11.1/The Interior Life/Sexuality and the Geography of Desire

The Rougher Register, 1989–2001

The Classified Economy

Three years after the Supreme Court ruled that a hostile sexual environment could by itself violate federal civil-rights law, no editor on a floor like Meridian’s had changed a single working habit because of it. Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, decided in 1986, held that a plaintiff did not have to lose her job or suffer a diagnosable injury for a workplace to be actionable — the environment itself could be the violation.² The ruling sat in the reporters the way most Supreme Court opinions sat in the reporters, read by the handful of lawyers whose job it was to read them, and changed almost nothing on the floors above Madison Avenue. The doctrine existed. The enforcement did not — not in 1986, not for years afterward.

What the doctrine described was already the working order of the place. Editors had sex with the assistants they supervised, the writers they assigned, the photographers they hired, the sources they cultivated, the wives of friends, and each other. None of it was concealed; it circulated as gossip, sometimes as comedy, occasionally as grief, the way any affair or firing or bad marriage circulated on a floor with thin walls and long hours. The infrastructure ran through the calendar rather than the bedroom — the long lunch that became the afternoon, a manuscript argued over an evening at a colleague’s borrowed house in Sag Harbor, an apartment two blocks from the office where a piece got edited because the office had people in it and the apartment did not. A twenty-four-year-old fact-checker involved with a senior editor was, by any accounting kept informally around the floor, likelier to be handed the next good assignment, and she generally understood this before anyone explained it to her. Whether that made her a target, a strategist, or simply a young person doing what everyone around her did was not a distinction the floor had settled vocabulary for. Where a word was reached for at all, it split unevenly between predator and willing climber, and most of the people actually living inside the arrangement fit neither label especially well — a fact that made the arrangement easier to keep running at the time and harder, later, to explain to anyone who had not been on the floor.

The Ledger Designed Not to Know

The magazine’s economy touched a second, adjacent one without ever filing a memo about it. Above the classified page sat a referral layer that never advertised at all. An escort agency called Cachet — the same name Sydney Biddle Barrows used for the service she ran out of an Upper West Side apartment before police raided it on October 11, 1984, and before she pleaded guilty the following July and paid a five-thousand-dollar fine — was one working example of the type; Manhattan agencies of its kind in the middle nineties booked an evening for four hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, an overnight for two to five thousand, referred bar to bar and phone number to phone number.³ Heidi Fleiss’s Los Angeles operation, broken by an undercover sting on June 9, 1993, was the decade’s more famous version of the same arrangement, run at a larger scale and for a more famous clientele.⁴ The same paper’s personal ads — the unpaid kind — and the two-week HIV-test ritual that shadowed the period’s sex belong to a fuller account of private life elsewhere in this part.⁵

The magazine’s own accounting touched this economy at one remove. A senior editor took a source to dinner at a restaurant that billed three to five hundred dollars a table; the source went home; the editor moved to a hotel bar, made a call, and the evening continued somewhere the expense report did not follow. What it bought, plainly, was paid sex — an escort’s company for an evening, sometimes intercourse, sometimes not, always billed as something else. Publishers turned a blind eye to the irregularity or did not; the open secret at this level was never that it happened, but that the accounting was arranged not to record it.

The Hearing and the Threshold

That October, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a federal appellate nominee put the phrase “sexual harassment” into a national vocabulary for the first time on live television; what the testimony contained and what it did to the way a floor spoke afterward is treated on its own terms elsewhere in this part.⁶ What changed at the level of enforcement took two years longer. The Navy’s Tailhook convention scandal broke open that same fall, and the 1992 Senate elections, remembered afterward as the Year of the Woman, followed it. In 1993, Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. dropped the requirement that a harassment plaintiff prove severe psychological injury, lowering the bar a magazine’s lawyers actually had to clear.⁷ Senator Bob Packwood resigned from the Senate in 1995 under threat of expulsion, after more than twenty women had come forward over three years with allegations spanning two decades of his career — a resignation the system had not been willing to extract from Thomas four years earlier, when the allegation came from one woman instead of twenty.⁷ Before 1993 most magazine human-resources departments were a drawer in someone’s office and a benefits packet. After it, the larger publishers — Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc. — began circulating policy memos; mandatory training entered upper-masthead meetings as a subject rather than a joke; the words “open-door policy” started appearing in mastheads that had never printed them before.

