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Please remember the topic is whether or not there is an upsurge in cases of HIV, what is causing the upsurge, and whether or not it will impact the heterosexual community. While a little veering off topic as part of the discussion will happen, posts where the primary focus is not on the actual topic will be deleted.
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I would think promoting gay marriage and monogamy would be a positive step toward limiting new HIV infections. I'm gay and married and do not have HIV. I've been in a monogamous relationship for over 18 years with someone who doesn't have HIV either. No chance for spreading a disease.
And really, it isn't the "gay community" we're talking about. It's men period. If heterosexual women felt the same way about sex as heterosexual men, there would be a few billion more people on the planet and more heterosexual STD spreading. But I agree that young gay men today need to step up and get a clue about HIV. From what I've heard, even taking the medications, lifespans are shorter and there are side effects. Not to mention the expense involved.
If you think gay men are any more reliable in the fidelity department than their straight counterparts, I would beg to differ.
According to a recent study/article in Atlantic magazine a claim was made that SSM men are supposedly better at fidelity, but didn't read the article and or do not know the methodology behind.
What one does know is that no small number of SSM one knows are on Grinder or similar Apps, the Internet and so forth taking their pleasures outside the marital bed. Andrew Sullivan one of the more famous gay activists/author etc... admitted years ago IIRC he and his husband have an "open marriage".
"The book Sex in America: A Definitive Survey, by authors Michael, Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata, cites a study of homosexual male couples conducted by gay researchers. The couples who participated had been together between 1 and 37 years. Findings were as follows:
100% (all) of the couples experienced infidelity in their relationship within the first 5 years.
Couples who remained together past the 10-year mark were able to do so only by accepting the painful reality of infidelity in their relationship
More than 85 percent of the couples reported that their greatest relationship problems center on issues related to outside relationships
Take away message is that regardless of whom or whatever one is married or involved in a long term relationship with you have to do you first. For centuries "nice" wives were infected with all sorts of STD from their husbands. From royalty down to peasants it didn't matter. HIV is just another brick in the wall so to speak. This is why it is important to know one's status at all times. If you are HIV- before marriage and become aware and or even think your spouse is stepping out, it is time for a sit down.
Blaming homosexual behavior for heterosexual cases of HIV? That is one of the lamest and most uninformed accusations I've ever read on this forum.
How about if I blame heterosexual behavior for the million or so fetuses that are aborted every year in the US alone? I think I can be pretty certain about that one.
If you want to be 100% sure you don't get HIV or any other sexually-transmitted diseases, then don't have sex with anybody.
This is the title of the thread: 33 Years Ago, Gay Behavior Resulted In An HIV/AIDS Explosion; It's Exploding Again. Will Heterosexuals Again Suffer?
My reply is this. As a straight person, I hope, pray and wish that any kind of HIV/AIDs explosion does not happen. I work with many gay people, mostly men. They are my friends. They have the same emotions and dreams of straight people..they want love, acceptance and happiness. How anyone could ever want them to have less than that is beyond me.
I urge everyone...straight or gay...to practice safe sex if they are in casual relationships...or if they have reason to question their partner's fidelity. AIDS still kills.
"As a straight person, I hope, pray and wish that any kind of HIV/AIDs explosion does not happen. I work with many gay people, mostly men. They are my friends. They have the same emotions and dreams of straight people..they want love, acceptance and happiness. "
Blaming homosexual behavior for heterosexual cases of HIV? That is one of the lamest and most uninformed accusations I've ever read on this forum.
How about if I blame heterosexual behavior for the million or so fetuses that are aborted every year in the US alone? I think I can be pretty certain about that one.
If you want to be 100% sure you don't get HIV or any other sexually-transmitted diseases, then don't have sex with anybody.
Unreal.
You could say Bi-men who are married to women who have sex with infected men (whether they are straight, gay or Bi) are responsible for the jump.
It is important when discussing HIV to distinguish as the CDC and others do behavior from various societal labels.
In the USA and indeed all over the world there are men who have sex with men that in no way consider themselves "gay" or even "homosexual". You find this not only in African cultures but Latin and even some Eastern European as well.
Early in the HIV/AIDs crisis outreach workers, researchers and others soon learned that with certain segments of a male populations not to ask if they engaged in "homosexual" or "gay" behavior but did they have relations with men. Many would deny the first two but answer positive to the latter if it applied to them.
Know we are supposed to be living in modern times with "marriage equality" and all but there are still many, many places where to be gay carries a stigma. Thus men will have sex with other men but also marry and or continue relations with women either out of desire and or to *maintain* some sort of façade of heterosexuality. This is where the problems can start.
On top of all this you have men who sleep with men for economic reasons. From porn to prostitution there is again no small number of men who see themselves as straight (some even with wives and children) that go with men to earn their daily bread. You'd be surprised how many of those gorgeous men found in the vast amounts of gay porn that come out of Eastern Europe are "straight", again some are married with children. Again no small number are also "gay for pay" in that they escort as well.
