(perhaps for students in Family Life classes in high school
or college,
educator involvement high priority, frank discussions of a sexual nature)
by
Robert Locke, Pseud. Clayton Bess
If it seems at first outrageous, what I write below, I hope that you will stop and think about it for
a little while. And please be sure that it is written most sincerely. It describes an exquisite moment of pain
and tenderness. It was a sweet moment, a moment
to remember, and a moment to pass on to the next generation.
"Well, as my grandma said," my 84-year-old mom said to me and my dad, "'A stiff prick hath no conscience'"
I was stunned at the casual way those words came out of my mom's mouth. It was a beautiful Spring day. I was
taking Mom and Dad for a drive in the California foothills. We were talking frankly, perhaps for the first time,
about my brother Richard's death
the previous Fall, a horrible death after ten days in the hospital on a respirator. (For that entire story, see
"Living, Dying and Mister In-Between" on this website.)
Richard's death was the most painful thing in my mother's long life. I knew that for a fact. She had said several times,
"A child is not supposed to die before his mother." There was no way for me to help her over it; there
was no getting over it. But in this
conversation in the car that day, it seemed important for me to confide in both Mom and Dad that Richard had not been
as careful with his life as he should have been. That he contracted AIDS was, of course, a tragedy, and a well-known
tragedy for millions of people, but he was not to blame for that. He contracted the virus very early on before anyone even knew anything about
this disease, before it had a name even, before anyone even knew that HIV existed. But what was also true was
that despite all of his later lectures to the gay community
about safe sex, he and John, his partner of several years, had given up their own safe-sex practices. They didn't
use condoms. They didn't play safe. And perhaps this had something to do with Richard's death, who knows?
Richard had told me that it didn't
matter any more because both he and John were HIV+ and didn't have
anything to lose. I told him flatly that he was wrong, that each time he
and John had unsafe sex they were contaminating each other with not only all sorts of other infectious agents that could
further weaken their already compromised immune systems, but they were also passing back and forth new strains
of HIV. The virus mutates quite quickly, and so they were continuing to infect each other with essentially a new virus
each time. Richard, however, was difficult to convince of anything that he did not want to be convinced of.
Now I imagine that a conversation such as this between myself and my parents in the car that bright
Spring day must seem strange to outsiders,
even
though we were all well beyond the Age of Consent, my parents both 84 and myself 52. But Richard had been
staring AIDS in the face for more than thirteen years, and both he and I had written books about the disease; so my
parents were no strangers to frank talk about sexually transmitted disease.
However, I had never heard my mother say anything so frank as this quote from Great Grandma Williamson. And, yes,
I was stunned for a moment. I almost had to pull off the road.
"Your grandma told you that???!!?? When?"
"Oh, when we were girls."
I was stunned again. My mom was the second oldest of seven sisters, and my Great Grandma Williamson had said
this to how many of them, at what age? "Oh, when we were girls." So casual.
So I guess it was probably around 1930, my mother having been born in 1913, and I can only suppose that
this quote was part a Birds-and-Bees lecture, maybe, that Great Grandma Williamson was giving to her
granddaughters: "Watch out for men, girls; they want one thing
only; and if you get pregnant, you're the one who will be stuck with the results."
Well, that would perhaps be a pretty good lesson actually, pretty apt for perhaps too many young men. Still,
these were the daughters of Grover Holt, Pentecostal Holiness Preacher, and it was pretty shocking to hear it
come so blithely out of my mom's mouth more than fifty years later.
And it really got me thinking. Doesn't that
kind of wisdom—
especially in this very sweet context of a little old lady passing along to her son the words of her sweet little
old grandmother—belong in our
current curriculum for Sex Education, Family Life, Pregnancy and STD Prevention? Not only was it true of a lot
of men back in my mom's
girlhood, but also evidently back in Great
Grandma Williamson's girlhood. And it still rings true, I'd say, and today in a much
more dire context when it is no longer just pregnancy at stake, but life and death, with so many infected
with HIV around the nation and around the globe.
