User:Bill Weintraub

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Bill Weintraub is the gay activist and author who coined the term Frot and who created the Frot Movement.

Bill was born in 1948. A Gay Liberationist, in 1975 he co-founded the Cambridge (MA) Gay Political Caucus; in 1976 served as gay liaison to the Committee to Elect Saundra Graham; in 1977 co-founded Boston Advocates for Human Rights (a support group for gays under attack by Anita Bryant in Dade County, Florida); from 1979 to 1984 was Metropolitan New York Tri-State Coordinator of Field Associates for Gay Rights National Lobby; and from 1983 to 1985 was a founding board member of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project.

In 1982 Bill met and became the lover of gay journalist Brett Averill.

After Brett's AIDS diagnosis in 1988, Bill and Brett moved to San Francisco, where Bill was active in the "Yes on S" campaign to pass domestic partnership legislation; and studied Taoist Erotic Massage with Joe Kramer at Joe's Body Electric School.

Following Brett's death in 1995, Bill started writing his and his late lover's life histories.

It was during this process that Bill begin to address the question of sexual conformity in the gay male community and the role that conformity had played in the ongoing epidemic.

Bill published his first critique of what he called "the cultural tyranny of anal sex" in 1999, in a piece in which he also extolled the virtues of penile-penile frottage.

Following very positive reader response to that piece, Bill coined the term Frot and decided to undertake a national campaign to legitimize and popularize Frot and weaken what he terms "the deathgrip of anal penetration on the lives of men who have sex with men."

Bill's work draws, among other sources, on Tom Kuhn's classic and very influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, which introduced the concepts of dominant paradigm and paradigm shift.

Bill refers to the primacy of anal penetration among gay men today as a "dominant paradigm or culture of anal penetration" -- analism -- and has said that there will inevitably be a paradigm shift.

Similarly, Bill's analysis of the role of anal, promiscuity, and ideology in the causation of the HIV epidemic among "men who have sex with men" parallels that of Gabriel Rotello's classic 1997 study of AIDS epidemiology, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men.

[edit] Published Articles

These are the articles Bill has published since 1999 on the question of Frot and anal, most of which are still online in their original settings:

Hyacinthine Love, or, Some Thoughts on Cock-rubbing and the Cultural Tyranny of Butt-fucking (Published in White Crane Journal's winter 1999-2000 issue.)

Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution (Published November 6 2000 on GayToday);

Interview: Cockrub Warrior Bill Weintraub -- with gay rights pioneer Jack Nichols (Published December 4 2000 on GayToday);

Does Sex Have to be Anal to be Gay? (Published January 26 2002 on 365Gay.com under the title "Is Gay Sex Trying Too Hard to be Straight?" -- no longer on 365gay site);