Interesting thread. I don't think porn-sized guy was asking people to "sympathize" with his friend, so the Ryan White comparison seems odious. It sounds as if that poster in fact shows no sympathy to either cigarette smokers who get cancer or adult gay men who sero-convert. The latter is not a clean analogy either: cigarette companies spend billions of dollars persuading very young people to smoke. Nicotine is highly, highly addictive. Once smokers start, they have a terrible time quitting. I think we should care about these people a lot both before and after the cancer develops. They're human beings who are suffering horribly, from both addiction and disease.

Gay men are often raised in extremely homophobic environments, including their immediate families while growing up, and grow into a society that is generally homo-intolerant, with dozens of states still prohibiting gay sex by law and with prevailing mores that equate gayness with sin and damnation. Gay men respond differently to this environment according to their character, inner strengths and upbringing, but for many the sexualization process can difficult and many, though not nearly all or even a majority, are prone to self-loathing and self-destructive behavior for extended periods of time, particularly when still young and forming. Doing drugs (just an assumption) and letting a guy you don't know fuck you raw at a huge all-night gay rave in New York City, one of the HIV epicenters, doesn't reflect well on that particular guy's self-respect or maturity; but self-respect and maturity, even in adults, can be fluid - mature adults on drugs and alcohol can do stupid things. Fucking a guy raw, if you have HIV and don't know your partner and don't discuss it is a deeply uncaring and negative act, I think we'd all agree. But should we condemn both of these guys? Should we not care about either of them? Should the top go to jail and the bottom to re-education camp?

The Ryan White analogy, I think, would condemn ALL gay men who seroconvert, since the men are adults with - we assume - fully formed moral compasses. The laws condemning knowingly infective HIV transmitters may not distinguish between a truly criminal act, the deliberate transmission of HIV to others, and a deeply careless and negative act between gay men, e.g. two guys fucking raw at the Black Party without any verbal communication between them about HIV status. In the latter case, I think it's important to repeat what I said in the above post: that it's gay men who care most about gay men getting HIV, and that we can always do more to help each other stay negative, and to help poz guys continue to care about themselves and others while they struggle to live with the disease. If we're going to continue to enjoy the tribal rites we've developed for ourselves as a community, such as circuit parties and multi-partner gay sexuality of the sort that cfs.com and its posters, for example, appear to celebrate, then we have to try unceasingly to care more about one another more while pursuing the very real pleasures of the sex for which we continue to be discouraged and persecuted (and prosecuted). What it boils down to is the individual act.

One last note: a good friend of mine, a top guy who is HIV negative and new to this country, and I were discussing this very subject and the fact that in New York, among a lot of sexually active gay guys in anonymous sex encounters, there seems to be a prevalent attitude that if you're fucking and the bottom guy is willing to be fucked raw, then it's the top guy's responsibility to assume that the bottom guy is HIV positive. Does this sound familiar to any of you?

Well, my top friend says that he had no idea at first that so many guys thought this way (or indeed that so many guys are willing to fuck raw, which he never does). New to this place and these ways, he nonetheless didn't make any assumptions, he just always wore a condom. What if the guy who got fucked at that party was the poz one, and the top guy was just a lusty greenhorn who didn't know to assume the bottom guy is positive? I guess all I'm saying is that condoms really make sense in a world of so many unspoken assumptions, and that it really pays to communicate.

I fully expect to be reamed for this posting, because so many of the political postings here deal in absolutes, despite what I consider to be the deep shades of grey on this subject... .