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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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I’d like to reflect on these and these relatively recent comments by @Walterodim and @HonoriaWinchester on the official response to the initial AIDS epidemic in the US and California in particular (I guess).

Not being an American I only have a vague idea about this entire subject. As far as I can tell, the standard Blue Tribe narrative in the context of the culture war on this is that the bigoted and evil Reagan administration, politically captured by Christian fundamentalists and pandering to Southern racists, callously refused to even consider the idea of formulating a federal response to a dangerous epidemic, and missed a good opportunity to contain the spread thereof by allocating federal funds to research and preventive measures.

Fair enough. But let’s assume for a moment that the administration had actually tried doing all those things earnestly, for real. What are the realistic chances that whatever measures they’d have come up with were bound to include the decisions to publicly call upon homosexual men to refrain from a) having unprotected sex with strangers altogether b) donating blood?

The obvious technocratically correct response, with eighties technology and knowledge, would be to intern the gays until we figure out more about HIV. Somehow, critics of Reagan’s aids response don’t seem to bring this up, unless they’re Lyndon larouche.

Weren't most these guys closeted? I don't suppose the government could get most of them in a camp.

Interning Japanese Americans is relatively easy because of their distinct looks and names.

No US government would survive locking up 5% of the majority white male population.

That doesn’t stop people from calling for pie in the sky Covid measures.

I read And the Band Played On.. a few years ago. The author was a mainstream journalist at the SF Chronicle, was gay, and eventually died of AIDS himself, so he has no reason to be biased against the gay community. What I took from the book is that for the first few years nobody wanted to talk about AIDS. The conservatives thought it was a gay disease that did not affect them, the liberals, the NY Times journalists, did not want to highlight the fact that there was a disease that mostly seemed to arise from men having sex with each other. Gay activists also fought screening men-who-have-sex-with-men from blood donations because they didn't want gays stigmatized.

If you read carefully, it seems like Reagan's main "culpability" was that his priority was to get control of the budget, and his people already thought NIH had a huge budget, and they should just use that budget to research AIDS rather than allocate new money. So really the most you can say about Reagan's guilt is: "Reagan's culpability was that he didn't know that a bureaucracy spontaneously reallocating money within itself to address the highest need disease is not something that actually happens, so either Congress and the President dedicate new money for the disease, or no research gets funded for it." It's funny how no one ever criticizes the NIH for not just immediately reorganizing their funding priorities to address AIDS ...

Unfortunately, this isn't how it all works - by law.

Congress approves various agencies budgets at various levels of detail. If, however, Congress is approving your funding line by line (most common in the Defense budget), you are not allowed, by law, to take funding from one line and apply it to another line without congress explicitly re-authorizing it.

Okay, so this must be pretty easy, right? When everyone agrees AIDS is super important to research, Congress just dashes off a little law saying "yeah, do it."

Well, no. In regular order, it would have to go through the committee of jurisdiction with all of the committee processes - markups, hearings, etc. Then, once it passes committee, it goes out to a floor vote.

Why not just skip to the floor vote? Because floor time is incredibly scarce and is controlled by party leadership. If you just go out and start introducing bills, you aren't even going to have a quorum to vote on them (which is why most bills introduced don't get passed and are "signalling" bills only).

I could go into more detail, but you get the point. The U.S. gov't is NOT like a corporation where you have budgets as guidelines for spending but, really, it's all coming from the same corporate account so just spend how you need to. The money not only has to exist, but has to be specifically slotted in for its purpose. If you don't obey those rules as an agency, you're violating federal law.

Yet another reason why state capacity is so fucked. We've created this arbitrary and capricious self-limitations that are blindingly obviously inefficient

That’s not the case here at all. NIH, NSF and the like have enormous amounts of discretion where they allocate funds, even if it appears to be earmarked.

For example, huge chunk of NIH funds are earmarked for cancer research. The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify. I learned this from some of my friends doing biotech research. Literally all of them work under cancer research grant, but their actual research has very little to do with cancer per se.

How to study AIDS on cancer grant? Easy: AIDS causes cancer, so AIDS prevention reduces cancer incidence. Done. No need to reallocate anything in Congress.

So, I'm not talking about earmark at all. Try to be less stupid.

