A comment here on ErosBlog from someone who’s had no sexual contact since the start of the Covid pandemic caused me to reflect on the AIDS epidemic as experienced by, for example, rural teens who didn’t know (didn’t know they knew) any gay people.
There was a cruel window in the early 1980s during which it was possible to pass through puberty steeped in the delicious propaganda of the sexual revolution, with its alluring promises of easy sex and promiscuity, only to watch in horror during your teen years as the AIDS crisis annihilated it all. Free love (and all that) got buried in in fearful and grudgingly-pair-bonded layers of latex while we watched, and before we ever got our first adult taste of pussy or cock or whatever we were wanting to lick and suck and fuck.
Of course, even acknowledging this feels churlish, petty, and self-absorbed now. For the obvious reason that this recollection of frustrated horny teen angst pales to insignificance when compared to all the lives literally destroyed by AIDS.
So why mention it now? Because of the Covid thing. I won’t say it hasn’t been covered in think pieces on smart websites, but I don’t think we’ve fully apprehended or begun to count the costs of all the intimate isolation that resulted from Covid and continues among people who are still trying to avoid new courses of infection every third month. What’s our culture going to look like when we have an entire generation whose dating and hooking up and casual fucking was constrained in novel ways by a respiratory pandemic? That’s going to express itself culturally, it has to. I just don’t know — none of us know — what to expect from it.
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