Dear Editor,

I read with great dismay Nicole’s review of the Recent movie Angels in America.

I watched this movie several times in the last week and find it a chilling reminder of what the 80’s was like.

I was early in my practice of medicine in the 80’s and remember how frightening it was.

I think this is an important film for your younger readers to read and remember how deadly this disease can still be.

Yes, there were bad role models but they were honest.

Many gay men are closeted but still part of our community.

Many lovers split over this diagnosis, still.

I have patients who are left over breast cancer or any number of diagnoses.

The movie is not outdated, Nicole is.

Gay men in there 20’s need to be graphically reminded of how horrible a time this was and how dangerous unsafe sex was and is.

I fear Nicole was too busy serviceing sailors in the 80’s to remember how devastating a diagnosis this was back then.

Your paper could be so much more of a service to all of our community, even the people Nicole disdains like closeted men who are self hating without printing Nicole’s dribble week after week.

I was closeted for a long time and do not judge anyone who still is.

I often read Nicole’s column to see what lows he will stoop to since his recent rampage against David Blair, but will not any longer.

This was a great and moving movie and should be mandatory watching in Gay 101.

I did notice on page 18 that Nicole celebrated his 65th birthday recently, so maybe alzheimers is setting in.

You need to retire this embarrassing columnist or lose many more readers who know there is more to the gay and lesbian community than that which is printed and pictured in his column.

Dennis E Mayer M.D

San Diego

Dear Editor:

Your article on “dirty old men” was bitter, confused, under-informed and perhaps reflective of your own unresolved issues regarding age and youth. It was also insulting to the intelligence and wisdom of all young people and older men. You try to make the point that a relationship with a wide difference in years is damaging to the younger man even if they are in their 20s, while offering no supporting evidence. And you also blur the boundaries between pedophilia, and older men who have relationships with younger legal age men.

The thing that seems to be glaringly missing from your article is the idea that younger people and older people do fall in love. Your tone is remarkably cynical and jaded...you seem to believe that any older men who falls in love with a legal aged young man is a fool, and that legal aged young men only see older men as cash dispensers.

Christopher Isherwood met his lover of 32 years when Chris was 48, and Don was 18. From all accounts, they had a great relationship.

Although I have always been attracted to men my own age (I am now 50), I have known countless successful age-variant couples (gay and straight). My sister, at 21, married a man nearly twice her age for life.

The world is full of age-variant relationships in which one person in the couple was in their early twenties when the relationship began. Nowhere in your article did you mention that there are age-variant relationships based on love. Age-variant relationships have their own issues related to age differences, but your callous description of them as some sort of symbiotic abuse/exploitation is doing many people a great disservice, and perhaps only reflective of circumstances in your own life.

Perhaps in your world, young men are stupid cash extractors and older men are stupid youth vampires...but before you state what you see in your small world as a general fact, you should look around to see if the rest of the world works like your world does. Love is still very much alive in many parts of the world...older and younger people do fall in love.

Jeff Miller

San Diego

Dear Editor:

Once again we are faced with an issue that instead of being for ALL of the community is now a wedge issue. OK, many maturemen like youngermen, BUT, it seems that this, according to the editorial, NEVER happens or is a problem in the Lesbian community!!! AMAZING!!

NOT all Intergenerational relationships are based on the editor’s simple math. There ARE men, and I am sure women who just prefer to be with partners of different age mixes. I have seen lesbian couples that OBVIOUSLY are intergenerational, so does this mean they are EXCLUDED from the Editor’s wrath and distain?

I agree FULLY that ages below majority or situations where the relationship is based on control DUE to the age differential are morally indefenseable, BUT lets remember that we ARE in a free nation and should a couple prefer the age difference that the EDITOR has ruled improper, then the editor should accept that his/her opinion is NOT absolute and that ALL editorials MUST be even handed, do not bash the Gay men in this world while ignoring identical activity by the REST of our community.

The GLBT/LGBT whatever community has MORE in common then this article reflects. Lets bring this community together and not use this forum to rip it apart.

Philip m Katcher

San Diego

Dear Editor:

Closing the AIDS Waiver program is Union Busting. The Board of Supervisors is using the budget crisis to even further and permanently lower the quality of health and social social services in the county.

Joe Mortz

San Diego

Dear Editor:

In your editorial concerning sexual relationships between gay “youth” and older gay men, you wrote, “...there is a difference between getting involved with another adult who happens to be many years younger than you are, and getting involved with someone who may be legal, but is still wet behind the ears...”

I take it from this and similar comments that you believe that eighteen years old is not old enough to be considered an adult for purposes of sexual and emotional consent to an intimate relationship with another adult of whatever age. I find this belief, expressed in a supposedly progressive gay publication, more than a little bit odd, considering that the laws of consent in this country are — if anything — conservative. In Canada, I understand that the age of consent for both gay and straight sex is fourteen, and that a range of from fourteen to sixteen is the norm in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, France and Germany. I understand that sixteen is the age of consent in England, and that gays there have fought long and hard to end a discriminatory law that made the age of consent sixteen for straights but eighteen for gays.

I should think that instead of scolding older gay men who want to have sex with those who are of legal age although young (over eighteen but under twenty-five), you would be recommending that we join those European countries whose attitudes about sex are, by most accounts, much healthier than our own and lower the age of legal consent.

Can we not at least resist going in the other direction and effectively raising the age of consent by condemning those who dare to date twenty-year olds when they themselves are approaching forty? Can we not at least agree that people are no longer children by the time they are eighteen years old? It is true that they have a lot to experience and learn, but so do we all up until the day we die. At age eighteen I was expected to move out of my parents’ house and work or go to college. I was also entered into the lottery for Vietnam. I knew most of what I know now about sex, and was sexually experienced. To say that an older adult should have avoided me seems to me to be nothing more than ageism (I was perfectly capable of saying “No.”) While it is true that most people want to go out with others around their own age, not all do, and young people can be as interested in older people as older are interested in younger. In the final analysis, we are all individuals, we are all unique in many ways, and relationships are equally individual and unique.

As for older-younger relationships based on mutual exploitation (one getting money, the other sex), why should we in the gay community condemn something that people accept as a matter of course in the straight community — chasing after rich husbands or sexy young things? Should we feel sorry for trophy wives in La Jolla because they are being “used”?

Let’s not turn the gay movement, which started as a movement for sexual liberation, into a movement that accomplishes the sexually repressed society that it was originally intended to overthrow!

Andrew Towne

San Diego