Troubling Report Of 'Gay Superbug" Shades Of Early AIDS Crisis

     As the AIDS crisis emerged in the early 1980’s, I had the helpful perspective of serving on a Congressional staff and being at the nation’s nerve center, so to speak, of Capitol Hill as America sought answers about the unfolding health emergency. I see eerie similarities to that disquieting time and the news account reported below, provided by Reuters News, via the Drudge Report, regarding a new “super bug” infection centered in the gay communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston about which we know very little.

      Back in the early 80s, Congress sought to understand and then respond to the AIDS crisis through many avenues.  Initially, as projections were made about the possible scope of the emerging epidemic, the epidemiological models assumed that 10 percent of the population was in fact homosexual – gay or lesbian.  This was based on the very flawed research of Indiana University sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey.  I later went to the Kinsey Institute to review the infamous research, only to see that a prominent disclaimer has been added at the beginning recognizing the sampling mistakes that Dr. Kinsey made in reaching his conclusion that 10 percent of the nation's men are homosexual.  But before these statistical sampling flaws were well understood, the nation, unfortunately, had a deadly epidemic underway confirming that the true percentage of gay men is three percent or less. 

     Congress also made other mistakes, including, chiefly, declaring AIDS the first disease in American history to have civil rights.  I fear tens of thousands died because of that political correctness that prevailed, principally pursued by then Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Beverly Hills.  If the news account below is accurate, more than 20,000 Americans have already died from this new "super bug."

      This has an eerie similarity to the initial reports of AIDS.  I hope and pray there is not another forthcoming 'super bug' disease anyone has to deal with, including gay men or lesbian women.  As a Christian, my compassion goes out to anyone who is ill, and I wouldn’t wish a debilitating or deadly disease on my worst enemy.  If we face a similar crisis, however, it is imperative that clear-headed medical science prevail as we respond to a sexually-transmitted disease, should that turn out to be the case. For those who might want to read the best analysis of the early days of the AIDs crisis, I recommend "Homosexuality and the Politics of AIDS" by Dr. Jeffery Satinover and "And The Band Played On" by now-deceased (of AIDS) San Fransisco Chronicle Reporter Gary Shilts.  Both are excellent, penetrating reads of the failures in the medical community (Satinover) and the gay activist and community health worlds (Shilts).

     Rueters news report as carried by the Drudge Report on Wednesday, Jan. 15

     SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday.

     They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles.

     Sexually active gay men in San Francisco are 13 times more likely to be infected than their heterosexual neighbors, the researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

     "Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable," said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study. "That's why we're trying to spread the message of prevention."

     According to chemical analyses, bacteria are spreading among the gay communities of San Francisco and Boston, the researchers said.

     "We think that it's spread through sexual activity," Diep said.

     This superbug can cause life-threatening and disfiguring infections and can often only be treated with expensive, intravenous antibiotics.

     It killed about 19,000 Americans in 2005, most of them in hospitals, according to a report published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

     About 30 percent of all people carry ordinary staph chronically. It can be passed by touching other people or by depositing the bacteria on surfaces or objects.

     The bacteria can cause deep-tissue infections if they enter the body through a wound in the skin.

     Of those people who carry staph, most carry it in their noses but community-based MRSA also can live in and around the anus and is passed between sexual partners.

     Incidence of MRSA is rising along with the resurgence of syphilis, rectal gonorrhea, and new HIV infections partly because of changes in beliefs about the severity of HIV and an increase in risky behaviors, such as illicit drug use and having sex that abrades the skin, Diep's team wrote.

    "Your likelihood of contracting each of these diseases increases with the number of sexual partners that you have," Diep said. "The same can probably be said for MRSA."

     Staph infections often look like raised red dots on the skin. Left untreated, the areas can swell and fill with pus.

     The best way to avoid infection is by washing the hands or genitals with soap and water, Diep said.

Comments

[Chris Douglas]

A strong argument, this time around, for encouraging stable monogamous same sex relationships, wouldn't you say Curt? Wouldn't you say that fighting AIDS by attacking gays proved a failed strategy by the Falwell crowd last time around?

Let's put it this way... Who is spreading disease? Tom and me having a bite to eat with my parents on New Years Eve or having family and friends over, gay and straight, on New Year's day?

