Tony Valenzuela Was Canceled in the '90s for Saying He Loved Bareback Sex. It Hurts Him to This Day.

Now a nonprofit head and hot L.A. daddy at 56, he speaks for the first time about his long road back to the queer community after being shunned merely for being honest about his desires.

Photos courtesy of Tony unless otherwise noted.

Happy Sunday, Caftaners! Can you believe what we are living through? I'll start this post by noting that I've started an informal protest rapid-response group for NYC folks, its purpose being partly to alert folks to larger marches and protests, so if you'd like to be a part of it, email me at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com and let me know. One protest/march we're looking to attend together is Indivisible's Stop The Cuts! on Saturday March 15 at Foley Square.

If you don't live in NYC, I hope you're a part of some kind of protest/action group or pod yourself! In fact, if you are, send me photos of your group actions and I'll try to include them up here at the top of my Caftan posts.

Now for my usual annoying pitch: I know the activism ahead of me is going to cut into my ability to take paid gigs. So I’m counting on Caftan more than ever to bring in some income for me—so please, if you’ve consistently liked it up to this time, consider subscribing at $5/month. I can’t tell you how much it all adds up. And for those of you who already do—for the umpteenth time as well, THANK YOU! <3

Now for the good stuff: Have you heard of Tony Valenzuela? In the nineties, he was a young, hot, smart, politically passionate budding queer activist in San Diego (where he basically grew up) and then L.A.

Here he is (center) in 1994 with activists including the late Urvashi Vaid (above him to the right in the black sweater)

He was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 and then, at a 1997 LGBTQ conference called Creating Change—at a time when even talking or fantasizing about bareback sex was almost as frowned upon as having it—Tony dared to give a speech that went, in part: “The level of erotic charge and intimacy I feel when a man comes inside me is transformational, especially in a climate which so completely disregards its importance.”

It didn't matter that he also added: “When I talk about having unprotected sex, I am speaking for myself, and not as a proponent of condomless sex for all." Or the fact that he was talking about being someone with HIV who only had bareback sex while bottoming, at a time when, even then, it was fairly well understood that tops were at low risk for HIV transmission even if they used a condom. Or the fact that, often, he was having sex with other guys with HIV, at a time when so-called "serosorting" (poz guys having sex with poz guys and neg guys having sex with neg guys) was already seen as a reasonable safe-sex practice.

In Tony's account, he was so badly ostracized for his honesty that it put him into the LGBTQ activist wilderness for years, well into the 2000s. At some point, the queer writers group Lambda Literary (for which I have led a fiction workshop at their 2019 emerging writers retreat) let him low-profile volunteer there—and then, in a remarkable rebuilding of one's career, he worked his way up until he became the group's executive director in 2009, all the way until 2018, at which point he became head of the Foundation for the AIDS Memorial in West Hollywood, after which he became (and remains) the head of One Institute, whose centerpiece is the remarkable collection of 20th century LGBTQ archives [personal and public letters, photos, magazines and more] that lives at the University of Southern California.

Some of you may remember when Tony, deciding to give what he calls a big (and, in my opinion, brilliantly subversive) "fuck you" to all those who'd canceled him, appeared on the cover of Poz magazine in 1999 shirtless astride an actual horse (bareback...get it?) …

…and then inside fully naked (no frontal) alongside the selfsame horse.

When I worked at Poz in the early 2000s, I always found that cover insanely sexy. (It's from a time when Poz was much more overtly a magazine mainly for gay men and not for the entire HIV community, as it is today.)

Today, of course, due partly to our understanding that people with HIV on meds cannot transmit the virus ("Undetectable = Untransmittable," or simply "U=U"), but mainly due to the PrEP revolution, barebacking is back like it's the 1970s all over again. It can be hard for people, perhaps especially younger gays, to realize that only about 30 years ago, publicly saying that you not only had but merely liked bareback sex could be seen as a betrayal of your entire community. But that's what it was like back then.

So let's go back in time with Tony to that moment, but let's also hear about how his pre-social-media-era cancellation affected him, and what he's done with his life since then. I found him to be a uniquely earnest interview—someone who seems almost incapable of being disingenuous, which perhaps is the key to understanding how he became the poster boy, back then, for an entirely honest expression of sexual desire that was verboten at the time.

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Hi, Tony. Thanks for doing a Caftan chat today. Can you start by telling us about your life today and what a typical day is like?

Sure. I live in the West Adams neighborhood of L.A., which is down by USC. I and my husband Rob Ferrante, who works in digital marketing and with whom I've been for more than 20 years, live in a 1912 Craftsman bungalow.

Tony and Rob.

We have five cats Rob rescued from the street—Frankie, Loki, Rory, Percy and Sunny. Sasha just passed away six months ago.

