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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 Direct action is a term for economic and political behavior in which participants use agency—for example economic or physical power—to achieve their goals. The aim of direct action is to either obstruct a certain practice (such as a governm ...
group" campaigning for
sexual freedom A sexual norm can refer to a personal or a social norm. Most cultures have social norms regarding sexuality, and define '' normal sexuality'' to consist only of certain sex acts between individuals who meet specific age criteria, nonconsangui ...
in the age of
AIDS The HIV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a Preventive healthcare, pr ...
. It was founded to oppose both mainstream political measures to control sex, and elements within the gay community who advocated
same-sex marriage Same-sex marriage, also known as gay marriage, is the marriage of two people of the same legal Legal sex and gender, sex. marriage between same-sex couples is legally performed and recognized in 38 countries, with a total population of 1.5 ...
and the restriction of public sexual culture as solutions to the
HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...
crisis. The group has been depicted as a faction in a gay "
culture war A culture war is a form of cultural conflict (metaphorical " war") between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology (moral beliefs, humane virtues, and religious practices) upon mainstream society, or upon ...
" 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 A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to imp ...
gay activism that resisted gay marginalization and countered forced conformity to
social norms A social norm is a shared standard of acceptance, acceptable behavior by a group. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into wikt:rule, rules and laws. Social norma ...
.


Origins

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 Neoconservatism (colloquially neocon) is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party alo ...
movement" and to the closure of gay venues around New York. The closure of gay venues stemmed from the urban
rezoning In urban planning, zoning is a method in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into land-use "zones", each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for a ...
policies of New York City mayor
Rudolph Giuliani Rudolph William Louis Giuliani ( , ; born May 28, 1944) is an American politician and disbarred lawyer who served as the 107th mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He previously served as the United States Associate Attorney General fr ...
'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 Michael David Warner (born 1958) is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for '' Artforum'', ''The Nation'', '' The Advocate'', an ...
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 Promiscuity is the practice of engaging in sexual activity frequently with different partners or being indiscriminate in the choice of sexual partners. The term can carry a moral judgment. A common example of behavior viewed as promiscuous by man ...
arguments of prominent gay rights campaigners
Larry Kramer Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to Lo ...
,
Andrew Sullivan Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a British-American political commentator. Sullivan is a former editor of ''The New Republic'', and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, ''The Daily Dish'', in 2000, and ...
,
Michelangelo Signorile Michelangelo Signorile (; born December 19, 1960) is an American journalist, author and talk radio host. His radio program is aired each weekday across the United States and Canada on Sirius XM Radio and globally online. Signorile was editor ...
, and
Gabriel Rotello Douglas Gabriel Rotello (born February 9, 1963) is an American musician, writer and filmmaker. He created New York's ''Downtown Divas'' revues in the 1980s, was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of ''OutWeek'' magazine, became the first openly ga ...
. Sullivan's 1995 book '' Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality'' had called for the abandonment of radical gay
identity politics Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, Race (human categorization), race, nationality, religion, Religious denomination, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, Socioeconomic status, social background ...
in favor 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 behavior 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.


Name

The organization's name references a concept used by historians to describe repressive measures against sex in the name of the public good; 'sex panics' in this sense have been documented since at least the nineteenth century. A ''
Gay City News ''Gay City News'' (stylized as ''gcn'') is a free weekly LGBT newspaper based in New York City focusing on local and national issues relating to LGBT community. It was founded in 1994 as ''Lesbian Gay New York'', later ''LGNY'', and was sold ...
'' journalist, evaluating the group's role in the history of sex scandals through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, described the choice of name as an act of self-empowerment.


Membership

Founder and early members of Sex Panic! included historian
Allan Bérubé Allan Bérubé (pronounced BEH-ruh-bay; December 3, 1946 – December 11, 2007) was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best know ...
, Christopher Murray, art historian
Douglas Crimp John Douglas Crimp (August 19, 1944 July 5, 2019) was an American art historian, critic, curator, and AIDS activist. He was known for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theories and art, institutional critique, dance, film, ...
,
Columbia Law School Columbia Law School (CLS) is the Law school in the United States, law school of Columbia University, a Private university, private Ivy League university in New York City. The school was founded in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School. The un ...
professor Kendall Thomas,
Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
English professor
Michael Warner Michael David Warner (born 1958) is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for '' Artforum'', ''The Nation'', '' The Advocate'', an ...
, research activist Greg Gonsalves, and scientific artist Dennis Davidson. Feminist authors Eva Pendleton, Jane Goldschmidt of the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force The National LGBTQ Task Force (formerly National Gay Task Force; National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) is an American social justice advocacy non-profit organizing the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBT ...
, and literary critic Ann Pellegrini were also early members.


