I thought your first post to this thread was expressing disbelief that heterosexuals contract AIDS through sexual contact. They do (although that homosexuals are a high risk group for the transmission of AIDS is no secret), and I was apparently not the only one to read your post that way. I suggest we chalk this one up to miscommunication. I’m sorry I didn’t read your post the way you intended it, but your post wasn’t terribly clear, and there are a lot of jerks out there who would claim that heterosexuals shouldn’t be concerned about AIDS.
If you read the infection rates, they are growing each year.
What you are seeing in the cumulative rates are the people who are SURVIVING. Thousands of those people are dead every year from opportunistic infections. This does not show a decrease in new infections, but a decrease in those who survive from year to year.
And you can drop the snickering. It isn’t your business how they got infected. It just supports the nasty and narrow views of people who are not infected thinking they are superior to those who are.
And I would say that subscribers to American Legion Magazine have an extremely high incidence of heart disease relative to their percentage of population.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, but raises hand as another gay man who’s never had an STD. And who gets tested regularly. Are you going to count every one of us or what?
BTW, “nasty and narrow”? “Superior”? Where on earth are you getting these? Please re-read my comments carefully…I don’t think any rational reading supports that they were attacking the HIV-positive. It seems that you’re assuming this attack - even looking for it - and that can’t be worth the psychic energy it takes. Peace.
This is factually incorrect. I have made no assertions. Hastur did. He also simultaneously called for someone else to prove an assertion that that person made. So I wonder if Hastur can do the same for himself.
Did you make your comment as an amusing aside? What difference does it make who made the original assertion? Anyone making any assertion, whether original or not, should be prepared to back it up. Especially if this person is himself calling on the “original” asserter to back up the “original” assertion.
Chalk up one more gay man who has never had an STD.
As for hetero boys who think because they have a stistically lower risk of contracting HIV that they need not bothter with condoms, have you heard of genital warts, genital herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis, not to mention a whole raft of other STDs?
Yet another gay man (and with quite a rather liberal sex ethic at that) who has never had an STD. I also get tested regularly for HIV (negative, and plan to stay that way).
I do not believe that gay men get any more or less sex than straight men, but if it makes you jealous to think we do, then feel free; I have never seen any studies to indicate one way or the other which orientation (or, for that matter, which sex) has more or less sex.
As to AIDS, do gay men still constitute the highest number and percentage of patients? Yes. However, according to the CDC, their numbers are levelling off (despite a very small contingent known as “bare backers,” a warped sexual backlash to the safe sex education of the late 80’s and early 90’s), whereas infections among heterosexuals (notably minority women) are rising rapidly - percentage-wise, heterosexuals are at more risk right now. I posted some figures in the thread “Some AIDS facts” after I received some fairly nasty backlash in my “I’m getting laid too much” thread discussing my then-current dating state. (And before someone uses me as a cite for “gay men have more sex,” I am but one man and hardly speak for the average gay man, for better or for worse. And even if you do, I reiterate that I’ve never had an STD and have always and continue to practice safer sex.) You might also want to check out the links in my sig.
So, in closing, I cannot emphasize enough: The epidemic is not over! Wear a condom, play it safe, and get tested, regardless of your sexual orientation!
All very true, but all very treatable. Everything you name has been reduced (especially for men) to the level of an inconvenience - sick for a few days, painful discharge, lumps on the dick - swallow some pills, wait a few days and then on with life. Even herpes, which those of us awake in the 70s remember as the Great Scourge, is easily controlled with Zovirax and its analogues.
Of course I’m not endorsing anything here, and multiple exposures to these nasties (and treatments for them) may well cause immune damage, but the fact remains that for the average young, horny, heterosexual male, the threat of disease just isn’t very strong. The pretense that straight guys are subject to the same risks as women or gay men is simply untenable.
It’s similar to the widely ridiculed one-in-nine breast cancer stastic, which assumed a lifespan of 120 and failed to inform people that the majority of women would die with breast cancer, not from it. It was, in essence, a well-intentioned lie designed to extract sympathy and, not coincidentally, NIH funding. The fact that it was a lie, and that it encouraged panic and scaremongering among a scientifically illiterate general public was, well, water over the dam.
I find such contempt for the truth contemptible, and that’s why I’m riding this particular hobbyhorse.