And, in fact, this was not the first time I had heard those exact same words spoken. They were the words
of my brother Richard when he was telling me about his new book, In the Heat
of Passion, 1987. Richard was doing what he called "guerilla workshops" around the nation, but especially in
San Francisco, to try to educate men in the gay community about AIDS. His point was that
when a man is in the heat of passion, caution flies out the window: "A stiff prick hath no conscience." He even
used that same old-fashioned word, "hath", that Great Grandma Williamson had used with her granddaughters.
And the ironic fact was that my mom was now using this same sentence, this same truth, to describe what had been
going on between Richard and John. In their heat of passion they had
stopped using their safety precautions, even though they knew, they
knew, they knew better. And here was my mother, recognizing this with regret, with the wise precautionary
words of her grandma from so many decades earlier.
Perhaps Great Grandma Williamson was just passing down to her granddaughters wisdom that her own
grandmother had passed down to her when she was a girl, say around 1880. Maybe that "hath" actually dates
the quote as being centuries old, passed down grandmother to granddaughter for generations? And then in 1987 there was
my brother passing the wisdom down to me, even though he himself would soon enough forget it. And ten years
later in 1997 my own mother passing it down to me.
And today it seems worth passing down again because it is truer than ever. Yet where are the schools on
this question? I wonder. When I was writing the first draft of my book The
Mayday Rampage at the same time Richard was writing In the Heat of Passion I visited many schools
in the Sacramento area to see what was happening in their sex-education classes. No, of course, the classes
were not called "Sex-Education" but were called instead more neutral names like "Family Life."
In fact, here is a quote from High School Junior Jess Judd from page 16 of The Mayday Rampage that shows the kind of
reactions that students in 1988 were having to these classes:
Only you can't call it Sex Education, right? You have to call it things like Family Sociology or Self Esteem, or
something that's really going to get kids to enroll like lightning. I mean like, 'Wow, you guys, I'm going to take
Family Sociology, how about you!' And you have to get parent permission. Can you imagine having to get
parent permission to take a class called Self Esteem? I mean my head explodes! And let's say you have parents
who cannot, will not, must not tell you anything about sex ...who do you turn to?"
And Molly Pierce, Jess's girlfriend adds:
"And Family Soc is only for juniors and seniors, right? Freshmen and sophomores are old enough to do it;
they're just not old enough to learn about it. And it's all girls in the class anyway, ten to one girls to guys."
And so I personally would like to find out what is going on in schools today. Same old, same old? Or have
we come a distance since I wrote that dialogue in 1988?
This "Author's Presentation" I am proposing on this webpage would be less
of a presentation from author to students and more of a dialogue between students and author, with lots of
guidance from the teachers. I would expect the students to have already read The Mayday Rampage and
be brimming with questions of their own. I can envision
putting together a non-fiction book based upon what I learn—what WE learn. What is being taught
about Sex Education in today's classes?
Who is enrolling? What
support and what resistance is being met within the schools and within the communities across the nation?
Right
now, it is merely an idea I am throwing out. If I get any bites for this presentation, I'll keep copious notes and
post updates here on this webpage. But for purposes of educators considering such an "Author's Presentation" and
wanting to know exactly what credentials I would bring to such a program, you should probably take a good look
not only at the webpage on this site devoted to
The Mayday Rampage which gives my very good, mostly starred reviews
for this bold book published in 1993, but I think it would also be a good idea to read my very intimate
autobiographical notes that I have
tucked away here.
This is a high-risk/high-gain kind of presentation, but of one thing I am very sure: students
will be very keen
to participate in it. I remember the way they participated when I was writing The Mayday Rampage
and I fully expect that same kind of mature dialogue and enthusiasm. I have found that if you extend a mature
hand to young people, they gladly extend that same kind of maturity back to you. Shall we give it a try?
Contact: Clayton Bess
Copyright © 2009 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved