Between word and deed.

There's a vandalized statue of Karl Marx in Moscow on which in 1991 some sage and mordant survivor of the Comintern spray-painted the words WORKERS OF THE WORLD, FORGIVE ME. At least 10 million people died during Joseph Stalin's collectivization efforts. It's estimated that 30 million to 35 million died during Mao Tse-tung's. Most of them starved. And all in the name of Marx's big idea.

There are a lot of dead bodies strewn between Marx's desk at the British Museum Library and what Francis Fukuyama called "the end of history." In another half century, when millions more have been infected with HIV and died of AIDS complications, the same might well be said of the killing fields that stretch between the ivory towers of radical queer theorists and the bedrooms of gay men. Someday maybe someone will deface an effigy of Foucault with the slogan SEX PANIC! = DEATH. There's a lot of space between words and deeds, ideas and realities. And in the recent arguments over promiscuity and safe sex that have tom the gay intelligentsia apart, most of us have come to realize that that space has become very dangerous.

Until now, perhaps what made that space so dangerous was the fact that people seemed to bumble into it blindfolded. People seemed to be behaving as if there weren't a deadly virus in their midst, and then somehow they seemed surprised when they caught it. Moreover, they were always looking for someone other than themselves to blame. For so many people, HIV was something you didn't discuss in the bedroom. Sure, the intellectuals were always telling us that promiscuity was subversive--a continuation of the gay liberation that began with Stonewall--but in the age of AIDS there's never been much of anything subversive about having sex with a lot of people because it wasn't really an act of protest.

For a while it was a willful ignoring of reality, a kind of teenage rebellion that ended up hurting "us" more than it did "them." It was the sexual equivalent of throwing a rock through someone's window and running away. Then, for some people, it became something more reprehensible: promiscuous, unprotected sexual behavior coupled with nondisclosure of HIV status. To wit, murder. Nothing like Stonewall, where people stood their ground and knowingly put themselves, not other people, in harm's way truly for the sake of individual freedom.

Now a new breed of sexual subversives seems to have appeared on the scene, and they're the worst practitioners yet of this murderous and false ideology that sex is freedom. They're the people who consciously practice "barebacking," or unsafe sex. They are the unsurprising brainchildren, the Galateas of their extremist Pygmalions in academia, and pernicious creator and creation alike can't help but make me think of those words scrawled on the statue in Moscow.

There they are, in their vacuums, the eggheaded, often pigheaded sex radicals, believing first and foremost in the rightness of their precious politicization of sex, which, like so many other trendy academic models, finds its roots in Marxist theory. Like latter-day Karl Marxes, they want to break the shackles of bourgeois tradition, and that goal apparently is worth the lives of so many young turks, who are encouraged, for the sake of the gay revolution, to run into the wasteland of disease-ridden promiscuity. In the name of social justice (which in this case takes the form of sexual anarchy), murder is justifiable, it seems, just as, also in the name of social justice, murder was justified in China and the former Soviet Union.

It's one thing to spin fanciful theories about bucking the hegemony while sitting in your cushy chair in the ivied establishment of academia. It's quite another to sicken and quite possibly die living out the real-life consequences of those theories in bedrooms and nightclubs and bathhouses. If some duped soldier in this inane war on heterosexual monogamy is fool enough to want to die for his beliefs, that's his ineffectual business. But he and his theoretical forebears have no right to decimate humanity in the process, much less expect their HMOs to pay for it.