Yup, John nailed it in the head here. True, after a while, we all quietly and implicitly agreed that what was going on WAS gay. We were trading gay magazines and VHS vids, too. No one spoke about being gay, though, but it was understood by all that we were all very much 'walking on the wild side', and no one showed any sign of being uncomfortable with it.

Over the time, your close buddies and you developed bonds of friendship. No one really felt like being in love with anyone in particular, but your close buddies enjoyed your support to quite some degree. We all implicitly agreed that the guy you were having sex several times a week was not just another dude you knew, but someone who deserved your friendship and support. Towards the end of the month, a few fellow college kids were running really low on food money. No one expected you to help them all, but a good top tried to make sure that his generosity was directed towards the dudes who bottom for him first and foremost. This was an unspoken, unwritten rule, but all my friends observed it judiciously.


Relatively few people would actually start a gossip here and there. 'You know, he does not have a GF, yet?', etc.. But since we all kept our stories very strictly to ourselves, there was no smoking gun, and hence, hardly anyone did more than shrug with his shoulders and move on to the more substantial subjects.

Unlike John, I never experienced any feelings of regret once I learnt that one or the other HS/college cuties came out.

Practically all of my buddies and I were pretty open-minded and extrovert. If a cute dude showed up anywhere on the horizon, the chances are that we would be putting our works on him. If he did not catch the bait, well, it was bad for all of us, but we moved on pretty swiftly. You win some - you lose some.

We also learnt pretty soon that a few guys who we thought were gay and who really turned out to be gay were apparently not interested in the dude(s) who were approaching them. A few years later, we discovered that there was yet another coterie of gay guys at college who were mostly looking for daddies, or preferably for sugar daddies. Those guys had had absolutely no intentions of messing around with their peers to start with. Some of it was purely sexual - they wanted to have sex with grown up men, and NOT with growing boys. Much of it had to do with money and lifestyle that some of them were craving for.

I befriended some of the Trophy Boys gang during my postgrad years, and discovered that most of the talk among them was about expensive gifts, exclusive foreign travel, and life on a superfast lane. Neither I nor any of my buddies would either qualify nor would we be really interested in going financially overboard to score with yet another dude, regardless of how hottt he may have been.

The 'generosity' most of the tops in my gang showed limited itself to a possibly nice meal, occasional movie/theater tickets, and a cab ride home, usually after some hot play in the top's bedroom.

We also learnt that being 'out' was of relatively low practical importance even if it were a theoretical possibility in those days only.

Later on, when many, many people came out, and the rest of the world kept on wondering if this guy was really gay or not, most of us shrugged with our shoulders and moved on.

The gay could be as gay as Christmas. I may be as out as anyone could possibly be, but if he does not find me attractive enough, I am not going to score anyway.

KD

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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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Much like NakedAl - as we found out how HIV was transmitted anal sex became rare.

I think what is happening now is a lot of younger gay / bi guys have grown up with AIDS as a manageable disease and they don't have the fear we had. But they don't realize the risks they are still taking. Sure the disease is much less deadly than it was - but it is still not something I am willing to risk my life for just to bareback.

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I looked at the Atlantic article again and saw a link to the study. When I went that online repository, I could read only the abstract. To see the entire text you have to pay to join the site. Without reading the study, we really don't know much about the sample or the methodology. I would like to believe that gay men, as a subgroup, are more educated about HIV than the general public, but that ain't necessarily so: It depends on the gay man. That goes even moreso if you consider the group of MSM, based on the activity of men having sex with men rather than the identity of considering oneself gay.

I thought it might help to post a link to The Stigma Project and also to their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/thestigmaproject. From their 'About Us' page: "We are a grassroots organization that aims to lower the HIV infection rate and neutralize the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS through education and awareness via social media and advertising. The Stigma Project seeks to create an HIV neutral world, free of judgement and fear by working with both positive and negative individuals from all walks of life, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, race, or background."

Anyhow, there is outreach to the "outliers" and it comes from many groups with many different messages. The individual still needs to make a choice, or sometimes they choose not to choose or their path somehow gets away from their choice.

Taking a quick glance at their Founders and Board of Directors, I'm making a unjustified snap judgement that this is led largely by younger gay men. Younger, in that I'm 54, gay glancing at the photos and bios (though you never know).

I wish I had the time now to write more about what I think the audience for the Atlantic article was and about generational differences in perception and behavior toward HIV. This seems to be different not only for those like me who moved to a place where I could be openly gay when I was young (as opposed to those who had a different cultural identity or self-image) but also different for people of different ages and life experience. In fact, I wish I could write instead of doing my regular work. Oh, well.

All for now. ~ Bob

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Hi, I took a look at the article in a little more detail. I see the authors' point that we have very distorted perceptions on relative risks of things we encounter every day. But it still begs the question about the subgroups who are at greater risk than others. My concern is for the people in recognized risk groups who misinterpret the results. This has been really interesting and I will try to access the study.

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