When you warn against being a huge fucking slut, I know that I agree but I don’t know if I’m being a huge fucking slut. I’ve had anal sex (with protection!) on the first date, and I’ve had sex with guys without quite remembering their names. But my lifetime sex partner count is not that high (20!), even if I am a youngish gay guy who can’t go on-line without some dude asking me if I “bb” (bareback!). Help me, Dan! How do I know when I’m being a slut?
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Still, there is an upside for gay groups and AIDS organizations in the media’s growing obsession with the bug-chasing story: it draws attention away from a potentially more damaging story. That story? While only a tiny percentage of the roughly 17,000 new HIV infections in gay and bi men every year can be attributed to active bug chasing (less than 1 percent according to a study conducted by the UCSF AIDS Health Project), that means the other 99 percent can be attributed to–let me put this as nicely as I possibly can–gay male stupidity, recklessness, naivete, and bad luck. And isn’t that a scandal in and of itself?
Maybe not. On his Web site last week, Andrew Sullivan–the conservative commentator, superstar Web logger, and HIV-positive gay man–contemplated the difficulties of lowering HIV transmission rates. “Let’s say that science found treatments that reduced the rate of fatality from lung cancer due to smoking by, say, 80 percent,” Sullivan wrote. “What would you predict would happen?” More people would risk smoking, of course, just as more people today are willing to risk HIV infection. “[Perhaps] we have to get used to a certain level of HIV infection the way we have become used to herpes, and every other sexually transmitted disease which has affected mankind, gay and straight, for millennia?”
Why is the media so wrathful when it comes to gay men who bareback? Straight people do it all the time!
