Stephen Koch Says:

If you rely on the media to inform you on any really big subject—-the way male contraception is big—-you’re going to go sprinting down twenty-five promising but wrong paths. Why? Because for the news media, every scrap of information is treated as news.  There are lots and of labs around the world working on lots and lots of options for biological male contraception. Whenever one of them announces this or that bit of progress, the media leaps to embrace it as news, THE future, forgetting, (because the media’s capacity to forget is amazing), that last month the leapt to embrace THE future over some other lab’s news.  

So let’s start with some basic information. I can’t wait to write about “Fatherhood by Choice,” or  ”Sixteen and NOT Pregnant,” but before we get to the (sort of) sexy stuff,  let’s find out what we’re talking about. 

Here are a couple of sites with information worth having. 

Try: Male Contraception Information Project

And/or:  http://www.malecontraceptives.org. 

Each of these has a parti pris, but please believe me, you’ll learn more from them than you will from MSNBC.

Or skip to this video for a some big-time biological eye-opening: http://us.shalomlife.com/videos/92/women-s-miracle-male-birth-control-pill/

Watch it all the way through. It will change your thinking. I mean, change it!

100% effective chemical male contraception is on its way, unstoppable and (as it were) pregnant with social consequences at least as momentous as The Pill has been for women. A shelf full of male contraceptive options will probably hit the market within in ten years, and turn the condom (as a form of birth control) into a funny little medical curiosity from distant times. 

Moms and dads, consider this: If you’ve got a son in kindergarten now, by the time he hits puberty a readily available, cheap, safe, reversible, renewable non-toxic injection—-a shot, not a pill, effective for months at a time—-will assure that he won’t impregnate any girl until he decides to impregnate a girl. Like after he finishes high school or college. Or when he gets a job. Or marries. Or just wants a kid.  Until then, your boy will continue to produce semen; his competence in bed will just fine; his raging hormones rage and rage while he learns, as every man must, how to handle their raging. But in contrast to women on The Pill, he will not experience adverse psychological or physiological effects of any kind. His body will work and feel just like any other guy’s body, in bed and out, day or night—-except he will be temporarily sterile.  

In posts to come, I’ll be giving information and entertaining thoughts about what it all may end up meaning. 

From Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” An unhappy couple is stranded in the African bush, with the husband near death from gangrene. Their sole hope is rescue from the air. As the story ends, the husband hallucinates the arrival of a rescue plane piloted by an old friend. There is no plane. There will be no plane. Yet in his delirium the man imagines he’s been saved and is airborne, being flown to safety.  

Here is his last delusion: 

“And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, [Compie, the old friend and pilot] evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, wide as the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

Every now and then, I’m going to have some fun posting my favorite single sentences of all time.

Here’s one: Malcolm Muggeridge describing Anna Louise Strong, the foremost American Stalinist in Moscow during the thirties—-and later, the foremost American Maoist in China. 

“Miss Strong was an enormous woman with a very red face, a lot of white hair, and an expression of stupidity so overwhelming that it amounted to a kind of strange beauty.”

From: Malcolm Muggeridge’s memoir: Chronicles of Wasted Time. 

On the Gender Watch: We are a few years away from inexpensive, reversible, widely available, and 100% effective male contraception. An especially promising possibility among the many methods being developed would not be a pill, not be hormonally based, and would be 100% effective: a single shot that would guarantee reversible infertility for six  months, with no negative effect of the man’s body, emotions, or potency.

The implications? Let’s begin with a pure utopian fantasy.  All utopian fantasies are nonsense, but they can be thought-provoking nonsense. Suppose every young man between fourteen and twenty-one had the shot. Teenaged pregnancy would simply stop happening. (Exception: teenaged girls impregnated by men over twenty-one: that is, statutory rape.) Couples wanting a child would have up to six months for discussion, thought, growth, and testing the relationship. Meanwhile, (short of the sperm bank), young women could become pregnant only with the young man’s conscious and explicit consent and collaboration. Result? FATHERHOOD BY CHOICE. No more surprise pregnancies. No more: “I’m pregnant , what are you going to do about it?” An end to the sickening spectacle of young fathers feeling “trapped” by pregnancies they did not want, and running away to hide in resentment and irresponsibility.

 PREGNANCY WITH THE MAN’S CONSENT. 

Utopian fantasy, of course. And yet male contraception could change life in this society. 

