Timeline is a regular feature in each issue looking back to events and milestones that have helped us evolve into the community we are today.

Early February, 1989

“It’s Saturday night—lights are dimmed, empty dinner plates cover the dining room table. The hour is late, your ride home is over thirty-minutes away. Sitting across from you is the woman of your fantasies, and you have been talking for hours and feel as if you have known her all your life. Lights are dim and the next thing you know it’s Sunday morning and across from you in bed is a woman you hardly know at all. Where do you start?”

Moreover, what do you say? As it was last century, one-night stands with strangers is still commonplace in both the gay and lesbian communities. The “dance” is always thrilling and widely exciting. A beautiful woman glances your way, casually touches you as she gets up from the chair she may be sitting in. “A cup of coffee,” you both know, translates into the reality of sex at either your place or hers. Unfortunately, in whatever throes of passion there may be, it’s unlikely that either women engages in analytical thinking.  Questions like “where do you like to be touched? and “may I put my arm around you” take the place of more important questions such as, “exactly how many previous partners have you had?” and “Have you had an AIDS test?”

During the week of Feb. 12, 1989, the Reader’s Feast in Hartford held a four-woman panel which explored lesbian lives and their sexual practices during the AIDS era. Having been believed to affect only gay men, AIDS let itself be known that the female anatomy bore no relevance. For women, the rules of sex suddenly began to change. The panel encouraged women to ask some very basic questions, such as what do women know about AIDS? and what do women need to know about their sexual practices that put them at risk for AIDS when their partners are other women?

The panel was a second in a series of workshops on women’s health issues sponsored by the Hartford Gay and Lesbian Health Collective.

Since AIDS is still very much a reality to every single individual, and since one-night stands show no signs of becoming an archaic thing of the past, are questions like “what do you like? and “may I put my arm around you”— uttered for only a single moment in time— worth the potential risk of a deadly aftermath?

Tags: 2010, 37-4, LATE FEBRUARY