Hi. I am returning to the original point of this thread, but have found the stories/memoirs of the 70s and 80s really interesting. I started having sex with guys in the late 70s, and so by the early 80s was in just as much panic about HIV as everyone else. Once it was established that semen transmitted HIV, anal sex became rarer and always with a condom, and that's true for me all these years later. After studying the stats, I changed my mind about oral sex (I don't use a condom). That is my "reasonable." And I'm not with a single partner, I do have anonymous encounters from time to time.

But the parts of the article that were given here leave me questioning. Are the one thousand people having unprotected sex a random sample of the US population having sex (which are overwhelmingly straight and in relationships that haven't involved the large number of partners I've had)? The sample doesn't represent me very well; most people on this site are outliers. Of course it's true that the population as a whole isn't at risk having unprotected sex (thank god they do, otherwise the birth rate would go to zero). What concerns me is that people who are outliers read this stuff and think that applies to them. There are a lot of health statistics that get very confusing in the hands of the public.

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