Through my job, I met a lot of people -- some with HIV, some with AIDS, most without either, all though were dedicated to stopping a pox that had already taken far too many lives. Danny who at 21 had been fighting his own HIV since 13 and Bea, who'd at 25 had been a survivor since college, still live on in memory. And memory only.

We all educated with the same message to gay and straight, young and old: "If you have insertive intercourse, use a condom." Simple. We also taught about waiting, about abstaining, about things to do intimately other than intercourse, about responsibility and health. Simply distilled though, the message was cover it if you are going to use it or demand that your partner do so if they were going to use it on you.

Ideals do get tempered by time, so while stopping AIDS was out of reach, slowing it's spread by preventing many new infections was not. Through the 90's, AIDS infections slowed and medical advances lengthened lives. Big ideals, small victories, time still well spent.

Why bring this up? Well, the Human capacity to act stupidly in the face of overwhelming information continues to amaze. This new, latest, "craze" for bareback sex -- screwing without a condom -- is the latest in a long line of boneheaded ideas justified by not through thought or intellect, but through stupidity.

I wish I could say that I didn't get it, that I didn't understand why people would betray the memory and effort of those who fought hard against an awful disease so that others, sometime, wouldn't have to live through a soul sapping existence of pain, suffering and despair.

But, you see, now I do....

About three months ago, I signed on to a group at Yahoo "dedicated" to "bare-back activism". I wanted to read first hand the thoughts of others -- I guess like Andrew Sullivan -- who actually thought there was something to fight for and someone to fight against. I sat through a bajillion adds for sex parties, penile enlargements, and for some girl named Wendy' whose sorority sisters are all really kinky nymphos interested in getting it on with real men. (That they also have great difficulty in understanding that some men really do only like meat goes without saying.)

Realizing I wasn't getting anywhere -- and tired of Wendy's pleas -- I asked this rather innocuous question:

I've been following this and other message boards for a few months now, but there hasn't been a lot of traffic on which to get an answer. So in that event, I'll be a bit proactive here and ask [quoting from an earlier message]:

This is a group for gay men to come together to defend and promote real ("bareback") sex and oppose the self-serving AIDS establishment and its initiative to brainwash us all into a condom fetish ("safe 'sex'").

What "self serving establishment out...to brainwash people into a condom fetish" do you mean? How does safer sex ed, which is trying to get people to modify their behavior enough to use a condom during whatever sex they have with whomever they have it, become something to become an activist against? I understand the "my choice" argument -- I don't fully agree with it, but hey, that's life -- but I don't get being active over safer sex education and educators.

This was the reply, posted back to the list:

It's very simple. Condoms, as a strategy, are causing people to get infected. Do you think it's right for the religious right to go around trying to "convert" gay people into being straight? Of course not, that's just trying to get someone to mask what is natural / instinctual to them.

Generations of unwanted pregnancies tell us men will not use condoms
consistently. Do we blame the men? Not really. They are just following a natural human sexuality path in not using them - they ruin sex. And if you want to debate that then you just clearly don't know what you're talking about, or are in major denial.

The AIDS establishment has promoted condoms like a religion, and indeed has quashed all opposition as heretical. There are other options. There's a mountain of evidence to show that antimicrobial lube is more effective at STD / HIV prevention, both as a tactic and as a strategy. There's even been a bill in the last 6 sessions of Congress to this effect that won't be endorsed by any major AIDS organization. By the AIDS establishment's own logic, virtually every
dead friend is so because he didn't use a condom - would he still be here today if he been told he could use antimicrobial lube?

There are opportunity costs in promoting condoms - they allow too many infections to continue because of non-compliance (and all the bitching, guilting, and brow beating won't change that - but it will cause untold psychological side effects), and they divert energy, time and resources that could be spent promoting antimicrobial lube. But the AIDS orgs. KNOW all of this, and want it that way.

With the partial use of condoms in small part, and the lower viral loads of the infected in large part, the explosion of infections from the 80s has been brought to a smolder. The AIDS establishment claims this is due to incremental improvements of the situation that they have made ("and, oh, a cure / hope / Jerry Lewis is just around the corner - if you could please just send us one more donation and give us just one more year!"), while not completely eliminating the problem, which would also mean the elimination of their lucrative careers and hob-knobbing with the politicians and socialites. If they
have their way, AIDS will be an institution of the gay community to stay. Their actions speak louder then their indignation on this point.

For the AIDS establishment, money makes the world go 'round, even when it means that you eat your fellow gay brothers for lunch to get ahead or stay on top. For gay society, popularity makes the world go 'round, even if it means you regurgitate, without question, dogma that is killing your or your friends.

So whether you only care about stopping AIDS at all costs, or you only care about being able to have a natural sex life without condoms, AND ESPECIALLY if you care about both - an end to the current AIDS establishment as we know it, and the condom dogma, must be achieved. None of this is rocket science. It just takes the ignorant or the brainwashed about 5 seconds to stop listening to
their self-righteousness, or to only one source of information, to see that something is terribly wrong with this situation.

- Moderator

I didn't realize I'd been brainwashed by a vast, international cabal of AIDS activists who want only to further their stranglehold on the gay community by promoting the use of an item that has been definitely shown to prevent infection from HIV when used consistently and properly, but, in fact, really just leads to more infections, statistics and studies be damned.

What can you say in response to that? I could ask why he thinks people would be any more prone to using an antimicrobial lube if they won't use condoms (and no, most people who have intercourse that way don't have to use lube). Or I could ask why there is such a high correlation between increased condom usage and decreased HIV infection. I could even have asked why so many AIDS organizations are laying off staff and closing up shop given the dearth of clients in need of their services. I could even have made the ethical argument about not creating new super strains of the virus that are resistant to all our current drugs. I could have raised any of those questions and tried for a response.

Could have...if I hadn't been banned from the group right after the moderator sent his response.