Or the kid that has fled his Midwestern parents, afraid to reveal his sexual orientation, and is instead engaging in anonymous sex with multiple partners in San Francisco far from any guidance? Or the men, like Ted Haggard or Larry Craig, who are married and sitting in Church and frequenting male prostitutes on the side? Or the thousands on the "down low" in the black community, where homosexuality was for so many years denied, who lived one life known to all, and resolved their sexual orientation issues by engaging in anonymous sex on the side, conveying HIV and syphilis at record rates through their community and through to their spouses?

We are both well acquainted with people among your peers who were confronted with the sexual orientation of their family members only when AIDS struck. That's sad.

The answer is to encourage restraint, fidelity, responsibility, and education in the gay community just as it was and perhaps remains the principal answer to containing disease for heterosexuals.

That means encouraging, recognizing, affirming, and protecting same sex relationships... which is what you and your peers have been fighting tooth and nail for years.

[Curt Smith]

Thank you for your comment as well as its civil tone. Regarding its substance, however, I don't think the possible emergence of a new epidemic centered in the gay community argues for legal approval of same-sex marriage.
During the 25+ years since AIDS began to be understood, for example, attitudes toward homosexuals have changed in the public's mind, becoming far more tolerant if not accepting of gay men and lebian women. The fact I write gay and lesbian, rather than homosexual or other words deemed pejorative, is testament to this radical shift in sexual ethics in one generation. Prime time TV stigmatixes evangelical Christians, not homosexuals, for example. Hollywood, Washington (including the GOP!), Wall Street and many mainline church demoninations have adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" approach if not outright approval and promotion of sexual experimentation. The four major cities cited in the news article -- San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles -- are outright pro-gay in policy. The Mayor of San Francisco issued marriage licenses to gay couples despite California law, for example.
But as the same article reports, so-called high risk behaviors (including sexual practices I won't name let alone detail on a pro-family blog)appear to be growing again. Let me repeat this -- after 25 years of education, death, disease, pleading, investing billions of taxpayer dollars, persuasion and the above change in social attitudes, high-risk sexual practices among American gay men are growing!
So, social attitudes improve (basically, the removal of stigmas), but the chaos in the gay community, as you put it, does not improve. Hmmm, as one of our critics says.
It is my belief as a student, though admittedly not a scholar, of the same-sex phenomenon in contemporary American society that the high-risk behaviors are compulsive. The compulsion is indeed rooted in shame, self-loathing and the like, but that flows from other issues quite apart from social stigmas or legal distinctions (also long ago evaporated).
Moreover, approving same sex marriage -- even if it helped the above issue, which I obvioulsy don't believe it would -- harms marriage, our bedrock institution of healthy culture. So, I would not favor approving same-sex marriage due to the harm to true marriage. But the argument we need legal same-sex marriage to remove remaining social stigmas is not compelling to me. I'm sure you'll disagree, and that's what makes this a great country -- citizens, as the sovereign, discuss and debate and work toward a consensus under which a great land can be ordered and the common wealth enhanced.
Let me repeat a key point just for emphasis -- I hope and pray for all our sakes, including gay men who would be at the most risk, there is no new incubating, virulent disease in our future. I graduated in a high school class of about 230 students (Indianapolis Pike High School, 1975) and three of my male classmates -- Tim Edwards (a good friend), Evan Yoakam and Don Gentry -- are dead from AIDS! Of 110 or 115 18-year-olds, three died very, very prematurely.

[Kenn Gividen]

I'm wondering: Why didn't gay marriage ceremonies in San Francisco didn't provide a ready antidote to the super bug in that area?

Why is the superbug prevailing in Boston, another area where gay marriage is accepted and celebrated?

New York and Los Angeles, liberal communities known for their celebration of homosexuality are also cited as breeding grounds for the staphylococcus aureus virus.

Observation forces a rational conclusion:

The super bug is most prevalent in areas where homosexual behavior is most tolerated. Approving same-gender marriage will enhance, not lessen, the risks.

[Chris Douglas]

Curt, perhaps this is a worthy dialog after all.

