Left Field May 2003

Whenever I read those dire news items about young people not listening to HIV-prevention messages, I’m reminded of a story about my mother. Once upon a time, when my mom was seven or eight, her mother warned her not to put beans up her nose. In those days every household had a hundred-pound bag of dried navy beans in the kitchen or pantry. It had never occurred to my mom to put beans up her nose. But Gram issued so many dire warnings that one day, my mother got curious. She went in the pantry and stuffed beans up her nostrils, one by one. Naturally the beans swelled from nasal moisture, and my mother couldn’t pry them out. Uh-oh. A trip to the local emergency room was followed by a spanking.
“Why didn’t you listen?” Gram thundered.

As a writer who has spent time listening to young people and writing about them, I wonder why everybody is so surprised that many don’t listen to unsafe-sex warnings. When did Americans start believing that kids listen to dire warnings about anything? When kids are six, they don’t listen to warnings about lost mittens; at sixteen they don’t listen to warnings about fast cars and bad company. Gram’s generation believed that dire warnings to kids always work. But then she also believed we’d never fly to the moon. Hasn’t America learned anything in eighty years?

Americans have tried to keep kids from doing a lot of things, and we’ve always failed. Alcohol, for instance. My mom grew into a Jazz Age kid with a silver hip-flask. People drank and partied, and some Americans believed drink was evil—so in 1920 Prohibition happened. That didn’t work—people drank more than ever, only now they drank in secret. Prohibition fueled the rise of organized crime. So we repealed Prohibition in 1933...but to save face and preserve the power of dire warnings, we kept underage drinking illegal. That didn’t work either—the culture continued to make alcohol forbidden and attractive. Kids drank in secret, as I learned in the 1950s, watching my small-town high-school confreres head for beer busts in the hills. Today law enforcement cracks down on youth drinking harder than ever. The penalties get bigger—you can be suspended from school, lose your driver’s license and scholarships, do serious jail time, ruin your life over a six-pack. Result: Some young people do fierce binge drinking that outdoes the 1950s. Is there a message here?

Cigarettes? Now that America has decided cigarettes must go, the young are more into smoking than ever. Every state outlaws smoking by minors; the feds jump in with grim public-service warnings. But the preventives aren’t working. Cigarettes have become one of those A-list no-nos that kids do anything to get their hands on...not because a cancer stick is such a wonderful thing in itself, but because adults have made it forbidden and attractive, the way they did with alcohol. Indeed, we are seeing cigarettes explode into a huge illegal traffic, just like drugs, with a whole new wrinkle of organized crime. Kids go to boot camps and juvenile detention just for smoking.

As a nonsmoker, I’ve tried my own preventive messages. “Smoking can kill you,” I smiled to a young friend of seventeen. “You know that, don’t you?”
He smiled back through a cumulus cloud of blue smoke. “Yes, I know,” he said.

Drugs? The United States fought drugs since the 1950s, when the Reader’s Digest fumed about the evils of reefer. Today we face the double whammy of preaching about illegal drugs to kids who have marinated in legal drugs all their lives. We try to tell them that Ritalin and Prozac and Zoloft are good, but crack and E and GHB are bad. Most kids don’t buy this sophist distinction. So now a generation of young people is largely deaf to “just say no” messages.

In short, sex is just another of those things that our society makes both attractive and forbidden. Sex is seen that way by many young people, whether they’re minors or not. Hence the problem with dire HIV warnings. So, while government and churches insist that abstinence-only campaigns are working, and AIDS nonprofits insist that prevention campaigns are working, statistics coming out of the CDC (if we can believe them) say otherwise. Gay kids and straight kids are having a lot of sex, and they’re having it younger than before, and many are having it unprotected.

In the past, kids ignored the dire warnings because they knew they would live forever. Young people of Gram’s generation rode the edge on fast horses and whisky and incurable syphilis. In their day, “living forever” actually meant being cherished and admired when you’re old. Kids knew they could look forward to happy old age, dying at home in their own bed with their family around them.

But today it’s different. Today kids know, with a certainty that is hair-raising to see, that they won’t live forever. From everything they see in the media and the daily social life around them, they know it’s best to be fiercely young and beautiful and sexy and popular for a blink of time. Being old today means Alzheimer’s, not admiration. Being old means loneliness among strangers in a nursing home, not dying in the bosom of a loving family.

