Sex Panic! - Aims and Activities

Aims and Activities

Members Eva Pendleton and Jane Goldschmidt articulated Sex Panic!'s goals in 1998:

Our multi-issue agenda aims to defend public sexual culture and safer sex in New York City from police crackdowns, public stigma, and morality crusades. We are committed to HIV prevention through safer sex, sexual self-determination for all people, and democratic urban space. —Pendleton and Goldschmidt, Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review

The group argued that the best response to sexual health crisis was to promote safer sex, and argued that approaches that contradicted the 'condom code' - the advocacy of barrier methods as the only sure protection - actually undermined efforts to curb the crisis by encouraging carelessness and hypocrisy. This opposed the group to the arguments of Rotello, Signorile, and others, who said that the spread of the disease was best contained by a "new maturity" of marriage and monogamy, sex with only one partner, and the deliberate use of shame to discourage participation in potentially risky sex. Such an approach, Sex Panic! argued, was either naive or deliberately disingenuous. Rather than demonizing sex with multiple partners, Sex Panic! stressed a need to counteract the effects of shame. They argued that it was absurd and repressive to insist that everyone adopt what Warner called a "Fifties gay life" of monogamy, to pretend that sex in private was somehow necessarily safer than sex in public, and outright dangerous to create a situation that bred ignorance about safer sex methods, despair over the possibilities for protecting oneself, and a resulting increase in infection rates. It was not gay sex or promiscuous sex, founder member Thomas pointed out, that spread HIV, but unsafe sex.

Some of the group's tactics were deliberately eye-catching. The flyer for one 1997 event was headlined "DANGER! ASSAULT! TURDZ!", the latter a reference to Signorile, Rotello, Kramer, and Sullivan. Other activities included demonstrating alongside ACT-UP against the GMHC's plans to identify seropositive patients by name in public HIV status reporting, rather than the anonymized reporting the group favoured.

Other measures were more conventional. In June 1997 the group conducted teach-ins at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The group also held a November 1997 summit in San Diego, California, where a series of lectures and workshops discussed what the group called an "emerging culture war" within the gay community and sought to forge alliances between gay men and other marginalized groups. At the conference, founder Eric Rofes urged attendees to start grass-roots movements of their own to combat the repression of sexual minorities. The outspoken methods of Sex Panic!, he argued, were indispensable, since the movement they fought worked by means of marginalization, silencing, and oppression. To be 'neutral' in the face of public discourses that sought to shame and marginalize gay communities, Rofes argued, was to be complicit in that shaming and marginalization.