USA: Weighing in on prevention

Some veteran gay activists are proposing radical new HIV-prevention strategies to combat unprotected sex among some sexually active gay men, including confronting these men directly in sex parties and chat rooms. Justifying the aggressive new stance in an interview with the New York Times, Charles Kaiser, a noted gay author, was quoted saying, "A person who is HIV-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person's head."

In an era when the Bush administration is spending millions advocating abstinence-only prevention, are these acceptable measures?

How do you think the LGBT community should combat the upswing in unsafe sex?

There are a lot of dumb gay men out there right now with limited respect for themselves and for others when it comes to unsafe sex and drugs. Crystal is worse than heroin: It reduces you to a fucking right-wing robot -- a superconsumer of sex, as if it were some kind of K-Mart blue-light special. Some say it destroys the part of your brain that allows you to experience pleasure without help from the drug.

This reported new virus is a huge wake-up call. I don't mind scare tactics from peers in the community -- better that than from the goddamned government. There needs to be serious cash for new education campaigns with new slogans that are tailored to the present situation. The recent crystal ads were a good start, but the messages have to be more specific to young homos' lives: If you become positive, you'll have a much more difficult time finding a boyfriend. If you become positive you'll have to get a job with health insurance for the rest of your life. If you're poor, you could die. If you continue to fuck around unsafely, you could die faster. No one knows the long-term effects of HIV -- this supervirus makes complete sense from a biological point of view, and it could be only the beginning of big trouble.

And somebody's got to do something about the sex sites. They've got a lot to answer for. They've got to shut down the crystal culture on their sites before the government does. Keep Bush out of this.

Newshawk: http://www.napnt.org/amphetablog.html
Pubdate: February 2005
Source: Gay.com
Website: http://www.gay.com
Author: John Cameron Mitchell