Here's an excellent article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker looking at the reasons for the rising rate of gay men in the US who are testing positive for HIV. Specter has been covering HIV for years - he did stories on its impact in Russia and India not long back - and he is balanced, calm and very well worth reading.
Much of what he says was said by Larry Kramer in his recent tirade on the stupidity of gay men, but where that speech, like most of what Kramer says is almost too exhausting to read, however right he is, Specter's article is easier to deal with. Its a long piece, so I won't give it in full here, but just the link and some of the main quotes. New Yorker pieces stay on their site for about a week, so do try and log on and read soon: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050523fa_fact I should point out that parts of this article probably don't apply to India. A major reason for the rising rate of HIV infections is the growing problem of drug abuse - specifically abuse of crystal meth, a drug that's taken because of the pleasure it adds to sex, but which also drastically increases the likelihood of unsafe sexual behaviour and also seems to weaken the body's immune system (and that's before the virus gets to work). I certainly do know a few gay guys who take drugs, and you can bet that parts of the Bombay scene (in general, not just gay here) are probably already onto crystal meth, but luckily I don't think its a big problem here in India. But as Specter points out, and this is the value of the article, just pointing fingers at crystal meth is beside the point. One has to look at the reasons why so many gay men feel the need to take it up. The scary part about this new HIV epidemic is that its not primarily young dumb guys who fuck like rabbits who are getting it. Many of the victims are older, have been part of the community for a long time and presumably know about AIDS and have known positive people - yet they are getting it. There seems to be a mindset operating: the fear of growing old and being alone, problems of depression and bad relationships, low self-esteem and so on that drive men to find sex over the Net, and crystal meth to make it easier for them to do so - but with that comes greater risks. And the other problem is that in the past there was a gay community that could mobilise, take action, take care of its own. But with greater acceptance, however superficial, the need for community seems to have decreased, just at the time when the Internet has meant you don't actually need to hang out in gay spaces in real life to meet other gay men - now you can just do it over the Net. That both makes the problem worse and makes tackling it harder. These are all important issues in India where the Net seems to be simultaneously helping us build on the existing communities (all the people who came to the existing gay scene through groups like Khush and GB), while also helping develop a large group out there who aren't getting in touch with real life communities, either because they're happy just meeting for sex, or they want to get in touch and are too scared. What sort of HIV risks are they facing? Specter's article makes us think about that. Quotes: "After years of living in constant fear of aids, many gay men have chosen to resume sexual practices that are almost guaranteed to make them sick. In New York City, the rate of syphilis has increased by more than four hundred per cent in the past five years. Gay men account for virtually the entire rise." "Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the aids epidemic, the number of men who say they use condoms regularly is below fifty per cent; after many years of decline, the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses among gay men increased every year between 2000 and 2003, while remaining stable in the rest of the population." " "I don't want to romanticize something that was often very hard and even dangerous," Jeff Whitty told me when I met him the following week in New York. Whitty wrote the Tony Award-winning musical "Avenue Q," and he has talked a lot about the dangers of crystal methamphetamine. "But I long for the days when people would actually cruise each other. I can't remember what I was reading—I think it was Gore Vidal's memoir, and he paints these pictures of being gay after the war, when you would follow someone for fifty blocks. It was a weird, funny ritual, but in a way it was actually more open. At least you could look at somebody, see how the person moved, interact. But that is now gone. Now we have the Internet when you want to hook up. You can get sex within minutes. Anonymous. No names. No commitments. No connections. Is that what we are really looking for?" " "Still, it was the man's age that surprised me. I could understand that people who had not been alive to see men dying by the thousand in San Francisco, New York, and other cities might have to learn to exercise caution. But the average age of newly infected gay men in New York and San Francisco is nearly forty. The real problem lay not with naïve youngsters but with those who had been aware of this epidemic virtually their entire adult lives. " "It used to be simple: aids equals death. Now the world is murkier than that. Fatigue is genuine. But also gay culture is focussed on youth, and once you hit forty you are no longer that cute kid on the block, the pretty kid. You are not married. You don't have a partner, and you are trying to assess what you want out of life. There are many who are confused and unhappy, and you mate that with cultural norms that have moved away from safety and you have a pretty explosive situation." "For his research, Stall has drawn on data collected from the Urban Men's Health Study, one of the largest surveys taken of a gay population. He looked at mental-health issues such as depression, partner violence, and substance abuse. He also examined the extent to which the men in this study of nearly three thousand people reported having been sexually abused as children. "I was surprised to see the extent to which one epidemic was associated with the other," he said. "Depression, partner violence, substance abuse." He controlled the sample for race, class, level of education, and H.I.V. status. Then he and his colleagues cross-referenced the data from all of the categories and found that each category was associated with all the others. That means that there are at least four significant epidemics going on in gay communities in the United States, and that they are interacting and making one another worse." "Odets believes that the gay community split in 1985, the moment a reliable H.I.V. test was available. "Before that day, everyone was in it together," he said. "Nobody knew who had it and everyone acknowledged that it was a horror. And then, in April of 1985, we started protecting people who had H.I.V. And we did that by normalizing infection—and we have done that all along. It has completely compromised prevention work, to the extent that when the aids Health Project, in San Francisco, put up a banner outside its facility that said `Stay Healthy Stay Negative' the gay public was incensed. Men wrote in and said, `I have H.I.V. and I am perfectly healthy. How dare you imply that I am not?' " While it has always been important to protect and support H.I.V.-infected men in the gay community, Odets argues that it has become difficult to teach men who test negative how essential it is for them to remain uninfected." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/MCfFmA/SOnJAA/E2hLAA/WfTolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Group Site: http://www.gaybombay.info ========================== NEW CLASSIFIEDS SECTION SEEKING FRIENDS? VISIT www.gaybombay.info click on classified section and type your message in the post section once the link opens This message was posted to the gay_bombay Yahoo! Group. Responses to messages (by clicking "Reply") will also be posted on the eGroup and sent to all members. 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