The thing I think you need to recognize about the intervening 25 years is that while tolerance of gays has increased, that has not in any way translated into education in places like Indiana. In my view, given that the majority of Hoosiers end their education at High School level, it becomes a real problem that they then graduate without any knowledge of disease control except abstinence. I believe that we would both agree that while in a perfect world abstinence until marriage would be the perfect contraceptive and disease-fighting agent, in the presence of sex in the meantime, condom use goes a very long way toward stopping the spread of disease whether among gays or straights. Yes, condoms are not perfect, but their effectiveness is very high. A great deal of disease would be stopped through the effective use of condoms, and yet (in my view) your conservative crowd has seized such control of the educational agenda that the population receives virtually no education on the control of sexually transmitted disease except abstinence.

And the studies aren't shedding too positive a light on abstinence education. To the contrary, a study recently seems to indicate that comprehensive sex education, including the use of prophylactics, does NOT increase sexual activity over abstinence education, but does decrease unwanted pregnancy and disease.

But for gay men and women, abstinence until marriage isn't possible, because no marriage can be forthcoming because of influence by organizations like yours. American youth, especially gay youth, need education... and they don't get it. There are to my knowledge no public service announcements of any sort that educate the population.

Tim Edwards, Evan Yoakam and Don Gentry would likely be alive and happy today were they in committed relationships respected by their community and educated about condom use, as distasteful as that may seem to you.

(For those who may obsess about the distaste of sex between people of the same sex, you are allowing your mind to focus on one group alone. Try picturing the full panoply of sex acts going on between your range of friends and family and you will find that you would rather not think about it. That is their right to privacy. You might as well afford them the dignity of that privacy even in the chambers of your own imagination. And do the same for gays.)

[Don Sherfick]

Kenn and Curt: The statements you both either make or appear to subscribe to terming homosexual sexual activity "compulsive behavior" are interesting. Are you in a position to provide any references to studies or opinions that show, for example, that there something about the nature of such activity, as opposed to the heterosexual variety, all other conditions being equal, is inherently "compulsive". My own feeling is that in your moral distaste for homosexuality, you have not adequately thought about the overall nature of "compulsive sexual activity" related to attraction to the opposite sex. In sum, how do they differ, in your opinions?

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris D,

You ignored the point made — Gay marriage is no deterrent to the staphylococcus aureus virus as made evident in areas where the virus is most prevalent — and responded, instead, with an unrelated question.

Please provide answers as well as questions.

Here's an excerpt from an article from the New York Blade: Bill Roundy, "STD Rates on the Rise," New York Blade News, December 15, 2000, p. 1.

"Reports at a national conference about sexually transmitted diseases indicate that gay men are in the highest risk group for several of the most serious diseases. . . . Scientists believe that the increased number of sexually tranmitted diseases (STD) cases is the result of an increase in risky sexual practices by a growing number of gay men who believe HIV is no longer a life-threatening illness."

Not the cause for STD cases: "sexual practices."

[Chris Douglas]

(By the way, I am aware that the staff infections won't necessarily be aided by condom use.... though careful reading of the sources indicate it would be a big help. The staph infections depicted are the same as those that are plaguing (literally) hospitals and nursing homes recently.

And I emphasize that I suspect we would find that those who are most active in the Castro herald from more conservative places.

I am reminded of a conversation I had in Michigan with family friends of Tom's parents. This gentleman was adamantly anti-gay, which he revealed before he realized I am gay. He, his wife, and son are active in a very conservative Catholic denomination the politics of which they identify with completely, including opposition to contraception (aka... condom use.)

The dinner time conversation proceeded and I learned that their "equally conservative son" is actually 40 years old. I learned he was unmarried. "Where is he?" He lives in Michigan, but he's vacationing. "Where is he vacationing?" He always vacations in Bangkok.

So there you have a highly conservative family, opposed to gays and the use of condoms, whose son is 40 years old, unmarried, and vacations in Bangkok. In my opinion, the father's history of anti-gay diatribe, his politics, (he's run for office) and his conservative views of religion have made it virtually impossible for his son to own up to his parents about his sexuality. He would never dream of settling down with a partner in a network of church and family. So he travels.

My parents (life-long Republicans and 50-year members of North United Methodist Church in which they were married) don't have an intolerant bone in their bodies towards anyone. They are the most decent human beings in the world, modest, humane, compassionate. (In my father's case, I would add that he is as selfless and dedicated to his family as any I know.) With such parents, I felt no compunction about revealing my sexual orientation, introducing them to a partner with whom I wanted to share my life, and including them in the life we have built, together in mutual support?

