If You Get Gay Married, You’ll Stay HIV-Negative Forever!
As everyone predicted, AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s mandatory condoms in porn law turned out to be an unenforceable bust, but fear not, AHF will never run out of horrible ideas. Their latest solution to prevent new HIV infections: Get married!
For the third year in a row, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, will take part in the Rose Parade. Following a United States Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed same-sex marriages to resume in California, AHF’s float this year will celebrate same-sex marriage and the role it can play in helping to reduce new HIV infections among gay men. As part of its ‘Love is the Best Protection’ theme, AHF’s float will include what is believed to be a first: a same-sex wedding performed live during the parade.
Playing off the Tournament’s 2014 theme of ‘Dreams Come True,’ Aubrey Loots, 42, and Danny Leclair, 45, a gay male couple from Los Angeles together over a decade, will be ‘Living the Dream’ as they legally marry on New Year’s Day during the historic parade. AHF’s ‘Living the Dream’ float will highlight the fact that ‘Love is the Best Protection.’
With so many layers of antiquated, heteronormative, unrealistic, and discriminatory bullshit, it’s hard to pick where to start. The notion that “Living The Dream” means getting married (on a float, no less!) is something that used to be forced upon young women up until the 1970’s, at which point conforming to patriarchal society “norms” became humiliating and passé. So, it’s nice to see that, as gay men, we’re keeping up with conservative traditions that died in the 20th century.
Some of us gay sluts remain single by choice—either because we don’t believe in the institution of marriage or because we haven’t met the right person—and manage to miraculously stay HIV-negative without ever having to get married, just like hundreds of millions of single straight people do. As if the media’s watered down image of homosexuality wasn’t puritanical and restrictive enough, now we’re told—in a televised parade broadcast around the entire world—that our very lives depend on adhering to that image. Fall in love and get married (in a parade), or you might just get AIDS.
And worst of all, consider the fact that AHF’s “love is the best protection” falsehood (so much for condoms being the best protection) being broadcast around the world via the Rose Parade only really applies to gays in California or New York or Illinois where they can get gay married. The overwhelming majority of gay men remain single because it’s simply illegal to get married in a majority of awful places in this country. While millions of gays in places like Texas and Mississippi and Florida and Kansas and 30 other states are watching a California gay wedding on New Year’s Day, they can not only be reminded of what they can’t do, they can also be told that because they can’t legally do it (even if they wanted to), they will probably get AIDS. Sorry.
AHF is insanely and irresponsibly telling everyone that their “Living The Dream float will highlight the fact that Love is the Best Protection,” which couldn’t literally be any less of an actual fact, unless of course you assume that married people never sleep with anyone other than their spouse. Maybe the float’s theme should be “Living IN a Dream”?
