must read "Saving Safe Sex: an interview with Richard Berkowitz"

[RaKroma]

This is a very informative interview that covers many aspects of gay history involving safe sex activism and where we are headed today. Richard Berkowitz was a sex worker who became a writer and involved himself with safe sex education during the AIDS epidemic in the gay world. I quoted some parts that I never seen before but found to be thought provoking. It is amazing to me that Berkowitz was considered "controversial or radical" by mainstream gay politics and probably still is by some.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-a...ref=gay-voices

Berkowitz wrote in 1983 " It has certainly been easier to fuck each other. But has it become any easier to love each other? Men loving men was the basis of gay male liberation, but we have now created "cultural institutions" in which love or even affection can totally be avoided. If you love the person you are fucking with--even for one night--you will not want to make them sick. Maybe affection is our best protection. Hard questions for hard times. But whatever happened to our great gay imaginations?"
[...]
"In his Cooper Union speech Larry (Kramer) said that he always knew promiscuity was the central problem when AIDS began; in Sex Positive he said that we couldn't talk about it because people "wouldn't have sympathy." But Michael Callen and I felt that gay men at risk needed to be warned, not just about AIDS, which Larry was doing, but about sex, which Callen and I were pilloried for doing.

From the start, any suggestion that many urban gay men's prodigious sex in the 1970s played any role in the development of AIDS was the third rail of AIDS politics. Callen and I knew it was politically dangerous, but we confronted it head-on in our writing. I'm glad we did, because it led us right to safe sex."
[...]
"This May marks the 30th anniversary of How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, but you won't see it noted or celebrated. It wasn't mentioned anywhere in the gay or AIDS press on the 20th or 25th anniversary. The 30th is sure to be the same.

How to Have Sex in an Epidemic was more conservative than it needed to be. It basically said that all safe sex means for a gay man is "don't get sperm inside your rectum when you don't know your partner's status." There was never any reason in the U.S. to waste millions of dollars trying to fool people into thinking that we are all equally at risk. Now, after 30 years, even the CDC has admitted that gay men have disproportionately born the brunt of AIDS all over the world."

[Serenx55]

Only in the US is HIV/AIDS a Gay issue. The majority of the world's afflicated are poor, heterosexual, and African.

[RaKroma]

Only in the US is HIV/AIDS a Gay issue. The majority of the world's afflicated are poor, heterosexual, and African.

Correction only in developed countries is HIV still predominantly a gay men issue.

[Beachguyj]

Oh I thought he was the son on Sam.

[Serenx55]

European, Japanese, etc infection rates are more heavily represented in heterosexuals. Likewise in China and India the majority are heterosexual and in that regard the majority over 95% are heterosexual.

[bankside]

Yup. He was right 30 years ago and the Official Gay Community™ still hasn't listened. "Fuck a stranger, as long as you use a condom" is not the way to saving lives - or having better sex for that matter.

[RaKroma]

European, Japanese, etc infection rates are more heavily represented in heterosexuals. Likewise in China and India the majority are heterosexual and in that regard the majority over 95% are heterosexual.

You are on defensive for some reason, why? Let's say HIV is predominantly a problem for heterosexuals, what should be done to reduce the risk in gay communities since this specific topic is about gay men's health? As for India, China, or even Russia or African countries, I wouldn't call them first world developed countries. In the context of AIDS epidemic in this discussion, the focus was in gay world because there was heavy impact on gay communities during the 80s in the U.S. and Europe.

Yup. He was right 30 years ago and the Official Gay Community™ still hasn't listened. "Fuck a stranger, as long as you use a condom" is not the way to saving lives - or having better sex for that matter.

Today, we are even shifting the focus away from condoms with strangers to "bareback is OK" because there are these new HIV meds that work to prevent infection or treat HIV that doesn't doesn't kill you fast. Basically, some are completely ignoring other serious STDs that are not prevented by HIV meds. They want to turn gay sex into some widely medicated activity when it doesn't need to be.