Of the two families, which family do you think is most responsible for the spread of sexual disease? Of the two Church congregations, North United Methodist and the conservative Catholic congregation in Michigan, which do you think is more responsible for the spread of disease, even as far as Bangkok and perhaps back again?

[Don Sherfick]

Kenn/Curt: I'm not a statistican (nor did I attend any classes at a Holiday Inn last night) but it would seem to me that your seeking to say that risky behavior still occurs in the areas where gay marriages have occurred, and then saying that such legal legitimacy is of no consequence is of dubious validity. If you were looking at the same phenomena in the heterosexual community, you would compare risky sex/promiscuity, disease rates etc. between those who were married (or at least in committed long term relationships) and their counterparts in the gay and lesbian community. Granted, those latter numbers are small compared to the millions of marriages in the U.S.A. (The marriages you speak of in San Francisco were short-lived as to legal validity. But that seems to me to be the proper basis comparison, just as, in a related area, comparing kids who have pledged abstinance versus those who have not would be an indication of the effects of the latter.

[Chris Douglas]

Kenn, those cities are places people go who often don't want to be seen as gay in their home towns.... They are the red-light districts for the nation, anonymous cities to which the children of Hoosiers escape.. like Las Vegas for straights. Is the fact that you can get a fast marriage in Las Vegas, where people go for every purpose under the sun and where prostitution and gambling are legal, an argument for denying marriage everywhere else?

You are drawing the wrong conclusion.

[Kenn Gividen]

[shaking head}

[Kenn Gividen]

-shaking head-

[Curt Smith]

Regarding the research revealing the compulsive nature of homosexuals, see below. Check the primary sources before you challenge the numbers or conclusions -- Curt Smith

"Bell and Weinberg reported evidence of widespread sexual compulsion among homosexual men. 83% of the homosexual men surveyed estimated they had had sex with 50 or more partners in their lifetime, 43% estimated they had sex with 500 or more partners; 28% with 1,000 or more partners.Bell and Weinberg p 308

"The same study revealed that homosexual men have to a great extent separated sexuality from relationship. The survey showed 79% of the respondents saying that over half of their sexual partners were strangers. Seventy percent said that over half of their sexual partners were people with whom they had sex only once. Bell and Weinberg pp.308-309. It should be noted that this survey was drawn from the San Francisco area at the height of the celebration by that gay community of its freedom from the restraints of “puritanical, middle-class values” and before the AIDS epidemic struck.

In their study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals published in Journal of Sex Research, Paul Van de Ven et al. found that "the modal range for number of sexual partners ever [of homosexuals] was 101–500." In addition, 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent had between 501 and 1000 partners. A further 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent reported having had more than 1000 lifetime sexual partners. Paul Van de Ven et al., "A Comparative Demographic and Sexual Profile of Older Homosexually Active Men," Journal of Sex Research 34 (1997): 354.

"A survey conducted by the homosexual magazine Genre found that 24 percent of the respondents said they had had more than 100 sexual partners in their lifetime. The magazine noted that several respondents suggested including a category of those who had more than 1,000 sexual partners. "Sex Survey Results," Genre (October 1996), quoted in "Survey Finds 40 percent of Gay Men Have Had More Than 40 Sex Partners," Lambda Report, January 1998, p. 20.

Surely these are indications of either deep dissatisfaction, or else terribly destructive hedonism.

"90% of lesbians surveyed had been recipients of one of more acts of verbal aggression from their partners during the year prior to the study, and 31% reported experiencing physical abuse (Lettie L. Lockhart et al., "Letting out the Secret: Violence in Lesbian Relationships," Journal of Interpersonal Violence 9 (1994): 469–492. ) and in another reference we see that “the incidence of domestic violence among gay men is nearly double that in the heterosexual population.” Gwat Yong Lie and Sabrina Gentlewarrier, "Intimate Violence in Lesbian Relationships: Discussion of Survey Findings and Practice Implications," Journal of Social Service Research 15 (1991): 41–59.

