The monolithic myths

Columbia City, Ind., has always prided itself on its Christmas decorations. Each year of my young life, I was shunted off to the Whitley County Courthouse on Christmas Eve to sit on Santa's lap and receive a bag of oranges and a bag of haystacks (those vanilla creamy things covered in chocolate). The line would be long because everyone did the same thing. \nWhen the ritual was fulfilled, we'd go the four blocks home to find that Santa had arrived. In a Christmas Eve family, the whole set-up was a little hard to believe.\nI never bought the Easter Bunny madness. \nI munched the chocolate, and I wondered why we did such things. My ordinary parents were suddenly transformed into love mongers, my siblings forced into Sunday pants, a dinner with 40 relatives stifled our little house. I was far too serious as a child.\nI'm dealing with new myths that threaten to become as monolithic as those cartoon holidays we have. One struck very close to home the other day.\nOne of my friends has met someone, and as we discussed it while rocking on my porch, inevitably I had to ask if they had sex yet -- which I always ask in a roundabout way: "Have you seen him naked?"; "Did you touch anything?"; "What about the kissing, did you get any tongue?"\nThen of course, each detail brought forth completes a list of risk factors I mentally check off. We finally reach the "do you have or did you use condoms?"\nI hate to be so predictable, but inevitably my friends know about this column, so it's caveat emptor when discussing sex with me. Because she is a good friend, I put her through the drill.\nTongue? yes. Naked? no. Touch anything? maybe. A little bit of wine went into pushing the attraction between my friend and her amour from "look across the room" to tongue tango in a most gratifying turn of events.\nI'm the cheerleader for discovering emotional and physical interest in another person, so I wasn't harsh. Because I know both parties I have the task to educate at the same time as I receive the thrill of the voyeur. I wanted to know if my friend had condoms, were they discussed, will they be needed?\nAs she knows from being around me when I'm sick, HIV is no real laughing matter. She's well informed of women's health issues. So when she told me she thought this guy was "clean," I got the surprise of the evening. \nWe've become a nation of diagnosticians, a mutant class of them blessed with viral X-ray vision. Such vision is naturally an all-consuming function, and it apparently tampers with our common sense.\nWe stop hearing words like condoms and incurable, just like I stopped hearing the Backstreet Boys a couple of years ago.\nI fixed my glare on her. She had the glow of the monolithic myth all over her. \nLike a deer in the headlights, she didn't immediately realize her mistake. If you're going to tell the monolithic myth, you don't usually have to worry about your audience. They probably believe it, too.\nToo often, we deal with the myth backward, by testing people who have believed it and have had hindsight regret. They peel off the vestments of a priesthood of immortality and get down and dirty with the rest of us. \nThe monolithic myth that you can know someone's status for sexually transmitted diseases just by looking has taken a staggering count of human life. Because its rituals are so often Dionysian, they are shrouded in the blessed forgetfulness of hangovers or crashing, part of a cycle of various addictions. \nIt doesn't take drugs or booze, it functions in more ascetic settings: between partners in a marriage or an arrangement, in monogamy as well as adultery. We know ourselves to be clever creatures, and we are too clever for our own good.\nWhile I gave the well-worn lecture, annotated with examples, she knew she couldn't win. Sighing, and throwing herself back into the rocking chair, she bore it like a pro. \nSometimes, when I write this column, I feel like I'm painting a bull's eye on my chest. Because I know the monolithic myths, you must know I believed them at one point of my life. It was the time least suited and most crucial for such mistaken beliefs. I tried to remember that when I started my lecture, my old life as a believer. \nI tried to remember when AIDS was a death sentence, as automatic as a mail sorting machine. Those myths we had then! We thought only people who had anal sex got it, then we thought only promiscuous people got it. We'd see someone out at the bars and say -- "I can't believe he doesn't have it."\nWe'd compare ourselves and know it wasn't possible that educated men would contract an STD. A case of crabs was a fluke, a poor choice of partners. A case of AIDS was like a demarcation -- that was for people who were out of control. They paid for their mistakes right in front of you. The proof of superiority was that you didn't have it, you weren't dying and of course, you never would. \nYour ethnicity, your education, your income, your cultural background -- these are all poor predictors of your risk for HIV. To me, nothing predicts as well as myths, the stories you tell of yourself. "I was so drunk…" and "I had the clap, but I took care of it…" or "I'm clean…" mark you as acolytes of the religion of denial. On my porch on a warm summer night, I defrocked another one of you. I'm a bounty hunter for you little pagans -- like Clint Eastwood after anger management, I'll try to make it painless.