This is a consideration that’s not directly relevant to the OP, but nevertheless important. If any saliva is actually being transmitted, the person who is HIV-positive (especially if he has full-blown AIDS) is the one who’s at risk. There are all sorts of things in people’s saliva that are totally harmless . . . as long as we have a normally-functioning immune system. These same things can be very problematic for someone with a compromised immune system.
Wow, what a disturbing amount of forgiveness in this thread.
Howbout this:
My friend called me in horror when she found out that the guest I’d brought along to her fondue party was half black! She had been raised to believe that black people carried plague germs.
. . . So where’s the chorus of “she did nothing wrong because she acted based on information she was raised with.”
Another step backwards at the Dope.
Apprehension about sharing saliva *specifically because the person is gay? *Unreasonable.
Are we reading the same thread? I think the synopsis was that “forgiveness” and understanding were not an appropriate response to the situation. The fondue hostess should know better.
Sorry, I wrote that about 2/3rds through page one; the early consensus seemed to be remarkably tolerant of “innocent ignorance.”
I’m not eating at your house.
Re: the OP, even 20 years ago, the opinions expressed by the woman in the other thread would have been head-shakingly ignorant. That HIV could not be spread through casual contact was already a part of the standard messages of the day. Since then, that message has only gotten stronger, and anyone who continues to cling to such outdated misinformation is probably (IMO) willfully doing so to justify their attitudes toward gays.
No more than “straight”. This is San Diego, where a substantial proportion of the population is currently active-duty military, and the city’s entire history is deeply intertwined with that of the local Navy and Marine installations. The words “military type” come up often enough, and they mean what you’re talking about. I’ll grant you that there’s room for ambiguity, but generally, “military” means “military”. This also holds true for the W4M section.
I bet you’re right, and I doubt you’d have to prove your military status with any real rigor. But there are plenty of actual local military MSM to go around. I bet you’d find different criteria in cities with less or no active duty military population. But there’s only so much of my time I’m willing to spend on this during the academic quarter.
It doesn’t. But it’s a metric of the popularity of unprotected sex in the MSM community, just like in all other comparable groups (I’ve had my fair share of unprotected sex with women), which–coupled with the fact that there’s such a high rate of closeted and straight-identifying MSM–means that you can’t just assume that anyone who doesn’t identify as a gay male is safe. If you’re going to freak out about fondue, anyway.
Does this surprise you? Many, many people are stupid. Many others are perfectly cognizant of reality and have risk-taking personalities. That’s life, gay or straight or whatever else.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
This is the heart of the inferential error. I posted as much in the IMHO thread.
Human behavior is not ergodic. The likelihood of an individual gay man acquiring AIDS in his lifetime does not ultimately converge to the average likelihood of the homosexual population. Black men may have a higher incarceration rate than white men, but this does not mean than a randomly chosen individual black man is more likely to commit a crime than his white counterpart if you play out both of their lives. Their probabilities of committing crimes in a given year do not converge to the criminality rates across the entire population.
Both criminality and AIDS acquisition from promiscuous and/or unsafe sex are not random, systemic events with natural frequencies. They are path-dependent behaviors. If you are a gay man and are not on an AIDS path, you are no more likely to have AIDS than anyone else.
The fact that there are many gay men on this path does not allow one to guess with any confidence what path a particular gay man is on.
The path-dependent and non-ergodic behavior of human beings makes drawing real inferences from general statistics very, very difficult. Some may view these infereces as important life-saving heuristics. Ok, fine, but these judgments are inevitably subject to massive survivorship bias.
Why is this thread still continuing? The information on body fluids has been out there since the '80s. After all these years, people have to be held responsible for their ignorance and their bigotry.
I still say it’s reasonable to be apprehensive about sharing saliva with anyone. It’s just good hygiene.
Why black ghetto?
Because if I just said ghetto, some smart ass would claim I only thought black people lived in the “ghetto”.
If I said group of black people, some other smart ass would wonder why I thought black people were too stupid to know what niggardly actually meant.