Aims and activities

Members Eva Pendleton and Jane Goldschmidt articulated Sex Panic!'s goals in 1998: The group argued that the best response to sexual health crisis was to promote
safer sex Safer or SAFER may refer to: * FSO ''Safer'', a Yemeni floating oil storage and offloading vessel * Safer (surname) * Safar or safer, the second month of the Islamic calendar * As an acronym: ** SAFER, an initiative of the World Health Organizat ...
, and argued that approaches that contradicted the '
condom A condom is a sheath-shaped Barrier contraception, barrier device used during sexual intercourse to reduce the probability of pregnancy or a Sexually transmitted disease, sexually transmitted infection (STI). There are both external condo ...
code' - the advocacy of
barrier methods Safe sex is sexual activity using methods or contraceptive devices (such as condoms) to reduce the risk of transmitting or acquiring sexually transmitted infections (STIs), especially HIV. "Safe sex" is also sometimes referred to as safer se ...
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. Founding member Thomas pointed out that it was not gay sex or promiscuous sex 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 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic. The group works to improve the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, ...
against the
GMHC The GMHC (formerly Gay Men's Health Crisis) is a New York City–based Nonprofit organization, non-profit, volunteer-supported and community-based AIDS service organization whose mission statement is to "end the AIDS epidemic and uplift the lives ...
's plans to identify seropositive patients by name in public HIV status reporting, rather than the anonymized reporting the group favored. Other measures were more conventional. In June 1997 the group conducted
teach-in A teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific tim ...
s at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The group also held a November 1997 summit in
San Diego, California San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
, 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 grassroots 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.


Criticism

Larry Kramer, an overt target of the group's campaigns, published an
editorial An editorial, or leading article (UK) or leader (UK), is an article or any other written document, often unsigned, written by the senior editorial people or publisher of a newspaper or magazine, that expresses the publication's opinion about ...
piece in ''The New York Times'' criticizing the group's tactics and goals. Sex Panic!, Kramer said, was "on the way to convincing much of America that all gay men are back to pre-AIDS self-destructive behavior that will wind up costing the taxpayer a lot of extra money." Other commentators accused Sex Panic! of irresponsibility in the face of the HIV epidemic. David Dalton, in the ''
San Francisco Examiner The ''San Francisco Examiner'' is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and has been published since 1863. Once self-dubbed the "Monarch of the Dailies" by then-owner William Randolph Hearst and the flagship of the He ...
'', said the group was telling young men that "a sex act... is worth more than your life." In ''Salon'',
David Horowitz David Joel Horowitz (January 10, 1939 – April 29, 2025) was an American conservative writer and activist. He was a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center's website '' FrontPage Magazine''; and ...
charged Sex Panic! with "intellectual fascism and sexual fanaticism" over their defence of sex clubs, which he characterized as the "death camps of the current contagion." The group's insistence that a gay public sexual culture continue in the face of the epidemic was, in Horowitz's view, "homicidal", and its membership composed of "sexual extremists" cloistered in complicit universities. Sex Panic! member Douglas Crimp rebutted the charges that this was a mere intellectual exercise. Mainstream venues where such debate took place, he argued, were dominated by the group's opponents and had failed to engage with queer theory, so necessarily saw the group's members as fringe extremists. He argued too that the very life-and-death nature of the AIDS crisis made the group's purpose political, rather than academic, rejecting the claim that the group's insistence on the complexity of the issues it addressed was "dangerous relativism". Others were sympathetic to parts of Sex Panic!'s manifesto but opposed to certain particulars. David Salyer in ''Survival News'', a journal of the AIDS Survival Project, applauded the group's demands for an end to discrimination and greater promotion of safer sex messages, but objected to the emphasis the group placed on public sex. Activist John-Manuel Andriote also criticized Sex Panic!'s assertion that public, visible, anonymous sex was necessarily a cornerstone of gay experience. Michael Warner had told ''The New York Times'' that "It is an absurd fantasy to expect gay men to live without a sexual culture when we have almost nothing else that brings us together". Andriote responded that the AIDS crisis itself had been an alternative community-forming experience for gays and lesbians, who cooperated to support one another and campaign for awareness. Through the crisis, Andriote said, gay men had acquired a broader common experience than "a priapic brotherhood of sexual rebellion", offering an alternative grounds for a group politics of identity. Sex Panic! members accused their opponents of mischaracterizing their positions. Founder member Kendall Thomas objected to a ''New York Times'' piece claiming the group saw "promiscuous sex" as the "essence of gay liberation"; the newspaper printed an amendment, stating Thomas's view to be that "any attempt to fight AIDS by demonizinging /nowiki>''sic''">sic.html" ;"title="/nowiki>''sic">/nowiki>''sic''/nowiki> the culture of sexual freedom is doomed". Tim Dean called the group's criticism of Rotello and Signorile "utterly confused and defensive", but noted its significance in re-energizing AIDS debates and reviving the political argument over gay assimilation. Craig Rimmerman similarly praised the group's "invaluable contribution" to sustaining gay and lesbian grassroots activism and fighting "normalizing tendencies" in public discourse about sexual health.


See also

* HIV/AIDS in the United States * Same-sex marriage in New York


References


External links


Sex Panic meeting leaflet
from th
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
Fordham University Fordham University is a Private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit research university in New York City, United States. Established in 1841, it is named after the Fordham, Bronx, Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx in which its origina ...
, New York {{LGBTQ HIV/AIDS activism in the United States Anti-racist organizations in the United States LGBTQ political advocacy groups in New York (state) HIV/AIDS organizations in the United States Defunct LGBTQ organizations based in New York City Sex positivism 1997 in LGBTQ history 1997 establishments in New York City Organizations established in 1997