Here's a CRS report on NIH funding for instance

To the basically literate eye, one would find a table with the following budget authorities:

Institutes/Centers

Cancer Institute (NCI) Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Dental/Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) Diabetes/Digestive/Kidney (NIDDK) Neurological Disorders/Stroke (NINDS) Allergy/Infectious Diseases (NIAID) General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Child Health/Human Development (NICHD) National Eye Institute (NEI) Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

Those aren't the only ones. There are more, but it's easy enough to understand the breakdown.

Moving money from NCI to NIGMS, for instance, would require congressional approval. How money within NIGMS is spent is more discretionary, sure. But your contention is either a deliberate misunderstanding of my original outline of the problem, or a weird semantic gotcha. Either way, it betrays a profound level of ignorance (intentional or otherwise) of how Congressional appropriations work. But I repeat myself. Your use of the term "earmark" in a wildly inappropriate manner betrays you.

The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify.

Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.

You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.

Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.

I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.

So, I'm not talking about earmark at all. Try to be less stupid.

You know better than this. I've talked to you before about how you have a habit of earning AAQCs followed by posting something clearly and intentionally antagonistic. This gets you another three-day ban. You can correct people without the juvenile namecalling.

Looks like in 1981 NIH had $3.5 billion in total, $1 billion for National Cancer Institute and $228 million for NIAID, $527 million for Heart Lung Blood Institute, $331 million for general health. Is the budget further itemized within those agencies? Seems like they could have used any of these budgets. Saying they were doing a cancer investigation wouldn't have even been a stretch as incidences of kaposi sarcoma was one of the primary early symptoms that got the whole investigation started.

A typical use of cancer funds is a grant where you GMO some bacteria to produce some protein, which you then concentrate, crystallize, then do some X-ray crystallography to analyze its structure. What does it have to do with cancer? Oh right, that protein may lead to a cancer drug, maybe. But, you know, it might also lead to AIDS drug! Who knows.

One distinction: homosexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) are different terms. As far as I know, the blood donation screening questions have always been activity based, maybe very early understanding and terminology was fuzzy (GIRDS). So claims of discrimination against homosexual men are conflating terms and missing the epidemiological reason of the bans. On current blood donations, the organization I donate with asks about 'new sexual partners in the last # month', STI questions, if you have ever tested positive for HIV or taken HIV prevention medication. Questions which maybe more finely target the MSM population they want to exclude.

One time when I was donating blood an old-time volunteer about how at one point blood donation was a free HIV test, so some men would donate and then call later and ask the red cross not to use their blood.

One distinction: homosexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) are different terms.

Only to the extent one is trying to get gay men in denial to admit that they are gay. In normal usage, if you have sex with men you are gay or at the very least bi.

There's actually a practical use here. Certain populations (two big examples in the use: inner city black men (see: "down-low" culture), and the prison population) will have sex with men and never ever say they are homosexual. In the case of the convict side of things they'll often never have sex with men outside of prison.

Awareness and use of this information ends up being relevant for certain kinds of health screening.

There is a distinction. Despite being ex-gay I have never been a sodomite; there's supposedly some in the opposite direction though I have more trouble modeling them mentally.

You can be gay and not have sex with men, of course, just like you can be straight and not have sex with women. But I reject the idea that you can have sex with men and not be gay (or bi). That makes no sense whatsoever.

Ehh... I could see straight guys going 'gay for pay' in porn or prostitution while they're otherwise heterosexual in their desires.

The late Billy Herrington (RIP) did manage to discover his bisexuality after having been in a straight relationship. His girlfriend was the one who got him into modeling in the first place.

Would you mind explaining, if you’re willing? It sounds like there’s a story there.

I was attracted to men in the past, consider myself cured, and have never had sexual contact with another male.

Were you exclusively attracted to men, or to women as well? If the latter, wouldn't that make you ex-bisexual? If not, does this mean you also became attracted to women at a certain point, or have you wound up asexual?

I see, thank you for explaining.

Did the "cure" happen spontaneously or was there some method that you used?

Yes. I worked through a therapy book written by a doctor van den ardweg(I don’t remember the title) under supervision.

Trivially, I was bisexual or gay for the better part of a decade before I entered even the most expansive definition of MSM, and that's as someone that was a pretty late bloomer when it came to having any interests.

One distinction: homosexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) are different terms.

As a gay man who has only ever had sex with women, I appreciate this.

This is one of the artifacts of left thought that I find to be especially intellectually bankrupt. The idea that identity is only ever a personally applied label without dependency in the real world, especially behaviors. If I can identify as whatever I want despite hard counters by reality and/or a repeated behavioral pattern, then "identity" is as meaningful as fantasy LARPing; I'm gay, and also a level 40 dwarvish warlock. They're both made up and just fun things to goof around with!