The Medical Institute for Sexual Health further reported: “It should be noted that most studies of family violence do not differentiate between married and unmarried partner status. Studies that do make these distinctions have found that marriage relationships tend to have the least intimate partner violence when compared to cohabiting or dating relationships.” Health Implications Associated With Homosexuality (Austin: The Medical Institute for Sexual Health, 1999), p. 79.

"Lesbians are 3 times more likely to abuse alcohol and to suffer from other compulsive behaviours. Joanne Hall, "Lesbians Recovering from Alcoholic Problems: An Ethnographic Study of Health Care Expectations," Nursing Research 43 (1994): 238–244

"A study of homosexual twins found that they are more likely to have attempted suicide than there heterosexual twin. R. Herrell et al., "A Co-twin Study in Adult Men," Archives of General Psychiatry 56 (1999): 867–874

"The life expectancy for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for men in general. Robert S. Hogg et al., "Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men," International Journal of Epidemiology 26 (1997): 657.

“A disproportionate percentage — 29 percent — of the adult children of homosexual parents had been specifically subjected to sexual molestation by that homosexual parent, compared to only 0.6 percent of adult children of heterosexual parents having reported sexual relations with their parent. … Having a homosexual parent(s) appears to increase the risk of incest with a parent by a factor of about 50.” P. Cameron and K. Cameron, "Homosexual Parents," Adolescence 31 (1996): 772

Conclusions

Scientific studies show there is a correlation between homosexuality and personal distress. There is clear evidence that many live unhealthy lifestyles. But not all homosexuals are distressed. Not all homosexuals experience personal distress nor can it be concluded that such distress is an inevitable part of the homosexual experience even if it is very common.

[Chris Douglas]

Curt, you have engaged with a reasonable tone, one upon which I would hope we can build as we assess accuracy of the statistics you cite, cause and effect.

Let's begin with your acknowledgment that not all gays experience personal distress and that it is not an inevitable part of the gay experience. I very much appreciate that statement, which characterizes the situation with vast majority of gays and lesbians with whom I am personally acquainted.

Every Christmas, I know of an individual in Indianapolis who hosts a quiet Sunday brunch for a group of gays and lesbians numbering over 100. These are people you see in the business world, in charitable service, in the arts, in retail, in education, entrepreneurs, even ex-ministers. Couples attend who have been together for decades. Aside from the fact that the couples are same sex, the brunch and its attendees seem indistinguishable from the general population. They are generally wonderful people leading quiet decent lives of mutual respect, ranging in age from their 30's to their 80's. Since Tom and I spend most of our time with our families and with our own circle of friends and couples(gay and straight), most of these people we only see at functions like this. A great number of them have grown children.

These are the people who as citizens have a right to the equal protection of the laws and whose relationships merit that protection in their depth, mutual sacrifice, commitment, and mutual respect in my opinion as much as, if not more than, many "traditional marriages." By that statement, I mean that the statistics indicate that a large percentage (but a minority, hopefull) of traditional marriages end in divorce, while these relationships have endured. They own property together and they make financial decisions together.

In my estimation, theirs is the better example compared to attempts, which mainly fail, to try to get gays to change or to live chastely without human intimacy, which for sexual human beings, gay or straight, is in my opinion not only difficult, but unreasonable. Human beings deserve intimacy.

Secondly, the population I describe above is a population of people who are difficult to get to, and therefore tough to incorporate into surveys. As I think of virtually all of them, I wonder how an academic would be able to get them adequately... or at all.. represented in a survey sample. Except for my tendency to speak up, how would Tom and I find ourselves included in a survey? We don't subscribe to a gay magazine, don't hang out at clubs (much less San Francisco bathhouses!), etc. How would researchers systematically find people like Tom and me and our friends? They are often surveying a narrow slice of the gay population and extrapolating in ways that bear little relationship to other realities.

Think of the famous early political telephone polls taken that completely mis-reported political sentiment, failing to consider that only the wealthy at that time had telephones. Similarly, a significant story for the gay population is lost in most surveys, because gays of a more active sexual lifestyle are the ones that are coming into contact with the avenues through which researchers build their samples.

Third, in my view it is important to study cause and effect. The problems these surveys depict in my opinion can be tied mainly to a lack of avenues through which gays can assemble healthy and respectable lives, their rights respected.

