There's a new HIV Vaccine being tested, developed at Harvard,

Which, they cautiously (scarcely dare say they) hope, will bring us back guilt-free, uninhibited sex with strangers, without   fatal sexually transmitted diseases, within a year.  The way it was until 1979, when there was (or while we thought there was) no AIDS, and we were winning.

So, you may well ask, what kept me (and keeps me) from being infected with HIV?  The first answer is, of course, Luck.  The second answer is a bit more complicated, and has to do with my being born with Venus in Detriment in Virgo, and with my having acquired, early on, a prudent ethical and esthetic philosophy, skeptical, rational and hygienic, with deep reading in history and with what might be seen objectively perhaps as a fanatical reliance on the faculty of intuition.  I had a good time--but not too good a time.  The third answer, of course, is old age, and ceasing to have sex when I turned 50 and it was no longer appropriate.

In any event, hearing the bated breath, viewing the constipated demeanor, of those oh so reluctantly announcing the end of the Great Plague, it does in fact seem likely that the generation born within the last  ten years will enjoy something approaching the sexual freedom known to us who were young in the sixties and seventies  of the last century.  Good on 'em.  May they make as good use of it as we did. ¿You doubt? Well (by opposing the War in Vietnam), we ended military conscription in peacetime in the United States--no mean feat. We legalized marijuana and homosexuality.  We brought back authentic performance on original instruments,  We defeated the ghastly snobbery of the posh Received Pronunciation with the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare. You wait and see--We will put an end to the corporal punishment of children in the public schools of Red States.  The day may even come when we shall see no actresses in plays written before 1660, their place in the performance of female rôles being taken, as were meet, by boys and young men--even in 'Tis pity she's a Whore.