But the problem is that we've imbued identity with the force of law. Protected class of people exist. Bostock v. Clayton County linked sexuality identity and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act --- what I "identify" as is literally as important, legally speaking, as age and pregnancy status - things that, for now at least, is still objectively measurable.

Either something is real and important or it isn't. If the only arbiter of my "identity" is my own self conception and subject to instant total revision based on nothing more than my mood, how can we ever approach something like equal protection under the law?

One distinction: homosexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) are different terms.

Fellas, is it gay to bang another dude?

Is it gay for intoxicated college girls to kiss and grope each other (or more) for the purpose of getting male sexual attention, without "debasing" themselves with male sexual interaction? I wouldn't say it isn't, but the point (in case it needs to be stated) is that demographics aren't natural kinds, so having purpose-specific definitions of certain categories in certain contexts is better than the alternative.

(See, also, The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories)

I think you can argue that behaviors can be gay as distinct from people being gay - so those girls would be doing gay stuff, but if it's just a one-off thing rather than something they pursue regularly, they aren't themselves gay. The phrase "Men who have sex with men" however, implies men who habitually have sex with men, not just "Men who fooled around with another man at some point". Bisexuals notwithstanding, it's easier to argue that that is essentially synonymous with "gay".

Looking back on this thread, I can't believe my throw-away joke sparked this much conversation...

I took it as a joke, but it's also an interesting question.

so having purpose-specific definitions of certain categories in certain contexts is better than the alternative.

I am in agreement with this specific statement.

The point in contention between the two sides here is precisely if 'MSM' and 'gay' mean the same thing or not.

If they are not, then of course there needs to be a separately-created purpose-specific definition.
If they are, then 'gay' is said purpose-specific definition, and 'MSM' serves no purpose.

The point in contention between the two sides here is precisely if 'MSM' and 'gay' mean the same thing or not.

If they are not, then of course there needs to be a separately-created purpose-specific definition.

If they are, then 'gay' is said purpose-specific definition, and 'MSM' serves no purpose.

I think others gave good examples of ways in which they have different meanings.

Gay is an identity (something you are).
Banging other dudes is an action (something you do).

Men do, women are, so men naturally assume that when you ask them this, you're asking them to apply the woman's label. Unless you're a man predisposed to Gayness (which forms part of the problem with Gays, from the average man's perspective), that is inaccurate, insulting, and outright dangerous.

Of course, that also means they won't be part of any discussion when women and Gay men are trying to create an identity to describe this phenomenon, so it's not like the mistake theorists in those groups are even going to get a chance to know that. And the conflict theorists do it intentionally because male-coded sexuality bad.

I’m rather confused by this post.

Are you trying to say that there are no “gay men” because “gay” is an “identity” and “identities” are “for women”?

Do you believe that there’s a legitimate distinction to be made between “gay men” and “men who have sex with men”?

Do you believe that there’s a legitimate distinction to be made between “gay men” and “men who have sex with men”?

Yes, I find Sin's wording a bit odd regarding the women thing, but I like the are versus do description. There is a legitimate distinction there. Gay men are a particular subset of MSM, and part of defining the subset is the cultural component.

Do you believe that there’s a legitimate distinction to be made between “gay men” and “men who have sex with men”?

Gayness is a white construct, other (sub)cultures may reject the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down-low_(sexual_slang)

Down-low is an African-American slang term[1] that typically refers to a sexual subculture of black men who usually identify as heterosexual but actively seek sexual encounters and relations with other men, practice gay cruising, and frequently don a specific hip-hop attire during these activities.[2][3] They generally avoid disclosing their same-sex sexual activities, even if they have female sexual partner(s), they are married to a woman, or they are single.

Gayness is a white construct

On the contrary, it’s a colorless reality!

subculture of black men who usually identify as heterosexual

Much the same as how men can’t “identify” as women, your capacity to alter reality through self-identification is quite limited!

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a man who continually seeks out sexual contact with other men is doing so because man ass/dick turns him on. We have a word for such men, and that word is “gay” (or, occasionally, “bisexual”).

In the overwhelming majority of cases

This is only true if you restrict the scope to the West (I suspect the key criterion is "countries formerly but no longer dominated by Abrahamic religion"). Globally, the overwhelming majority of male-male sex happens in the context of machismo-based homosexuality, and the man dicking another man doesn't think dicking men is gay, or at least not in the context he is doing it in.

