Item #5831 SEX Panic !
SEX Panic !

SEX Panic !

[New York]: Sex Panic! ca. 1997. Size XL. Very good. Item #5831

Shirt for Sex Panic!, a direct action political organization founded by HIV-positive gay men to challenge the emergent gay neoconservative, anti-sex right and the concomitant crackdown on gay venues in New York by disgraced former mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Sex Panic! formed during an inflection point of gay political history: the 1995 release of protease inhibitors, which became the foundation for the first successful AIDS treatments, ushering in a new era of the AIDS epidemic. In this context, gay neoconservatives like Andrew Sulliven fought to reorient the gay rights movement around liberal demands for marriage and open service in the military, abetted by other prominent gay activists like Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, who argued that the sex-positive culture of pre-AIDS gay life had to be destroyed so that gay people could gain mainstream acceptance. Sex Panic! publicly challenged the emerging anti-sex gays, who would ultimately triumph in an alignment with Rudy Giuliani, systematically destroyed any and all sites of cross-class sexual contact and cruising.

An attractive garment from the sex-positive and radical current of late-90s gay activism.

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