None of it reached the arrangement described above. The memo changed who had to sign something. It did not change who had sex with whom, or why the good assignments still tended to land with the assistants who were closest to the editors handing them out.

The register was not only an office matter. In the same years the fashion-image economy ran openly on very young bodies whose release forms were legally sufficient to run the picture, a complicity taken up elsewhere in this archive, in the account of the photograph.⁸

The Movement’s Own Line

A parallel fight, unconnected to the office and to any court, ran through gay-rights politics across the same years. The North American Man/Boy Love Association, founded in Boston in December 1978, advocated the abolition of age-of-consent laws and had marched in gay-liberation parades since its earliest years — a small organization, a newsletter, a few hundred members, and a presence that a growing respectability wing of the movement wanted gone.⁹ The argument over whether to exclude it ran bitter and public for the better part of a decade, one side calling exclusion a surrender to a politics of respectability and a betrayal of the parade’s original claim to sexual-liberation maximalism, the other arguing that the association’s presence handed the movement’s opponents a conflation — homosexuality with pedophilia — that no amount of civil-libertarian principle was worth carrying into a march. A culture writer assigned to cover a June parade could not treat the question as settled. The contingent was still marching. Whether to name it, to frame it as marginal or central to the day, or to leave it out of the frame entirely was a live editorial choice made new every June, and no house style anywhere in the industry existed to make it for anyone.

The fight had outside consequences by 1994. Senator Jesse Helms sponsored an amendment in early 1994 to cut United States funding to any United Nations body that could not certify it had no organizational ties to groups promoting pedophilia; it passed.¹⁰ The International Lesbian and Gay Association, which had won UN consultative status the year before, voted at its New York conference in June 1994 to expel the North American Man/Boy Love Association outright — 214 in favor, 30 against, roughly ten abstaining — and lost its UN status regardless of the vote.¹¹ That June’s dueling anniversary marches up Manhattan’s two avenues, one sanctioned and one not, are their own story, told elsewhere in this part.¹²

The Rupture

The Eleventh International AIDS Conference convened in Vancouver from July 7 to July 12, 1996, and left with a result the field had not had before: a triple-drug combination, built around a protease inhibitor, that drove the virus in treated patients to an undetectable level and kept it there.¹³ The press called it the cocktail. AIDS-related deaths in New York City fell forty-seven percent the following year.¹⁴ The mechanism of the drugs is treated on its own terms elsewhere; what belongs here is what the science did to men who had spent a decade inside the epidemic it ended.

It did not produce relief in any simple form. The friends were already dead. A body braced for fourteen years of losses had no ready use for sudden survival, and the vertigo that followed did not resolve into gratitude on any predictable schedule. Some men, in the years right after Vancouver, did not become more careful. Some became less. By 1999 a man of thirty-eight who had been inside the epidemic from its first years had been to more than forty funerals; a man of twenty-four arriving in the city in 2000 had been to none. They did not stand in the same relation to a Friday night.

What Entered Print

The word for it reached print in June 1997, in POZ magazine: “barebacking,” Stephen Gendin’s essay describing condomless sex among other HIV-positive men, a practice he distinguished explicitly from exposing a negative partner.¹⁵ A staffer at the magazine reportedly threatened to quit before the issue ran. The distinction Gendin drew did not survive the word’s spread past the page it was coined on; by 2000 the term needed no scare quotes, and the public argument over what it meant had mostly stopped asking who it was meant to describe. Before the word existed, the practice had a substrate: Scott O’Hara, editor of the journal Steam, had argued in print through the middle of the decade that positive men owed each other, and no one else, the decision.¹⁶ Both men were writing from inside losses already numbered in the hundreds; both were dead of AIDS-related illness within a few years of publishing the words that carried their names into general use.

“Bug-chasing” and “gift-giving” — a negative man seeking infection, a positive man offering it — reached a general readership through a September 1997 Newsweek piece.¹⁷ Inside the gay press the phenomenon was reported as a small, real subculture, diagnostic of something rather than a movement toward it: a name for a posture toward the epidemic built out of grief, exhaustion, and anger at a decade spent managing a risk alone. No sentence explains that posture better than its own vocabulary did.

