Sex Panic!

Sex Panic!, sometimes rendered SexPanic! or Sex Panic, was a sexual activism group founded in New York City in 1997. The group characterized itself as a "pro-queer, pro-feminist, anti-racist direct action group" campaigning for sexual freedom in the age of AIDS. It was founded to oppose both mainstream political measures to control sex, and elements within the gay community who advocated same-sex marriage and the restriction of public sexual culture as solutions to the HIV crisis. The group has been depicted as a faction in a gay "culture war" of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Sex Panic!'s actions and attitudes were criticized as immature and even fanatical by its opponents, but other commentators called the group a vital component of grassroots gay activism that resisted gay marginalization and countered forced conformity to social norms.

According to founder member Christopher Murray, in a 1997 letter to the New York Times, Sex Panic! was formed by six HIV-positive gay men opposed to a "gay neo-conservative movement" and to the closure of gay venues around New York.

The closure of gay venues stemmed from the urban rezoning policies of New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration. Giuliani had passed laws that made it harder for sex-related businesses to operate in central city areas, forcing many to close or relocate to the waterfront. These policies, Sex Panic! founder Michael Warner wrote, served to stigmatize sex and sexuality in ways that had negative consequences for public health efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. Reducing the availability and visibility of venues for sex did not, Warner, argued, make people safer; on the contrary it reduced the number of public sites where safer sex messages could be broadcast and gay men encouraged to consider their sexual health honestly, critically, and without the confusion and misinformation fostered by a culture of shame.

As well as mainstream politics, the group opposed the anti-promiscuity arguments of prominent gay rights campaigners Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rotello. Sullivan's 1995 book Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality had called for the abandonment of radical gay identity politics in favour of campaigning for the right to marry, which he presented as the highest social value attainable and the token of a maturity and moral responsibility the gay movement had lacked. Sullivan's arguments for marriage included the assertion that it was a good defense against the spread of HIV and AIDS; Rotello argued similarly that these diseases could not be eradicated so long as a 'core group' of gay men participated in risky sex. Marriage, Rotello suggested in his 1997 book Sexual Ecology, was a powerful incentive to behaviour less likely to spread disease, while exclusion from the benefits it offered created an equally powerful stigma. These views, the founders of Sex Panic! argued, supported a mainstream political culture that demonized gay people and portrayed gay sex in general, rather than unsafe sex in particular, as a vector of disease.

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