Joe knew these were not gay issues but male issues. The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine, right down to the cold, hard stares of the bathhouse attendants. Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say “no”—no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu.