New York’s mid-1980s emergency amendment to the state sanitary code, backed by Mayor Koch, had already closed the city’s commercial bathhouses and pushed the trade into private membership clubs operating under sex-club regulations and into circuit-party afterhours; that displacement and its surviving venues are mapped elsewhere in this part.¹⁸ The sex parties of the late nineties inherited the displaced infrastructure rather than inventing it. By the late nineties, private apartments in Chelsea, the East Village, and the lofts of Brooklyn hosted parties organized by phone tree and then by email, invitation lists sorted by serostatus — poz parties, negative parties, mixed parties advertised as such in the invitation rather than negotiated at the door.

The Legal, Not Moral, Consensus

The Clinton-Lewinsky story broke in January 1998 on a leaked Drudge Report item and grew through the fall toward Kenneth Starr’s referral to Congress, and it did not settle a moral question so much as a legal one.¹⁹ After 1998, human-resources manuals across midtown specified, in language they had not used before, that consent could not cure a power differential, that an open-door policy was not itself a defense, that a closed-door one-on-one meeting with a subordinate carried risk regardless of what happened in it. Editors did not stop having sex with the people they supervised. They stopped putting it on the visible record. “I’d rather not put that in email” became newsroom shorthand for an entire category of conversation that had, until recently, simply been conversation.

What did not change: assignments still followed proximity, intimacy and editorial taste remained, as they had always been, mutually generative, and the office Christmas party still ended, some years, in the wrong cab home. The lawyers had gotten better. The behavior continued, with less of it committed to paper.

The Article Congress Condemned

Bruce Rind of Temple University, Philip Tromovitch of the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Bauserman of the Maryland Department of Health published “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples” in Psychological Bulletin, volume 124, issue 1, in July 1998.²⁰ The paper pooled fifty-nine studies of college students and reported that the assumption of uniform, severe, lasting harm from childhood sexual abuse was not supported in that sample set; that reported harm varied by the child’s sex, by the presence of force, and by closeness to the abuser; and it proposed reserving the term “child sexual abuse” for encounters involving coercion, recommending a separate term for the rest.

The paper sat without controversy for nine months. On March 22, 1999, the radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger told her audience that the American Psychological Association, which published the journal, had endorsed pedophilia. The story moved from talk radio to the Wall Street Journal to Congress inside a few months. The APA defended peer review, then issued a June 1999 statement distancing itself from the paper’s policy implications without retracting it, then asked the American Association for the Advancement of Science to review the study; the AAAS declined, citing the political contamination already surrounding it. On July 12, 1999, the House of Representatives passed House Concurrent Resolution 107 by a vote of 355 to 0, with 13 members voting present, formally condemning the paper’s conclusions; the Senate concurred by voice vote on July 30.²¹ It remains the only peer-reviewed scientific article the United States Congress has ever formally condemned.

The paper’s methodology carried real problems — a college sample skews toward subjects minimally affected, and the line the authors drew between coercion and consent in a minor’s sexual experience is contestable on grounds that have nothing to do with statistics. Neither fact was what Congress voted on. What passed the House 355 to 0 was a judgment on a conclusion, not a procedure: no member reviewed the data; no resolution proposed a correction to the method. A magazine built on the premise that peer-reviewed findings deserved a hearing before a verdict had, in the condemnation of Rind et al., a story about the cost of reporting a finding straight — and about what it meant when the only available defense against the backlash was to distance the finding from the method that had produced it.

The Migration to a Screen

Crystal methamphetamine had circulated on the West Coast and inside circuit-party culture since the early nineties; in New York, a compound of the drug, sex parties, and online cruising coalesced between 1999 and 2001 into what men were starting to call “Party and Play,” or PNP, the drug itself going by “Tina.”²² Public-health workers at GMHC and Callen-Lorde were writing about it in print by 2000. On April 1, 2001, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jonathan Crutchley and Larry Basile launched Manhunt.net, a profile-based site — face, stats, position, serostatus, neighborhood — searchable in a way the AOL chat rooms that preceded it had never been.²³ AOL had offered conversation. Manhunt offered a catalog. The piers, the bookstore mezzanines, the park after dark — the physical geography that had organized gay cruising for a generation — began that year to compete with a screen at a desk at home.