R150 Yeah the logic of his rhetoric is nonexistant, but I chose to read the disparate points collectively as meaning simply that Gen Xers (I am one, barely, at 38) grew up in a time of ambiguous semi-acceptance of sexuality--no active condemnation of us, but no general acceptance, either--when the prospect of sex was something like Russian roulette. That's all true for me, anyway. It was OK to be who I was but it was going out on a limb to put a rainbow sticker on my car and when I did I was relatively isolated; when I went to college, it had only just established a GLBT group and the meetings were intentionally low profile, and the university board of governors denied any funding for the group even as it funded a student Anime club. So there was a passive cultural acceptance at the time and a passive aggressive condemnation at the same time. There was still stigma associated with being gay--and I was just outside of DC, which was and is almost as progressive as San Francisco.
To the Grindr point, my read is similar to the above: i was 17 when I got on Prodigy and then Compuserve and then AOL. I had MIRC Internet chat (my first gay interactions), and then AOL had waiting lists to get into multiple M4M DC chat rooms. And then gay.com chat. All throughout and up until the mid-2000s, we were told about people being murdered after meeting people online. It was discouraged by the media; for many gay people it was the only way to meet gay people. So now we were worried about HIV, still deadly, and about being slaughtered by Internet monsters. These fears were associated with our sexual identities and even the bold and courageous among us internalized "gay" as "threatening and risky" to ourselves. Lots of complex psychological effects that are difficult to get out of our psyches.
For the next generation, there was no mortal STD to fear, meeting people online became unstigmatized and mainstreamed, and even easier than ever with mobile apps that have come to present human beings like Ikea catalog items--an endless supplies, all variations on one idealized gym-toned theme. So we saw sex and relationships as coming with risks, and many Millennials are very much like 1970s free-love hippies. They fuck randomly and without guilt, shame or fear, and have an endless supply of physically appealing bodies to do it with since they were cultivated when gay = trendy and when adults raised their children to be gym-obsessed and beauty-obsessed narcissists who prize trendiness and physical conformity.
As a Gen Xer I will never shake the sex-is-risky complex, and honestly I am glad for it. It has complicated/been a barrier to relationships, and that's terrible. But the hyperpromiscuity of young gay men today who assume that because PREP may protect against HIV they are at no risk worries me for them.
I am the guy here who has chronic Lyme and every time I bring it up everyone here mocks me and compares me to Yolanda Foster. Fine, and I wished it changed the reality that this disease has taken a toll on my life similar to that of untreated AIDS, making my whole immune system go haywire and physically disfiguring me, but despite people assuming it isn't real and it's funny, the numbers of infections are spreading at a rate not unlike that of HIV. The disease has been shown to be passed through semen and vaginal fluid and I know a young gay man in the UK who claims his boyfriend caught it from him.
The point is not to rant about Lyme specifically but to state an undeniable truth: there are always new and emerging diseases about which nothing is known. Before AIDS was known, it was still infecting people for over a decade. This is how diseases become plagues and protecting against just one (HIV) and assuming nothing else will ever come along is more stupid than human beings today have any right to be.
So I am comfortable being a Generation Xer with hangups about sex and sexuality. It may make for a more complicated and conservative lifestyle but it's at least a responsible one.