If you couple all the above with high or even moderate levels of intravenous drug use a clearer picture of how HIV spreads within certain populations becomes clearer.
Again sex with condoms was never popular with men straight or gay. HIV/AIDS brought them back to the forefront during the 1980's less as a method of birth control (something gay men don't have to worry about) but as a means of protection against the virus. But barely out of the 1980's and certainly in the 1990's the spell wore off. Enter "barebacking".
By the middle of the 1990's or so you'd hear the term "barebacking" in hushed tones in gay circles. Soon you see the words in print in classified "hook-up" adverts and then as AOL chat and the Internet spread simply "BB". Long story short barely ten years after one of the most horrible plagues wiped out generations of gay men you had others actively seeking to participate in the one known means of transmission.
Back in the day you saw adverts all over the place for condoms. Trojans had television and print media using the slogan "Trojans... use one or get none.." This campaign was aimed at young straight adults but IIRC some version appeared in gay media, but the message was clear. Today you rarely hear about condom use. Worse when it comes to gay porn "BB" versions are in higher demand than those not.
My first problem with the Original Post is the reference to "The Gay Community", as if it were some monolithic, contiguous group of people. It is NOT.
Moderator cut: Off topic
Oh, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah! FROM those Wrestlers/broke NFL stars with bad knees/Mr. Universe types, my friends learned all the techniques of getting-off without getting infected - with ANYTHING. And that sort of knowledge was spreading like wildfire throughout the Gay Mainstream (although possibly not among the "least fortunate and less white" among the "Gay Community" as a whole - assuming there is such a thing). Gay Sex - at least among 'mainstream' whites and Asians - was completely reinvented with the disease in mind.
This Safe Sex Mania was HORRIBLE news to the Tobacco Industry, the makers of Booze, the Drug Cartels, and the PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY. As someone who profits from Pharmaceuticals, I can tell you that we do not want you to avoid getting diseases. If I were on the board of a company making an AIDS drug, I would (secretly) be horrified to hear that Gay men were inventing alternate techniques for interaction, which would make my expensive cures irrelevant.
Likewise, Big Tobacco was incensed to learn that one of its last remaining markets was drying-up, because smoking was seen as a 'co-factor' in AIDS susceptibility. Vodka-sellers were not amused by the notion that alcohol was being avoided as a 'co-factor'. Same with the powers behind illicit drugs. Beginning in the mid-Eighties, Gay men (the much-reviled high-achieving white/Asian 'Mainstream', anyway) were becoming pure as the driven snow (absolute paragons of health and fitness, in fact), and a lot of powerful interests were not pleased with the trend. Gays, in fact were leading the entire American Populace toward hyper-healthy ways of living. It was not good for business.
Big Tobacco was already hating white Americans, and scheming to replace them with colors theoretically more apt to smoke. Same with the Drug Cartels, and Big Pharma. But in the meantime, what to do?
Why not create a whole bunch of "Gay" magazines, to push booze, drugs, cigs, and unsafe sex?!!! "We'll use Bandwagon Effect to get those healthy middle class Gays back on the Unhealthy Lifestyles Bandwagon! Yeah! We'll need some sort of "urgent issue".... Hmmmm... AIDS is irrelevant, because they've been practicing safe sex for two solid decades. Homophobia has largely been conquered (until we can import some homophobes). Ok... what can we make into an issue? Oh! Gay Marriage! We'll splash Gay Marriage across the covers, to sell the magazines that will really exist, to push unhealthy lifestyles!"
One year later...
You walk into Books-a-Million, and the back wall, the wall where school principals and preachers from out in the boonies go for their super-softcore-porn, when they're up in the State Capital on business - well- that back wall suddenly has a wealth of snazzy new, glitzy-but-hastily-contrived "Gay" magazines, basically glorifying the wonderfulness of "barebacking", booze, cigs, and drugs! "Everybody's Doing It!!!" is the cumulative implicit message.
Mainstream Media is loathe to share this information, but the portion of the "Gay Community" who actually fell for the media-engineered "Return to Unhealthy Living" are not the White/Asian 'Mainstream' Gays. I've asked a few people whose business it is to know, and they say that the increase in unhealthy practices closely follows the decrease in whites as a percentage of the Gay Population.
The Face of Aids in America used to be white and middle class (if Big Media was painting an accurate picture). Today's infected group(s) have little or nothing in common with yesterday's victims. The old demographic did learn their lesson. And they have not forgotten that lesson. If there is really a new outbreak, it is not among the sort of people who were stricken in the Seventies and Eighties.
So, if you're going to accuse any groups, you should specify along racial lines - which would be racist and unwise. The various groups within the evanescent (and possibly even nonexistent) "Gay Community" are quite distinct from one another. Isolation and alienation are things with which Gay men learn to deal in elementary grades. So naturally, when groups of Gay men are analyzed, their various "Communities" are quite distinct from each other. You cannot blame Gays-as-a-whole, because there is no Gays-as-a-whole.
It's a sexual orientation, not an organization.