Now, to return to the OP - I suspect that we won’t find much in the way of reliable statistics on the question of Who Gets Laid With More People. A couple of cites I found suggest that, in fact, gay men may have fewer lifetime sexual partners, but I’m deeply suspicious. Until very recently, gay men living outside major urban centers would have had the problem of simply finding other gay men. Thanks to AOL, that limitation has rather disappeared, so a lot of guys may be getting a lot more action that was possible previously. Moreover, the social circumstances of gay men have improved enormously even over the last ten years, with the effect of increasing their willingness to be truthful.
And yet the fundamental problem with so much of this sex research is that people lie, and will continue to do so barring much greater cultural changes than are currently imaginable. The most comprehensive recent U.S. study, completed in roughly '96 and maintained at the University of Chicago, reported suspiciously low numbers of lifetime sexual contacts for men in general (unfortunately, no breakdown for gay men v. straight men - and of course these data, gathered in the early 90s, would be subject to my stated reservations anyway). How many straight guys are going to admit to seeing prostitutes? How many fags are going to admit to haunting bathhouses? It’s a conundrum.
Wasn’t that the rhetoric that the SFO gay lobby used in protesting against closure of the bath houses? A quote from the aforementioned link, which is a review of And the Band Played On:
Condemning those who advise against an activity because it’s high risk for disease? By this logic, the Western scientists who drew a link between kuru and cannibalism were insensitive, ethnocentric bigots because they advised the Papua New Guinean tribes that, hey guys, maybe it’s not such a good idea to be eating Grandpa’s brains. Or licking his anus, for that matter.
So, then, why are you only requiring Hastur to back up his assertion?
See, Izzy, if it’s your contention that only Hastur has to back up assertions, then that seems more like a personal vendetta than anything else. If it’s your contention that only Hasturs statement is unbelievable and needs confirmation, then, by simple logic, you must believe the original assertion of Markxx’s to be true, in which case, it’s perfectly fine for some one to require you to back it up as well (as they did and you refused, saying you didn’t make the assertion).
What I saw happening is another of the seemingly endless ‘put up’ ‘no, you put up’ matches starting again. The original assertion was made by some one who also made other, obviously unsupportable assertions, not the least of which was paraphrasing ‘Magic Johnson got (it) from drugs, not sex’. Had Markxxx not done that, no other comment would have been forthcoming.
in any event, it is unlikely that there are any reliable statistics on promiscuity, and any place that claims to have such data will undoubtably be disbelieved by the other side anyhow, so all the posturing of ‘well I asked first’ will likely be unresolvable. Both sides should refrain from statements they cannot support.
And, as far as the OP is concerned, the term “serious” STD is subject to debate as well. Certainly we can probably agree that HIV is the most serious, however, since many of the others listed have some pretty dire consequences as well, I don’t think they should be brushed aside with a ‘well, they can be treated’ comment, either.
Short answer: The statistic “Gays=80% of serious STDs” seems to be made up out of whole cloth. Total lie.
Now, some other things. There are no reliable statistics for who gets more sex. Any purported statistics offered, as wring and xtn pointed out, are not believable for various reasons, most notably because people have no reason to provide pollsters with accurate information about their sexual lives.
That being said, it seems to me that men want to have sex more often than women. And since gay men have sex with other men it wouldn’t surprise me if they had sex with more partners. But hey, what do I know?
In any case, I’m going to disagree with Hastur:
I think that it is important to know how people get infected, since that is the only way we can protect ourselves. People contract HIV through unprotected penetrative sex and by sharing needles. They do not become infected by casual contact and almost never through non-penetrative sex. This is important information, right?
Don’t you think accurate information about how this epidemic works is valuable? I mean, you can have unprotected penetrative sex, or you can have protected penetrative sex, or you can have non-penetrative sex, or you can refrain from sex. One of these is very risky, one is slightly risky, one is very slightly risky, and the other is not risky. Without learning how people get infected we wouldn’t have this information.
Or perhaps you were saying that you don’t particularly care how any one particular individual HIV+ person got infected. In that case I agree unless that person is exposing other people unneccesarily by continuing the practices that exposed them.
I only asked Hastur for proof because he contradicted what happens to be my impression. I would not myself make an assertion either way, as I don’t know definitively, but when someone is declaring false something that I thought to be true, I am more interested in what his basis is for this. IOW, there is no difference between Hastur and Markxxx in terms of who “has to” back up assertions. But there is one in terms of who I am interested in calling on it.
This is as regards to my original post. It is also true that if, as seems increasingly likely, Hastur has no basis for his own assertion, he was being hypocritical in demanding one from Markxxx.
