ABSTRACT
I remember one evening I was travelling to spend some time with a new friend. Sitting opposite me was a pimply, unattractive youth and at the other end of the tube carriage was a gaggle of girls. He couldn't take his eyes off them. I had been studying him for several minutes, the desperation of lust for the girls and the hopelessness of it all when, suddenly, he saw me. A look of utter contempt coloured his face. I turned away, amused that he thought I was eyeing him up; nothing could be further from the truth. There was I with an evening promising dinner and good sex, and there was he going nowhere. I think it was then it first occurred to me that a backlash against gays was inevitable. We were having it too good for them. There's an often repeated joke about the 1960s that no one knows anyone who was actually there when what the 1960s is legendary for was happening. In the 1970s it was happening too, and gay men were exclusively in on the action. We had rejected heterosexual standards and made our own rules, finding the sexual freedoms which were the envy of all. No wonder, when HIV came along, that many saw it as a punishment; they couldn't have wished a more effective retribution.