Young people know that the planet is in serious trouble. They get the messages of doom constantly, mainlined right into their brains from advertising, movies, TV, the Internet, video games, and music. The messages are not teaching them to be violent, as so many people believe. No. The messages teach our young people that the Earth is going away, and Bruce Willis won’t get here in time to save us. Why would a kid worry about safer sex in a world where he—or she—feels a sharp personal certainty about being cannon fodder for the Apocalypse? If anything confirmed this for them, it was seeing the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11.

Therefore, when young people ignore our dire warnings about sexually transmitted disease, they’re doing it in a vast context, the size and power of which we’re totally underestimating. We’re telling them, “AIDS can kill you...you know that, don’t you?” And they’re smiling back at us beatifically and saying, “Yes, we know. And we don’t care.”

In the GLBT world, the older GLBTs grumble, “We were the generation who didn’t know about AIDS. We had to learn the hard way by seeing our friends die. But this new generation...they know that they can die of AIDS. Why don’t they want to live?”
Well, the gay young people who aren’t practicing safer sex don’t see any point in trying to live that long. They already “know” they won’t live past twenty or twenty-five. They don’t even have to commit suicide, though some of them do. They know that death will surprise them some morning, on the way to school, or at night after a club or rave. They’ll be gay-bashed, or shot in a drive-by, or hit by a terrorist bomb, or drowned in a tidal wave when an asteroid hits Earth.

Indeed, our society and our government have done little to convince these young GLBT people that life is worth living. After all, the U.S.A. still insists that gay people can’t marry or serve their country openly. In most states, gay people can’t adopt children or get benefits. Many schools still declare open season on GLBT students by refusing to protect them from harassment or physical harm. Indeed, religious righters are working hard to repeal every last shred of civil protection that gays won over fifty years. Is it any wonder that many gay kids feel they’re dead meat? Why should they care about their lives when society tells them their lives aren’t worth a nickel?

As for the GLBT world, it is equally guilty—it has done little to convince young people that there’s life after twenty-five. Gay media that run editorials lamenting the rise in unsafe sex are the same media that glamorize being young. As a writer who talks to young people, I’m now meeting the twenty-five-year-old males who have computed the message and try to look fifteen. They shave three times a day so their chins look pre-pubescent. They stay away from the gym so they can keep that flat-chested young-boy look. They don’t want to be men. Past twenty-five, even twenty-eight, they’re still trying to look and act like teenage boys. It’s Peter Pan of post-2001.

One young man of twenty-eight whom I’ve known for years, who is incredibly bright and talented, had an incredibly jarring wake-up that he survived. He now works in HIV-prevention programs. And he’s having his own moment of truth.

“The kids aren’t listening,” he told me, brokenhearted. “The soft ads with the cute, little healthy penises aren’t working. The hard ads that show dying guys aren’t working either. No matter what you say, or how you say it, the kids hit the remote.”

With America in a get-tough-on-kids mood, I can guess what’s coming next. State “safer sex” laws will be enforced with a rigor worthy of fighting terrorism. The South Dakota epic of jailing an HIV-positive college basketball player named Nikko Briteramos will be repeated with other kids in other states. The philosophy is, “If they insist on having unsafe sex, we’ll put them in shackles.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that safer sex is a lost cause or a waste of time. Sexual health is definitely worth having. But we won’t achieve it by punishing kids for doing things we make attractive to them. America’s political and religious leaders, our media leaders—and yes, many GLBT leaders too—have failed to see what messages our young people are really listening to. When the current fad for punishing kids has run itself out, we will have the social equivalent of a successful carpet-bombing campaign and a lost war. We will have a lot of kids behind bars for a long time. Their bodies will be in custody, but we will have lost their emotions and minds and spirits, not to mention their trust and respect for us. Most important, we will lose the chance to be there for them, as we always said we wanted to be.

There has to be a better strategy for prevention campaigns. Figuring out what it could be would require a whole other article. But meanwhile we shouldn’t be telling kids not to put beans up their nose.

Patricia Nell Warren writes about young people in the bestselling novel Billy’s Boy. Her editorials are archived at patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.

Copyright © 2003 Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.