How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [36]
By 2001, a San Francisco study was warning of the dangers of recreational Viagra in the gay community. Viagra had left the regular medical world to become a “club drug” that could banish the erectile dysfunction associated with crystal meth, cocaine, ecstasy, Special K, alcohol, and other regularly abused party drugs. The study, conducted by the San Francisco Department of Health, showed that gay and bisexual men were four times more likely to use Viagra recreationally than were heterosexual men.
As in so many other social cycles, straight men in their teens and twenties began catching on to Viagra a few years after their homosexual counterparts. “Gay men are simply ahead on the social learning curve,” reported Bob Condor in the Chicago Tribune in 2003. He interviewed Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, a Harvard Medical School physician who studies sexual dysfunction. “One thing that is remarkable is it has all happened without anybody paying much attention,” said Morgentaler, who also runs a clinic where college-age men try to “score” Viagra. He notes that there is a lively underground Viagra scene among young men, who buy or trade “six-packs” of Viagra samples that have been distributed free to doctors. Even though Pfizer, which markets the drug, insists that it is for erectile dysfunction and not for recreational use, the party six-pack conjures up other “great American male images,” says Morgentaler. “The first, of course, is the six-pack of beer. The second refers to the highly desired set of abdominal muscles.”
So, after being reinvented by the male gay social scene, Viagra has become firmly ensconced as a club drug at heterosexual raves and at straight dance venues. Viagra and its generic counterpart are easily available on the Internet without a prescription, and although that wide availability could change in the future, Viagra and newer erectile-dysfunction drugs such as Levitra are becoming assimilated into the sex lives of healthy, functional gay and straight men entranced by the special effects the medicines produce. With other such drugs on the horizon, we can also count on gay male pioneers to experiment with them recreationally, however risky that could be.
The Cult of the Penis and the Deification of the Blow Job
Hey, Faggot:
What is the difference between cocksucking, blow jobs,
and fellatio?
—Unsigned
Hey, Unsigned, “Cocksucking” is what my boyfriend’s good at; “blow jobs” are what my sister gives; and “fellatio” is what my mom does.
—from Dan Savage’s sex column, “Savage Love”
“Swallowing!” says one gay man I know, talking of fellatio. “It’s not like we invented the issue of whether to swallow or not to swallow,” says my friend, “but we definitely brought it more to the attention of the straight world.”
I like to think of the nineties as the Blow-Job Decade, a time when straight and gay trends came together to result in an American obsession with the phallus.
At the very least, it was the period of time when the penis, heterosexual and homosexual, came out of the closet. In 1994 we were all shocked to find John Wayne Bobbit’s pecker at the side of the road; it was only then that the word “penis” began to appear frequently in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, anecdotal reports of middle-schoolers indulging in fellatio became commonplace and appeared in reputable sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. The cult of the penis was on the rise.
By 1998, we were all able to read detailed descriptions of President Clinton’s distinctively shaped phallus. It’s significant that our president committed adultery not via ho-hum missionary-position sex, but with abbreviated incidents of fellatio. In fact, the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal redefined sex for Americans. Although the president put his penis in a young woman’s mouth