National Review: Beds, Bathhouses, and Beyond: 'The return of public sex'

When Harvard AIDS researcher Dr. Bruce Walker made his startling announcement to colleagues on July 10, the scientists filling the room at the 14th International Conference on AIDS audibly gasped. Dr. Walker revealed the case of an HIV-positive Boston man whose immune system had been doing an extraordinary job fighting the infection on its own. Then the man had unprotected sex with a male partner who was infected with a different strain of HIV.

"He never got a new [immune] response against the second virus, and he declined clinically," Dr. Walker said. "The public-health implication of this is that it is possible to become infected with a second strain of HIV, even a very closely related one."

This has, as one scientist put it, "shattering implications" for the development of an AIDS vaccine. In plain terms, it means the HIV virus is so mutable and durable that the standard method of vaccine-making will almost certainly not work.

Clearly, AIDS is going to be with us for a long time. And it's going to cost a lot of money. Another study presented at the AIDS conference found that the annual cost of treating a single patient in the advanced stages of AIDS is $34,000, and $14,000 for those who are HIV-positive but still healthy. According to the latest Centers for Disease Control numbers, as many as 900,000 Americans are living with either HIV or full-blown AIDS.

The situation is grim and getting grimmer. Just don't tell the gay-male community, or at least a significant portion of it. Many are partying like there's no tomorrow -- and guaranteeing that for an untold number, there won't be.

"Gay Sluts Are Back," read the headline in the June 26 Gay Pride issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The article, by self-described "gay slut" Simon Sheppard, celebrated the renascence of promiscuity among Bay Area homosexuals: "The threat of HIV was (and is) real and deadly. But the epidemic was also seized on as an instrument of control, by assimilationists within the queer community who wanted us all to behave like good girls and by those in the larger heterocentrist culture who were both envious of and repelled by men who numbered their sex partners in the dozens. Or hundreds. Or thousands."

The article characterized efforts by AIDS-prevention experts to dampen male promiscuity as hatred of sex and male desire. To ignore the problem, the argument goes, is to be both moral (since fulfilling sexual desire is the greatest good) and authentic. "[T]here's been a quantum increase in unprotected anal sex, not only between those already HIV-infected but also among the not-yets," Sheppard wrote. "People who work in AIDS-prevention programs will confirm what we all already knew: queer men are having more sex, and less of it is condomized." He went on to praise the joy of "unapologetic homo-lust."

Meanwhile, in New York, the AIDS capital of America, a city that has over four times the number of AIDS cases (122,000) as San Francisco (28,000), the Gay Pride issue of the Village Voice came with a headline touting "The Return of Public Sex." Mind you, this was not a lament. Writer Steve Weinstein opened his report from a penthouse party where a crowd of men in their twenties had paid $20 to participate in a private orgy. Then he went to a "dimly lit Midtown hotel suite" where 18 men were having an orgy; next, to a tugboat near Chelsea Piers, which men were using for anonymous sex. "After years of AIDS anxiety and government repression," he wrote, "gay public sex is bigger and better than ever."

The Internet is making this possible. Finding out where orgies are being held in your city on any given day is as easy as checking the Dow. Worse, some of these affairs are so-called "barebacking" events, which Michelangelo Signorile, a leading gay columnist, described five years ago as "quite common." Barebacking is the term used to describe unprotected anal sex. The risk of contracting HIV rises dramatically with condomless sex, of course; it's the danger that makes this kind of sex so exciting to its practitioners. Then there's the conviction that with protease-inhibiting drugs, AIDS is a manageable disease.

Even more perverse are so-called "conversion parties," in which HIV- negative men willingly submit to sexual intercourse with AIDS-infected partners. In the argot of the gay sexual underworld, this is called "giving the gift," and those looking to become infected with HIV are called "bug chasers." A variation on this theme are "Russian Roulette parties," which consist of bareback orgies with HIV-positive and uninfected men, whose HIV status may not, by mutual consent, be known before the sex begins.

Because condomless sex is still considered an outlaw practice, researchers say it's impossible to tell with any accuracy how much of it is occurring. But a few studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, suggest that it is on the rise, and a sharp increase in the reported number of AIDS and other sexually transmitted disease cases bears this out. In May 2001, the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that a second massive wave of AIDS infections, comparable to the first wave of the 1980s, was about to sweep the homosexual population.

A few prominent gay voices have broken the taboo on criticizing the sexual behavior of fellow homosexuals, and have been attacked by other gays as anti-sex and even homophobic. Gabriel Rotello, in his 1997 book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, bluntly stated that "people will have to accept the fact that the unlimited, unstructured pursuit of absolute sexual freedom was biologically disastrous for gay men." He warned that it takes only a small number of gay men who engage in unprotected sex with multiple partners to keep the epidemic alive. Michelangelo Signorile, exasperated by the devil-may-care promiscuity of many fellow homosexuals, wondered, "How will we continue to get hard-fought funding from the government, and compassion from our liberal friends, when they learn that a small but growing group of people within our own community are behaving recklessly and selfishly? How can many lesbians and a great many gay men themselves not throw their hands in the air, rightly disgusted and anguished?"

It turns out that Signorile was unduly worried. He posed those questions in 1997. Since then, there has been no hint that AIDS funding will be reduced or compassion lessened. We have now reached the point where gay promiscuity and bareback orgies can be praised in the pages of major left-wing newspapers as a return to the good old days. While the more mainstream media outlets would never publish articles praising this suicidal phenomenon, they have been conspicuously silent about it, and they have not helped build the kind of public outrage among responsible gays and straights that might stand a chance of curtailing these practices. Imagine how the phenomenon would be reported if, in the middle of a deadly typhus epidemic, people were keeping the epidemic going by getting together to exchange infected lice for fun and pleasure. How would the newspapers report it? What would the public say? How would the government react?

Social condemnation is, in fact, just about the only realistic measure that can be taken to combat this behavior. During the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, some city governments, including San Francisco's, closed the gay bathhouses, where public, anonymous sex was common, and which therefore served as incubators of the plague. This time, though, it is much more difficult to devise measures to crack down on public sex. For one thing, many barebacking parties occur in private residences. For another, a man craving anonymous sex need not risk arrest by prowling in public toilets or city parks for his fix; he has only to log on to the Internet, where willing partners and private locations for trysts are only a few mouse-clicks away.

One is tempted to think: So what? What goes on behind closed doors is nobody's business. This is fatally wrong. Aside from the fact that it's inhumane to remain indifferent while people blithely kill themselves, there is the not-insignificant matter of the enormous cost to the taxpayer and the health-care system. And, much more important, the mutation of HIV into newer and deadlier forms of the virus -- a process aided by sex between HIV-positive men infected by different strains -- has made an AIDS vaccine an even more remote possibility. The unavoidable truth is that male homosexual life has, in some quarters, become a death cult. Yet no one dares to hold gay-male society accountable for the nihilistic, erotomaniacal subculture that sustains the killing and dying. At the beginning of the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, the band, it seems, is still playing on: same song, second sad verse.