So I usually get up about 7 a.m. at the latest. I have coffee and look at emails. Then, even though we have a hybrid work set up at One Institute, I go in every day to our office in Hollywood on Sunset. Right now we're in the early planning stages for our Circa Queer History festival. We also have a number of K-12 youth programs. And we have our first in-person fundraiser in April. I'm always doing fundraising.

After work I go to Gold's Gym in Hollywood, which is probably 80 percent gay. I've been going and seeing some guys there for the last 25 years. It's very satisfying growing older with a group of guys who may not even be my friends, but we say hello. I feel this sense of comfort that we're all still around. There's also younger queers and some women and trans people and lots of OnlyFans creators.

Then typically, unless I have some work thing at night, I go home and my husband makes dinner because he works from home. He's Italian so there's a lot of chicken marsala, chicken piccata, eggplant parmigiana. Then we'll watch TV. We watched Traitors last night [the reality show hosted by Alan Cumming, whom I interviewed last May] and then I'll be in bed by eleven.

I'm familiar with the incredible history of One Institute, but tell us about it.

In the early fifties, a group of gay guys and some women from the L.A. branch of [the pre-Stonewall "homophile" group] The Mattachine Society wanted to start a magazine, so the formed an organization called One Inc. for the purposes of publishing it, starting in 1953.

It was the first widely distributed queer publication in the country, thousands of subscribers, and it was groundbreaking—essentially a gay lifestyle magazine that had articles about arts and theater, but is probably most famous today for its letters to the editor, because in them you hear the stories of queer people in the closet at that time.

What really took the magazine to the next level was that, in 1954, the postmaster general pulled it from distribution and charged One with obscenity under the Comstock Act. So the One founders to the postmaster general to court. They kept losing the case for four years all the way up to the Supreme Court, which dismissed it on free-speech rights.

Learn more here.

And that allowed for the proliferation of not just queer materials but Playboy to be distributed nationally. And One ended in 1967, the same year The Advocate started.

But alongside this, One was collecting an archive of gay materials, which grew over many decades. Now it's the largest queer archive in the world. In 2010, One gifted it to USC. One is largely now an educational organization that does arts events and screenings and K-12 curriculum school programs about queer history.

What are some of the things in the archive?

The papers and materials from important queer organizations like AIDS Project Los Angeles and Lambda Literary. Random collections of photographs left in people's garages as far back as the 1930s. You can take a tour of the archive—the staff will open boxes for you. There's one box of early 20th century vaudeville posters that feature a lot of cross-dressing. One from 1918 reads "My best girl is a fella." And of course stuff from the [pre-Stonewall L.A.] Black Cat protests. The whole archive has more than 4 million pieces.

That is so cool. Is there porn or disco palm cards?

So much porn was donated. The entire collection of Falcon videos is owned by One. I would love, if the archive folks approve, to do an exhibition called "Sex at the Archive."

That would be very cool. Tony, what was your childhood like?

I was born in L.A. to a Mexican father and an Italian mother who grew up in Brooklyn, but from when I was five months old until I was six years old, we moved to Guadalajara and opened an Italian restaurant.

Shots of young Tony. Is the horsey pic a bit of foreshadowing? LOL

Did you see the movie Roma? My childhood was like that, life in a middle- or upper-middle-class Mexican family. We also had a little house on our roof where the housekeepers lived. It was a wonderful, close, loving childhood. But in the mid-seventies, the Mexican president was getting too close to Pinochet and my mother worried that Mexico could become a dictatorship, so we moved to San Diego, where my parents opened three restaurants.

I was very much a momma's boy, a socially uncomfortable introvert. I'm still like that. If I have my executive director hat on, I do that well, but otherwise, honestly, I struggle with social interaction. And as a child I struggled with my weight. I realized I was gay in middle school because I very much lusted after boys and the gym coach. So I looked up the world "homosexual" in my parents' huge dictionary and thought, "Oh, wow, that's me." But I only struggled with it briefly. I was watching Making Love on Showtime in my bedroom and watching Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean make out. I was shaking. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and, being very dramatic, said aloud, "I'm one of them." And after that, there was no turning back. I started college in Santa Barbara and had a terrible homophobic experience there.

What?

My sophomore year, 1987, when I was 19, I had this strange, bigoted roommate—really an oddball. Around that time, I discovered Club San Diego, the gay bathhouse. And I wrote about it, and my fear of AIDS, in my journal. And my roommate found it and made a copy and showed it to everyone in our residence hall. I was the last to find out. A friend, a girl, asked me: "Have you ever been to a bathhouse?" I remember sitting there sinking into the carpet, thinking, "How is it possible that she knows this?" And then she told me about the journal.

And this begins my activist career, because I went to my resident advisor and told them about it and said, "I want you to call a hall meeting so I can give my side of the story." So they did. It was in the lounge and so many people came—it was standing room only. So I stood up and told them all, "I've felt different my whole life, and I recently realized I'm gay, and I'm not ashamed of it."