Oh, and when you get Shingles (it seems to happen to all of us, at some point, now), or if you rush for the Vitamin C when you get a cold, you should possibly reflect upon all the research that was done into viruses - particularly retroviruses - because of the AIDS Epidemic. Today, if you get Shingles, you can go and get a prescription to a drug developed as a weapon against AIDS. Previously, you would have suffered for years. Likewise, the knowledge of fighting viral infections with lifestyle changes, diet, and antioxidants, spread outward from Gay men who were trying anything and everything to survive the AIDS epidemic, in the Eighties. Some of the strategies they tried worked, and we all benefit from those advances in knowledge.
Last edited by Oldhag1; 07-15-2014 at 08:47 PM..
Reason: Please stay on topic.
But are we getting actual HIV *tests* for African diagnoses, or are they just calling any disease that involves wasting away "AIDS", even if it is something else? Calling Cholera, Typhus, Ebola, "Sleeping Sickness", and other diseases that plague poor Africans "AIDS" doesn't help track and fight HIV.
In 1985, the World Health Organization called a meeting in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, to define African AIDS. The meeting was presided over by CDC official Joseph McCormick. He wrote about it in his book “Level 4 Virus hunters of the CDC,” saying, “If I could get everyone at the WHO meeting in Bangui to agree on a single, simple definition of what an AIDS case was in Africa, then, imperfect as the definition might be, we could actually start counting the cases…” The result was that African AIDS would be defined by physical symptoms: fever, diarrhea, weight loss and coughing or itching. (“AIDS in Africa: an epidemiological paradigm.” Science, 1986).
In 1985, there was no laboratory test to diagnose AIDS in a patient. At that point, they didn't know what caused the wasting and other symptoms associated with what we know as AIDS.
That is not true now. It's now known that a retrovirus ( Human Immunodeficiency Virus-HIV) causes the symptoms of AIDS, this virus has a propensity towards the CD4+ lymphocytes ( a type of white cell involved in the immune process), and towards neural tissue as well. And there are specific tests used to diagnose HIV infections in those who have contracted this virus. These tests are widely available and accurate. In fact the US and other countries have dumped millions of dollars on research, testing and treatment of AIDS patients in Africa, and there is no reason to misdiagnose another condition, even with signs and symptoms similar to AIDS.
Or maybe if AIDS research funding had been made available in the years before a famous gay actor friend of a former actor President died, they would have had an earlier start on identification of the virus and how it was transmitted.
You will recall, I'm sure, that the only two people researching AIDS at the CDC had to buy a microscope with their own money because they were turned down for funding to research a disease that was mostly only killing gay people. Oh, and heroin addicts.
*Killing all the right people*
That was a quote from a self righteous character on Designing Women who took exception with Julia Sugarbaker and her views on HIV/AIDs. JS saw HIV/AIDS for what it was, a plague spreading among human beings. The character far as she was concerned held the (then too widely held) view that HIV/AIDs was some sort of nasty woman's or man's disease that decent persons did not contract. As such it was God's vengeance and the disease was affecting those chosen because of their immoral lives.
One politician recently put it another way; if HIV/AIDS had affected White/European straight community in the USA first there would have been a vastly different response on all levels was his reasoning.
This episode of DW is from back in the 1980's and was ground breaking for taking on what was then a very hot button issue. However the attitude by one character existed then and still exists. Gays are immoral persons and are getting what is coming to them if/when they contact HIV.
Is gay sex without a condom more risky than straight sex without a condom?
If the gay community in its entirety is not more irresponsible than striaght people, then how do you explain what was noted in the article; i.e., that the younger gay group "is 19 times more likely than the general population to be infected by HIV, Hirnschall said?"
My ex-wife has worked 37 years in clinical laboratory conditions, most in the field of bacteriolgy. It has n[been a well known fact with that profession for many years that the pores in latex condoms are so incredibly bigger that a virus that to pass through those pore it as if a virus passing through were a lemon as in passing through a basketball hoop.
One thing that contribute to the spread in the 70s and early 80s was the attitude that "It can'y happen to me I am not in NY, San Francisco Chicago. The other was the fact there was an element that significantly for all practical purposes glorified their own promiscuous behavior and thereby
helped to perpetuate this same behavior.
When the disease had been identified it was too late for a much greater number of people that would have been otherwise without this element of promiscuous licentiousness. What followed was normal disease vectoring based on bisexual behavior taking it across lines also based on the heterosexual males or bisexual males for the most part to female heterosexuals and the in some case to other males depending on the frequency of contact between regular partners after one had become infected. :Political correctness and not encouraging more responsible behavior among those prone to the promiscuous behavior heightened the threat.
the dependence on condoms that were and are not reliable unless things have changed, due to the natural pores in latex. Most medical people know this fact.
Prior to GRIDS ( the fear of PC police prevented more action for prevention while that name was used to a limited degree briefly) HIV or AIDS hepatitis WAS Aids of it's day in the 70s and even 60s with similar infection parameters and vectors. Then as now many activists blame the Gov't for no more proactive efforts to combat the spread and this + the promiscuity hastened the spread.
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