Word: gays
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...hangover. At some point in the middle of our Lucullan outburst, gays willingly - joyously - stopped talking about AIDS. I don't mean it never came up - there were plenty of Angels in America screening parties in 2003 - but an awkward silence descended in the bedroom. Gay men of my generation had never really known AIDS, so it seemed weird to bring it up when you were about to have sex with someone...
...never been much for Gay Pride Month - for my part, I like guys during all the months - but June also happens to be the month when, 27 years ago, scientists published the first account of the disease that came to be known as AIDS. From the early '80s until 1995, when AIDS deaths in the U.S. crested, the plague arrested and then completely subsumed gay culture. In his new book Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited, Andrew Holleran writes that living in gay New York in the '80s "felt like attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were...
...years after antiretroviral drugs began saving lives, the tense fear that Holleran describes gave way to hope, wary optimism and then finally a wild spurt of gay partying in the 1990s. I came out in 1993, when I was 22. For the rest of that decade, I didn't know any gay men who had AIDS, but I knew plenty who took ecstasy every weekend...
...silence, it turns out, still equals death. Researchers believe HIV infections among gays are rising. There can be a long lag time between infection and diagnosis, so it's difficult to gauge precisely how much HIV is spreading. But various studies in the last few years have reported increases in unprotected sex among gay men, partly because of the spread of crystal meth. Too many guys are bringing condoms to their sexual encounters but then not using them...
Public-health experts are now fighting back with a new online campaign. On June 11, New York University, Public Health Solutions (a New York-based nonprofit) and a filmmaker named Todd Ahlberg launched a website called hivbigdeal.org. It features two online short films designed to remind gay men that - duh - HIV is still deadly, and that we must talk about it in the bedroom, during those awkward moments before sex. The films are called The Morning After and The Test, and I can't stop thinking about them. A disclaimer: while the shorts are smartly directed, they are poorly acted...