If you want to see, hear, feel, and understand the New York “downtown” of the eighties; if you want to see, hear, feel and understand how love, art, rebellion, self-destruction, courage and creation worked in those grungy streets, read Cindy Carr’s Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.  If it doesn’t show you, nothing can. I will spare you the usual hollow superlatives.  Let’s say you can’t imagine how good this book is until you’re swept…not swept away, but swept into the way it was. Really was.

         Let me stick to the part of David’s life that I know best: his relationship with Peter Hujar, on which I am something of an expert. I was there. I knew them both. Well. Hujar I knew much better than well. Carr’s account their bond is flawless. But I do mean flawless. Not one tinny note. Not one wobbly factoid. I don’t have a single quibble. Non-writers have no idea how very  hard it is to write a 600-plus page book without getting at least a few facts wrong—-but Carr doesn’t. She sees what I remember right, gets it right, says it right. This is factual perfection. In a book that reads like the wind. 

             I believe that Hujar-Wojnarowicz relationship will stand in the history of art as like a kind of parable, too dense for any one interpretation. Like the best art, their bond was more than its parts. It was a bond between two artists whose highest achievements would not have happened without it.  It was bond between two gay men that went far beyond sex, maybe even beyond love. It was also a bond between two men, just men period, two father-starved men of our era, men living with and through what all men, straight or gay, have to face and live with, live through. 

To have invented this relationship as fiction would have taken genius. To have lived it for real, and lived it to the death, took it too.

Let David’s partner, Tom Rauffenbart, have the last word. “They were both more than and less than lovers. Peter was the one who saved him, who changed his life in a major positive way. They were kindred souls. David was missing something after Peter was gone.”

Before we go one step further, my references here to “Franny” will always be to my wife. Even if Franny doesn’t like it, she’s going to get quoted now and then. That comes with being married to me.

Tough luck.

Franny recently finished bound galleys of our friend Daniel Smith’s wonderful book, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, soon forthcoming from Simon and Schuster. Over dinner, neatly sipping a Stoli-on-the-rocks, she mused, “Dan’s book made me see something. Being a comic requires an exceptional, exquisitely sensitive sense of self-esteem.” 

I stared at her. But when we talked, I got it. Her point is that the clown’s self-esteem must be exquistely sensitive. Not necessarily healthy. Or sound. Or radiant and unstoppable.  Just sensitive—-just alive, aware. 

I see it. Clowns are invented from the comic’s sense of ways he or she might be ludicrous. They stand on the platform of their creator’s private self-judgement.

When I think of the funniest figures in my personal repertoire, it’s true of them all, from Mark Twain to Jackie Gleason to Carole Burnett to Evelyn Waugh to Iris Owens…

To name a few. 

In the last week of January we at the Peter Hujar Archive worked our tails off with the film-maker Christoph Gelfand, or True Life Media, filming interviews with people who were close to Peter during his lifetime, and people who’ve formed some big connection to him and his art since his death, 

This morning Christoph brought in the files on a massive (at least for me) external hard drive. The files are unedited, but shot with beautiful, perfect professionalism, and parts will soon be on the web. For now, it’s enough to say that there are wonderful interviews from every phase of Hujar’s life. A magnificent exchange with Gary Schneider, printer supreme, whose discussion of Hujar’t technique is destined to become a You-Tube Classic. An almost metaphysically profound interview with Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons. Memories from Vince Aletti, (photo critic of The New Yorker), about love, friendship, and PH in the realms of fashion and rock music. Laughs with Chuck Close, who tried to stop smoking with Peter, and Linda Finch, the only person ever to have known Hujar from the days of his early youth to the last days of his life. (And yes, she’s the same women who is the model for Chuck Closes’s Portrait of Linda Finch.) There’s more: A wonderful talk with Jonathan Katz, curator of the Hide and Seek exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution and Brooklyn Museum. And two fine, funny, and very moving interviews, one with Robert Levithan, the big love during the middle years, and one with Tom Rauffenbart, the man who (contrary to the myth polluting the web) was David Wojnarowicz’s real partner during David’s famous realtionship with PH.

That interview with Tom! It tells a love story so powerful than when he finished talking, the room was uncannily quiet, and our (very straight) crew, who have shot and seen everything from Jersey Shore to the Kardashians to Oprah, stood silent: not a word, just impressed and moved. 

Now you tell me: How many famous-artist profiles bring tears to your eyes? 

This afternoon I dropped in at my favorite independent bookstore, Crawford-Doyle Booksellers on Madison Avenue, to be surprised and very flattered when they handed me two copies of the new paperback edition of The Breaking Point for me to sign before they put them beside the cash register. 

Authorial bliss!