I will allow that studies seem also to indicate that men, whether gay or straight, have a greater reported tendency to wander from fidelity than women. If there is no marriage from which to wander, no partner to whom one has pledged fidelity, then unattached gay men perceive little downside to recreational sex. And with no societally established pattern for what a same sex-relationship should look like, it cannot but be fluid in expectation.

That's why there is an irony. Conservative heterosexuals consider same sex marriage to be the most radical of ideas, while gays with more conservative views of life consider marriage to be the most conservative of approaches to getting on with life in a responsible and happy way, integrated appropriately with our larger families, churches, communities and work places.

[Stacey]

Chris,

It really is amazing that you can manage to blame Christians for just about everything. Now it is "conservative Christians" who are to blame for the spread of sexual disease?!?

When do individuals become responsible for their own actions and lifestyle choices? When will you stop placing blame on others? Kurt was right in his post...

[Chris Douglas]

By the way, there is another reason that I think it is tough to get the full range of gay experience adequately represented in the studies you cite. The people I mention above associated with that Christmas brunch, for instance, have jobs and lives that they have assembled over a long period of time. It is legal in the United States generally, and in all but those states that have offered protection, to fire people, deny them services, deny them housing, and generally discriminate against them based on their sexual orientation. Many gay couples living quiet lives with a lot to lose decline to participate in any survey that might make a record of their sexual orientation, for to make such a record is to risk everything.

This seems an injustice to me.... we carry on this debate, but not as equals. If you are discriminated against because of your religious views about us, you have a legal basis to challenge the discrimination and protect your right both to hold your views and be treated equally as a citizen in employment, housing, and public services. But by revealing my sexual orientation, I sacrifice my right to be treated equally as a citizen in employment, housing, and public services.

In 1996 when I came out of the closet by founding Log Cabin Republicans in Indiana, I was fired from my corporate employer, a risk I knew I was taking in pursuit of the only action... be honest in the community about who I was... that I felt was appropriate for a man of honor.

Under such circumstances, I would ask you to use care in citing surveys the accuracy of which cannot include a vast part of the gay population. It seems unjust to oppose measures to protect gay citizens from discrimination and at the same time to expect us to present ourselves so that we can be represented and lend accuracy to such surveys.

[Chris Douglas]

Stacey, read my comments about the two families more carefully and reflect upon their truth. You are precisely right... individuals should be held accountable... That 40 year old son shouldn't be doing what he is doing... and in my opinion, his father shouldn't be engaging in anti-gay rhetoric oblivious to the consequences in his own family.

In no respect is theirs how a family should behave. That is why I wince when the word "family values" is applied to such perspectives. Family values involve love and acceptance, mutual and self respect... which seem to be nearly absent in that family.

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris Douglas' approach is to dismiss discrimination by portraying gays as normal folk who differ only in their gender partner preference.

However, I question the wisdom of turning a blind eye to gay-related health risks. AIDS and the staphylococcus aureus virus are two of many.

[Chris Douglas]

Kenn, concentrate real hard now.... we are normal folk who differ only in our gender partner. (You say preference, I say orientation, the term now accepted and understood by virtually all the medical and psychological associations and indicating it is a given, not a choice. The American Bishops of the Catholic Church affirmed the same in a pastoral letter years ago.)

Kenn, you can't pin the millions dying of AIDS in Africa on gays, nor the SA virus on gays either... it has struck elementary schools, nursing homes, athletic teams, and hospitals. I would certainly endorse sex education. You can relate the spread of sexually transmitted disease on sexual activity unrestricted to marriage in an environment in which there is no sex education.. which is are both circumstances foisted upon the gay community through public policy and conservative opposition to giving gays access to the institution of civil marriage.

[Curt Smith]

Here's the question, which different readers will answer differently: Are gay men shunned by society, which prompts them (writ large, per the data)to engage in risky behaviors of all sorts that take 8 to 20 years off their lives, on average? Or, do gay men engage is risky behaviors that takes 8 to 20 years off their lives and as a result also experience shunning by the larger culture?

I think the precursor is gay behavior (compulsion due to deep wounding) that leads to shunning/stigmas.

[Chris Douglas]

Curt, the problematic aspect of your statement is this: I respect your right as an American to think anything you want to think (so long as you don't engage in a criminal act against a those whom you denigrate as a result, but that's another topic.)