So, I went with the safest combination I could come up with off the top of my head. That poor black folks would be both the most likely to not know the actual definition of niggardly AND be offended by it.
Of course yet another smart ass will now come along claiming I am profiling by assuming poor people who live in any ghetto are less likely to know what niggardly really means…and that poor white people who do or do not know what
niggardly means could ALSO be offended…blah blah blah…
and i am sure a dozen other smart asses are waiting to pounce on their favorite little observation/interpretation.
how the hell did i even get sucked into this niggardly thing anyhow? it wasnt even my analogy or anti analogy for that matter!
If you don’t want to share fondue with me for hygienic reasons, fine. But don’t turn around and host a fondue party for straight people only.
Or do host that party, offend the offended, the offended can be offended, and everybody can get on with their lives…
Freedom doesnt mean freedom from either ignorance or being offended.
I love that you devoted all that time to responding to my parenthetical comment, and zero time to the rest of the post.
Cause I dont CARE to respond to it. Actually, IIRC I agreed with most of it, or at least it wasnt directed at me.
If it’s been boiled in oil or chocolate, then yes, it’s unreasonable and irretrievably stupid, to boot.
Clearly, field work is needed. 
Yeah, it does, and I guess that makes me a babe in the woods on this issue. I can see ending up having unprotected sex (passions overtook us; I only had one condom but we were still both rarin’ to go; etc…) but soberly and actively seeking it out, to the point of advertising for it, feels like one step away from the infamous “bugcatcher” fetish, which I assume is a tiny tiny minority.
Living in near tropical Florida, that first brought up an image most folks would probably care not to share 
I want to clarify my comments on the “military” thing earlier.
There are several different ways, it seems, to ask for military men in an online personal. There’s “hot military boys”, which could go either way; there’s “military-type”, which implies that actual military status isn’t so important; and then there’s stuff like “straight/married/military go to the front of the line”. Most of what I saw in my little survey was the latter. That probably varies a fair bit, though.
And, I might add, there are many (probably many more) straight people on this path. Their version of Russian Roulette might be said to have one fewer bullet, but let’s not forget that “promiscuous behavior” is pretty damn common in the world. Assuming that all gay men are promiscuous and unsafe, where in fact it’s probably just as common among straight people, is prejudice, put quite simply.
(I’m not attacking you, Maeglin, I just used your quote as a launch pad for my point.)
No, in fact, we can’t get on with our lives. Maybe you can, because you’re not the one being treated by a leper. But this is the kind of discrimination we face every day and it is a very real, very big problem. It’s why, for example, LGBT teenagers are twice as likely to attempt suicide.
This attitude is like saying, “Or we can just refuse to sell to black people, let them be offended, and everybody can get on with their lives.” No, you can get on with your life, but the people being discriminated against can’t, because everywhere they turn, gee, it’s that pesky discrimination again. You have the privilege of walking away from it at any time because you’re white–or, in this case, because you’re straight. Not everyone has that privilege.
I agree with all of this. And I say this as someone who soberly and actively sought out unprotected sex with strange women (and I do mean strange! 
) when I was confused about my sexuality. Being nearly virginal WRT male-male sex, I’d like to think that I’ll never make that choice with men, but that’s what I used to say about sex with women, too. For me, once I knew what unprotected sex felt like, using a condom with women was like drinking cold coffee–might as well just skip the thing completely.
Of course, when I have sex with the gender I’m actually meant to be with, who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to enjoy myself with a condom on. But I gradually found myself on an unsafe path with women, and I can see how anyone else could start down that path with men.
The “bugcatcher” thing really is a very tiny minority, but it’s a question of Russian roullette vs. just plain old suicide, really.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Of course you aren’t attacking me, you are agreeing with me.
This is the sort of inferential error people making, assuming the particular from the distribution of the general, that leads to all sorts of madness. When properly conditioned, you can infer the general from enough of the particular, but not the other way around.