning, multi layered. Every word sweated over, every word was discussed again and again: reformatted, reprocessed, redefined, so that its meaning was clear, its focus and tone acceptable to the hundred and one agents tasked with looking after its birth, over thirty years ago now, in 1990.
Safer Sex: talking it through
Most people know about the health risks of sex and have some idea of what is safe and what is not. Raising the subject of safer sex with someone you want to have sex with can still be a problem. Although it maybe easier with someone you know well than it is with someone you have just met talking it through takes careful handling. So here are some tips.
I recall how long we struggled to put these simple words together. I remember the anguished conversations, the memos back and forth, the anger when words were changed, deleted, added. I recall the passion with which single sentences were crafted, amended, altered, put into context. How friendships were lost, remade, remodelled. For how long we discussed the options open to us, how many times we hoped for a word that would make it all clearer, how we abridged content and cut out words to create space. Then added, demanded, new ones be allowed back in allow for a more humane, nuanced interpretation of the message.
Activities that carry risk:
Anal intercourse (often called fucking), Anal intercourse with a condom, Fisting, rimming, sex toys (there follows a description of all these activities and the sexual risks involved)
Safer Sex Activities:
Kissing, Masturbation (often called Wanking), Oral Sex, Digital intercourse (usually called fingering) Massage, Frottage (often called body rubbing) (there follows a further description of all these activities and the practice of them and the sexual risks involved).
Back and forth went version after version of this text, examined, pored over, revised, reworked, censored, discussed for its accuracy: what should be certain, what was less certain, what was most important, salient, necessary & what was whimsy. Everyone an educator, with strong views, feelings. All of us understanding something of the life and death nature of its contents. All of us knowing how difficult it was to interpret such things in the heat of a moment. I remember the frustration of changes, the anger at what was taken away, the distress at the removal of phrases that seemed vital to the message. This was after all about our lives, our relationships, our lovers, our friends, about those we had seen off at countless funerals, visited in hospices, argued with whilst shedding hot tears born of despair and frustration. Why we had marched for years, shouted out in demos to be heard, bonded together to create support groups of love, solidarity and determined commitment. Answered the phone countless times on helplines and switchboards to offer some words at least that were supportive, to offer some hope, shed some light onto the inconsistencies and the unknown that this virus presented us with. Why I had written bitter words in my diaries at the time, as I kept a record of the discussions, as much to resolve my sanity as anything else.
This innocuous leaflet (coded STD60 by the HEA) which had no real photos as such (which might have been useful but was probably felt to be too controversial) and was pretty bland in many ways and now, retrospectively, it’s hard to understand what all the fuss was about. Partly it was because the leaflets would be going into the public domain (in health clinics, STD centres, surgeries and so on) and the climate was very different then to that of today’s.
It makes me realise how in a sense everything we read from those times was mediated, going through an often complex process of filtering, editing, censorship and reasoned analysis. I suppose we took it for granted that the less this showed the more effective the process clearly was. By being so very intimately involved in the development and production of the particular leaflet I know just how complex and -frankly- painful this process was.
You realise just how much of the material we now read in the internet age (I almost wrote post internet age) is unmediated, raw if you like. Some will argue for this process and other against it. I would argue that it is far easier to present or wrap up dishonesty today than, say, thirty years ago. And yet in retrospect would I have liked the gay safer sex leaflet to have had an easier gestation, an easier birth? I don’t think it came to blows but I think I would have liked the metaphorical blood and the literal sweat and tears that lay behind it to be on show more clearly than the text suggests.
But perhaps, for some context, I will leave the last line to the information strap created by ‘London Gay Switchboard’ that I worked on, in the years before I went to the HEA: ‘Calm words, when you need them most’. And it is calm words that were often what was most needed then.
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