I remember when religion

 was private and sex was public. What does it mean for sex to be public? It means that it is not only polite to talk about sex -- it becomes obligatory dinner conversation. At certain festive gatherings it is suddenly de rigeur to speak of the sex you had last night — not only identifying the partner and perhaps the positions utilised — but also the device (dildo, tit clamps etc.). When we began doing this back in the 70s it was bragging — because we had never talked so brazenly before. And it was for gay men asserting what had been forbidden. Eventually it became a fine art, that is sexual discourse — because after all, sex is interesting. Like human beings, sex comes in infinite variety; one person’s feast is another’s famine. Ken McDougall used to go on about a man who licked him from head to toe — he moaned: ’It was heaven!’ But for me it would have been a certain kind of hell. Ken and I  had a friend, a musician  (he shall remain nameless) who was very beautiful, but for him sex was apparently a mystical experience. This again seemed to me a nightmare; to turn something which has as its primary value its very materiality into a prayer. Not that sex isn’t a kind of prayer; it certainly is, but it is a prayer for philistines who have only accidentally — and precipitously — fallen to their knees. But to say sex was public does not mean only that we talked about it openly, it actually happened in public, with people watching, either by accident or design. Group gropes were once commonplace -- and an integral part of theatrical presentations -- this was sexual liberation, it was believed we could discover not only other people’s bodies but their souls. I suppose it was a kind of religion because it replaced religion in the public square. But I still insist it was not mystical. God was not so much sensitive and all-knowing as extremely well hung. (The painting of Jesus that hung over my bed was very sexy — many of us had sexy pictures of a very white Jesus back in those days — and if he was not the actual subject of our first masturbation he might crop up, now and then, in our 'minds-eye'). The result of all this? AIDS? Not necessarily. AIDS is not the consequence of group gropes, but of a specific sexual act — the insertion of an orgasmic penis into a bleeding orifice. The raison d’être of a group gropes was not penetrating as many people as possible -- although that did sometimes happen of course -- but a plethora of human contact. Human contact is what it’s all about; what everyone requires, what keeps us healthy and alive. Today sex is no longer public, it has become quite unmentionable. Trans folk announce shockingly that their queerness has nothing to do with sex; young people are no longer proud sluts they are ‘gender non-binaries.’ Religion has taken over the public square. Religions are vast bureaucracies of varying degrees of corruptness (see: The Roman Catholic Church). They must necessarily recruit and lie -- the way any capitalist organization does. All this has nothing to do with the human spirit. What happens between oneself and one’s spirit — or the spirit of another, or the many spirits in the air — is a truly private matter; no one should talk about it or spread it around as they might COVID-19. Religion means simply a commonly held belief; or one should say a belief which is not actually believed, and certainly not practiced, but merely confessed to publicly, often displayed, often boasted of, and thus competitively asserted. The new religion is altruism; everyone talks about it, no one practices it. For instance; there is a quick solution to COVID-19. The people who die (except for those with mysterious unacknowledged co-morbidities which make up a very small portion of deaths) are the abject -- those who are not privileged, those people we do not in fact care about. People died in nursing homes and meat packing plants because they lived in appalling conditions unfit for humans. They were dying before COVID-19, but we refuse to admit it, for that would reveal our culpability. The majority of the COVID dead are also non-white. If we were to give these people access to health care and and basic human rights they would not die from COVID-19. We don’t want do that, but we insist that we do, fiercely displaying our public religion—  i.e. altruism — but the fact is we will never fundamentally change the social system because we don’t actually care about other people. Caring for others is difficult and time consuming. We would rather jaw endlessly about our evil neighbour who forgot to put on his mask. Last night I walked past a gay bar on Church street that was packed — as packed any bar can be these days. It’s called The Well, and it opened briefly and proudly for one night only before lockdown; The Well is now closed for a month. It’s what we all need. A place — like all gay bars — that offers the possibility of making sex public again — and making religion private. For some things just must not be spoken of; it is not sexual acts which are obscene but our hypocritical altruistic lies; they are the furtive greasy glue that holds society together. We want nothing less than to be thought perfectly good, and in our own minds we are.  Don’t ask if anyone remembers the Holocaust; we are living in it. Last night a man told me about his father. His father will soon be dying of cancer because his father will not get proper medical care, because of precautions taken due to COVID-19. Make no mistake. This Holocaust will be duly noted by future generations; and Hitler too — please don’t forget — often spoke of a uniquely German concern -- putting the common good above the individual good, performing his persuasive altruism. I know it’s not pleasant to think about it, but that’s the problem really. We wish for our imaginations to entertain and reassure us. Alas they will wither from this misuse and abuse; our minds-eye is the most valuable gift God gave us; it was meant to rock he world, not rock us to complacent sleep.