So gay guys go on having unprotected sex after they are diagnosed with HIV, a new descriptive study of gay poz guys at a clinic in Boston tells us. Nothing new there, although it’s sobering to be reminded that one in two of the men who know they have HIV choose to bareback with someone [...]
It’s usually safe to take time off in July to move house — in a previous existence in the newroom we used to call the European summer the “silly season”. In the weeks I’ve been painting walls, unpacking boxes and not blogging, we’ve had some HIV silliness, but some good sense too. The IAS conference [...]
The day before the UK release of Bruno, Sasha Baron Cohen’s swish along the catwalks of homophobia, the UK’s House of Lords voted to allow Brits to criticize homosexuality. Gay groups are painting this as a victory for homophobia. Christian groups say it is a victory for free speech. I say, on balance, that it [...]
New HIV-infections among gay men are rising everywhere they are measured, with the sole apparent exception of Sydney. That’s in part because Sydney has not dropped the ball (and the budget) on prevention. It hasn’t swallowed the “Treatment IS Prevention” mantra that seems to be behind the rise in many other places. If we want [...]
The death rattle of the Bush administration puts it, once again, in the company of great defenders of human rights such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. This time, it breathes its sickness on gays. The US is one of nearly 60 countries which stamped its feet in opposition to France’s declaration (made in the [...]
Tuesday evening. I spent it with baited breath sitting at the bar in Baltimore airport, surrounded by boys with buzz-cuts and camouflage who were headed for Iraq. They seemed strangely unconcerned by the drama that was unfolding in red and blue on the screens in front of us. I, for my part, nearly missed my [...]
A little while ago, CDC estimated how many people were newly infected with HIV in the US in 2006. They told us it was a disease of gay men and black people. Now they’ve done more detailed analysis: It’s not just a disease of gay men and black people. It’s increasingly a disease of gay [...]
Thailand has been much (and rightly) praised for its pragmatic approach to cutting HIV in its illegal but vast heterosexual sex trade. Of course when the tide of brothel-caught infections goes out, the rocks of ongoing infection in jails, among drug injectors and between men who have sex with one another are left exposed. And [...]
New York likes to think of itself as ahead of the rest of the US on many fronts. It certainly is on the HIV front. In most of the world, we’ve got precious little idea how many people get infected with HIV each year. Generally, we report HIV prevalence — the number of people who [...]
So Britain’s spy services are growing up. According to the Financial Times, the domestic spy service MI5 is looking to recruit more gay men and women to the service. MI5 has hooked up with gay rights lobby group Stonewall to try and get more gays to sign up to stick their noses into other people’s [...]
Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban leader Raul Castro, has been a crusader for the rights of gay men and women and for transgenders in Cuba. One result is that Cuban hospitals will soon begin offering sex change operations. (Perhaps Bangkok’s sex change clinics should start worrying). I am honoured that Ms. Castro has cracked open [...]
Apparently not willing or able to think for themselves, Christian fundamentalists have been programming their computers to automate their views. The result: content that they themselves would probably consider pornographic. This, for example: “Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark. This time, he kept [...]
Still on the subject of the multiple meanings of masculinity: whatever your identity, you’ve got to pee. But if you’re a person with a penis who dresses as a woman, where should that be? There’s a debate about this over at The Lost Boy, continued at by Roger Tatoud at Peripheries whom I thank for [...]
Further to yesterday’s post, I find myself in California at a happy time. Same-sex marriages are a huge step forward in undermining the absurd qualms that our society still has about who has sex with whom. I notice that the qualms are still reflected, though, in reports of the happy day. My New York Times [...]
Good timing. I arrived in Washington DC as they admitted they’d underestimated the size of the city’s AIDS epidemic by half. I got to San Francisco the day that California allowed gay couples to marry. Hurrah for some sensible policies at last. The San Francisco Chronicle has blanket coverage of the rush to get married, [...]
I was pleased to read of the marriage of Bishop Gene Robinson and his partner of 20 years Mark Andrew. Well, not marriage actually, but civil union, the closest we allow gay men and women to get to the sacrament in most States in the US. Bishop Robinson is Episcopalian (which is pretty High Church [...]
I’ve been remiss about posting links to electronic versions of all of the references cited in The Wisdom of Whores (or at least abstracts, where academic journals or others continue to restrict copyright to full text). I just have not found time to post several hundred documents and links to the site yet; though I [...]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in Prospect about HIV prevention among gay men now that near-universal access to treatment is making AIDS virtually invisible in rich countries. This excited a fair bit of comment over at Metafilter, not all of it pretty. But in any case, I was premature in declaring [...]
The head of Uganda’s AIDS commission says his country can’t afford to do any HIV prevention work with gay men, according to the Pink News. Though they’ve got hundreds of millions in the AIDS funding trough, and have their snouts raised for more. “Gays are one of the drivers of HIV in Uganda, but because [...]
We’ve all known for ages that there are essentially two HIV epidemics in the world: a heterosexual epidemic in East and Southern Africa (some would say all of sub-Saharan Africa) and an epidemic driven by drug injection, sex between men and commercial sex in the rest of the world. Now there’s another distinction, too. There [...]
