Well, dammit Matt. I am a hetero female, but your comments make me want to have a sex change so I can stand with you and help you fight the good fight!! If I become a man, and still go for men, does that mean I am gay? Hmmm…I better go read Heinlein’s “I Will Fear No Evil” again before I delve into that one.
In the meantime I will just keep telling my kids and any bigots I run into that there is far too much hate in this world for people to be worried about what kind of love others enjoy. Love is good…Hate is bad. End of story.
What’s most dangerous, and most difficult, is that the desire for barebacking isn’t simply a desire for sex - it’s a desire for love, transmitted through danger and touch.
“Desire” doesn’t quite convey the sensation - “need” isn’t even close. It’s a point where even breath itself stops mattering.
I’ve been there, and so will you. Those vast majority of you will suffer no consequences. Try to envision a life in which it did.
*
This isn’t a defense of barebacking, just a request to suspend judgment. Several sources have reported that even at the very peak of the epidemic - the late 1980s, when an older friend of mine crossed a hundred names out of his address book - about 40% responded to having had anal sex without a condom. Most of them were in the context of long-term relationships - but monogamous? Inevitably imperfectly.
Now we’re relying on exhortation alone, when at the same time pharmaceutical manufacturers portray the positive climbing mountains. When an HIV diagnosis enables you to get steroids and human growth hormone - legally! (And before I get in trouble, quite necessarily for those with serious wasting; but that reality often isn’t apparent.)
Is there evidence that exhortation alone has ever brought about behavioral change? Smoking might be an example, but it’s a bit hard to tell when so many people have family who’ve died horrible deaths of emphysema or cancer. A better example might be obesity, where the risky behavior is enormously pleasurable to the person engaged in it, and has no immediate (or even medium-term) effect on anyone else - it doesn’t even smell bad or make people cough.
Is AIDS really all that big a threat to society at large? Matt called it a plague but I don’t see people dropping dead in the streets. Cancer, heart disease, accidents, and even murder are the cause of death more often then HIV in this country. Uh, unless I’m reading the chart wrong.
In the 80’s activist made it sound like we were all at threat and that pretty soon we’d see an HIV epidemic. I don’t think that’s happened and I don’t think it will unless something changes.
Um…hello? Could I suggest you look beyond the Rio Grande and the Great Lakes? There’s a whole world out there that’s being devastated by (heterosexual) AIDS. It’s a sneak peek at what could happen here.
There’s a whole world there outside of North America? GASP! I better get a map!
I realize I tend to focus on this country but I suspect that has something to do with where I live. I suppose Africa is an example of what could happen in the United States in regards to AIDS. But it has been almost 20 years and it hasn’t happened. Why? Probably because North America is not Africa and we don’t have the same habits that they do. So I’ll rephrase the question. Is AIDS really all that big a threat to the people in North America?
Marc
PS: I’m not sure what “heterosexual” AIDS is. Do you mean to suggest that there are homosexual and heterosexual strains of HIV floating around out there? Because that would be the first I’ve heard of any such thing.
Yeah, I know that’s not what you meant. But I’m aware that AIDS isn’t a gay disease any more then it is a straight disease. Furthermore I am aware of the AIDS problem in Africa being way more severe then it is here.
You do deserve an apology for my tone there, Marc. I was just a little bit bitchy, wasn’t I? I’m sorry…you asked an honest question.
It doesn’t look like NA is undergoing the same kind of epidemic that Africa is, but that can be deceiving. We have to look at societal biases as well, and remember that it can take up to 10 years for AIDS to develop. And also remember that North America, in general, has medical care that’s exponentially better than that in most of Africa. Fewer people are dying of AIDS. This doesn’t mean that fewer people are seroconverting HIV. AIDS is a disease that can’t be tracked as easily as influenza or stomach cancer, due to cultural biases, moral judgments, the social profile of the disease and its nature as a (practical, if not technical) STD.
We can’t really see what AIDS infection rates and social profiles are going to look like in 10 or 15 years. The prediction of heterosexual AIDS (and are you really confused by the term or were you being facetious?) is an estimate that could be wrong, I’ll admit that.
Heterosexual sero-conversion rates ARE rising in the US among the black population. According to MSNBC.com,
black women now make up more than 60 percent of all new cases of HIV among women, and rates for black children are similarly high. According to the National Black Women’s Health Project, the 1998 reported rate of AIDS cases among African Americans was 66.4 per 100,000. This was more than 2 times greater than the rate for Hispanics and 8 times greater than the rate for whites.
Heterosexual AIDS is here. In the ghettoes of our large cities, like Southeast DC, the same conditions that have caused the AIDS plague in Africa–poverty, lack of access to health care, lack of HIV prevention information-- apply, plus the high incidence of incarcerated black men acquiring the bug in prison through man-to-man sex, or through IV drug use on the outside, and then transmitting HIV to their wives and girlfriends.
And if you think HIV will remain limited to poor people, or that you are somehow immune because you’re not poor, black, or gay, think again. Micro-organisms have a nasty way of infiltrating every level of society, unless prevention measures are used early on.
I realize that the source is controversial, but for reporting Gabriel Rotello’s Sexual Ecology is pretty well spot-on. What he notes is that the epidemic has flowed along courses of multipartner sex, compounded by lack of access to basic healthcare. Even assuming some reluctance to admit to multipartner sex, in the United States few heterosexual sleep around on the scale that the segment of urban gay men most prone to HIV do. The population of that community is pretty small, but because of the sheer numbers of sexual interactions and the interrelatedness of the community’s members, the incidence level reached the “tipping point” remarkably quickly. (I don’t have a cite handy, but I recall that in the mid-80s the infection level in the Castro was estimated to be somewhere around 70%.)
One of the most significant contributing factors to the epidemic in Africa has been the widespread incidence of untreated venereal infections, which provide ready pathways for heterosexual transmission. There’s also a theory that the HIV-I clades most common in south-central Africa and southeast Asia (IIRC, type “A” in Africa and “E” in Thailand) may be more infective than the “B” type common in western Europe, North America and Australia (largely, those places where the primary route of infection was through gay men). Social practices, which include the widespread use of sex as a medium of trade (see Hooper’s The River for an account*), have further exacerbated the epidemics in Africa, India, Thailand and the Philippines.
The mid-80s idea that HIV would spread through middle-class hetersexual Americans was based more on a combination of panic and politics than on sound epidemiology. That doesn’t mean that individual heterosexuals are impervious, but it does mean that they have not very much to worry about. Resources for free testing, for example, are probably better spent on gay men or poor women than on middle-class straight people who have an “oopsie” or two.
*I recognize that Hooper’s primary thesis, concerning the possible role of an early polio vaccine in transmitting HIV, has been pretty roundly refuted. Nevertheless, his history of the epidemic, especially in Central Africa, seems unimpeachable in any serious way.
If you mean the rate of AIDS among heterosexuals then say that. Don’t say heterosexual AIDS. I’ve never heard AIDS referred to as homosexual AIDS except among certain bigots.
So AIDS is caused by things like poverty, lack of access to health care, and lack of HIV prevention information. Why would AIDS spread like wild fire to other segments of the population where these factors are not present? We’re talking about a virus that is fairly difficult to spread.
And if those are the primary causes of AIDS why is there such a high rate of infection among homosexual men? I don’t think they’re all covered under the poverty, lack of information, and no access to health care blanket.
You say 66 out of 100,000 black women are HIV positive. While that’s high it doesn’t sound like 1 in 3 to me. Out of 100,000 homosexual men how many are HIV positive? I’m more worried about things like cancer, heart disease, and accidents then I am with becoming HIV positive.