But what you think is not sustained whatsoever by the conclusions of the scientific and medical community regarding the origins of sexual orientation. To the contrary.

(I do reject the idea that I personally have a compulsion due to deep wounding.... to the contrary, I had the happiest and most normal of childhoods.

A digression:

What is interesting to me about your contention that who we are is the product of a deep wounding, is that in my extended family, there is only one distant branch that has become fundamentalist Christian. That branch descends from my maternal grandfather's brother who was an abusive alcoholic.

One day (in the late 1940's), the wife of this abusive brother sat their children down and said she wanted to divorce their father, but would not do so if any of the children, adolescents and young teens who had been witness to the abuse, objected. One of those young children objected, and the mother remained in that marriage the rest of what turned out to be a brief and unhappy life. The child who objected grew up.... and is now a fundamentalist minister, and his children are fundamentalist. I would contend that it is not a coincidence that the child who suffered such unreasonable trauma became the most adamant as an adult, for he had to reconcile in his conscience as he grew up the adamant position he took, even as we watched the physical abuse of his mother and siblings. It was a noble intent by his mother, but unfair to put the weight of such responsibility on a child, who would have to find a way to live with it the rest of his life. He did so by drawing a hard line and believing that everyone should do as he does. The alternative, that perhaps he was wrong, is too painful for him to consider.)

Regarding gay behavior leading to shunning/stigmas, school yard bullying of children perceived to be gay begins long before there is any gay behavior.

I will agree that there is an unfortunate cycle, that being gay in itself can produce deep wounding in an intolerant environment, which can in turn produce behavior which in turn can produce greater intolerance. But it seems to me that the organizations with which you are affiliated are continuing and promoting the cycle rather than arresting it.

[Chris Douglas]

Curt, upon re-reading, I see that you are not contending that sexual orientation is a compulsion related to deep wounds, but that the promiscuous behavior is the compulsion related to deep wounding that therefore produces shunning. Perhaps there is indeed some cycle there. But I would contend that the deep wounding is is usually the shunning itself..... so it is chicken or egg...Perhaps the cycle has existed virtually for eternity.

In my view, then, one might also say that mainstreaming gays and guiding gays into channels of existence in which monogamy and fidelity are promoted would be an important step to reducing the problem of promiscuity... just as it has been for heterosexuals. Indeed, in my view, refusing to encourage and protect such channels promises to ensure that the cycle will continue ad infinitum. How can we impose expectations on gays when there is no common structure for it as there is for straights?

[Chris Douglas]

Or to put it succinctly, the fact that many gays for eons have behaved promiscuously and the fact that gays have not had access to the institution of marriage, or at least civil union, are two sides of the same coin.

[Leon Dixon]

Kinsey's lies were well known at the time, even to him, as they were pointed out to him. Mere journalists, of course, were and are clueless. Maslow, among others exposed IU's shoddy pretensions of being a place of ideas at the time.

[Clinton F]

At the expense of butting into a conversation, and at the risk of revealing more about myself than I would normally do, I am a gay man who lives in San Francisco, am not in a long term relationship, and have no desire to mimic an institution which already has an over 50% failure rate without gays having the right to be blamed for its failure.

I find it just a little stunning from those touting "family values" to think that if I was to pick up some lady in a strip bar and marry her tomorrow, that your institution of marriage would be better protected than if I was to marry a man with whom I had been in a monogomous relationship for 20 years.

The UCSF study provided no new information, and it is well documented that staph infections do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The unfortunate language of the UCSF press release (for which they've already apologized) suggests that this infection is not already in the general population. Sad for all of us, it is.

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris D,

I don't think I disagree with much of what you said.

Concerning nuture vs nature, I fall on neither side of that debate. People are inherently given to particular behavioral patterns. I see no reason why homosexuality would be any different — but that doesn't rule out learned traits.

Whether learned or inherent, it has no bearing on the health matter.

My worry is that gays are denying the serious health risks associated with their lifestyle to avoid the stigma.

The African AIDS epidemic in no way erases the gay AIDS epidemic.

Back in 1971/2 a photo was taken of a dozen friends who had gathered out our home. Two are no longer with us. One of the two is (was) Thom. He died before the age of 30 after moving to San Francisco to immerse himself in the gay lifestyle.