He accounts for the existence of "gay men" as a population distinct from men having sex with other men.

I suppose the evidence (e.g. prison sex) indicates that there is a distinction to be made. Although in the majority of contemporary cases, it’s being used as a cope.

In 19th and early 20th century Britain you were a homosexual if you liked to be penetrated by men, but if you were the one doing the penetrating you were not considered homosexual. This is similar to the culture of the Roman empire, which saw nothing wrong with man penetrating another man but considered being penetrated to be shameful. All that to say, the conception of the "gay man" as being someone who wants to have any kind of sexual activity with other men is historically quite recent.

I don’t think it’s quite true that gay topping was even remotely socially acceptable in Victorian England.

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There was a researcher from the mid twentieth century whose name I forgot said this is basically supported by the psychological research.

Being the top or bottom is more than a preference, they’re really more like two separate sexualities in which very few people naturally gravitate towards both.

Tops are much more likely to be bisexual using modern terminology.

I understand the objection to “gay” as a label in this context, although I have no dog in this fight. People also use the term “gay” to essentially bind extremely disparate people whose behaviors vary wildly into one essentialist unit of cultural and political valence, which I imagine some “Men who have sex with men” would object to.

I’m sympathetic to this because I suffer from a mental disorder but I find attempts at building cultural and political solidarity amongst people who suffer from my disorder or a cluster of related ones to be absolutely abhorrent; I’m not a member of a “community” with proscribed political and economic interests, I’m just someone with a fucked up brain.

This is one of the few things Freddie deboar gets 100% right.

I think basically how we moderns think about identity is fundamentally harmful and stupid, getting in the way of understanding behavior which is the real interesting and functional bit with regards to how individuals interact with society writ large.

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it’s being used as a cope

Why do you believe men feel the need to use it as a cope, and why is there anything to cope with?

Why do you believe men feel the need to use it as a cope

Because they are gay, and they would rather not be.

I reflect rather than endorse. I think there's a pretty clear political division, though, looking back over history, so the argument seems colourable.

Men do, women are, so men naturally assume that when you ask them this, you're asking them to apply the woman's label. Unless you're a man predisposed to Gayness (which forms part of the problem with Gays, from the average man's perspective), that is inaccurate, insulting, and outright dangerous.

I think there is something interesting here but I can't figure out any of this. Can you clarify?

"Women are human beings, men are human doings". Men are valuable because they can do stuff for you, women simply are valuable, innately and without meaningful argument. Advocates of this assessment generally hold that it emerges from biology: sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. A tribe that loses three quarters of its men will bounce back in a generation, while a tribe that loses three quarters of its women will bounce back maybe never.

The claim here seems to be that "Gay" connotes innate nature, "being", rather than activity, "doing". Hence, the women's label?

Very helpful, thanks!

I suspect the answer includes "not if you do it in prison - particularly not if you didn't have any choice in the matter."

In machismo-based homosexuality (which appears to include the kind practiced in both American and Russian prisons), it isn't gay to dick another guy, only to take a dick.

I imagine it also includes straight men who work as gay porn stars.

Are there any?

... arguably? (cw: no actual wing-wong, but still NSFW)

Gay4pay as a genre also attracts just masc-looking guys who are pals with guys, but there is significant crossover workforce from the het side of the aisle, including people that are pretty clearly more into the het fuckery. A lot of them focus on solo work (eg, the squirrel guy), but the difference in pay is significant, and modern chemistry can do a lot to keep an erection going even if physical interest isn't there.

((There's a handful of pieces that involve gay-focused actors who are gay-focused in their personal lives having heterosexual pairings-or-more, though for a variety of reasons that's a far less common kink.))

The line gets fuzzy and definition-focused: you can argue a strict definitional no-het-would-stick-their-dick-in-a-dude, and I'm sure at least a few are either self-closeted, or playing it up for the viewers. On the flip side, I know enough people that thought they were bi and then found out that it wasn't working for them once they actually got another dude involved in person (and a few that thought they were bi until they got a woman involved in person), and while that occasionally fails around the physical bits not working out, it's as or more often something where only the mechanics work.

no-het-would-stick-their-dick-in-a-dude

I mean, I'm 0% aroused by the idea of having sex with men, but it's also not the thing you would have to pay me most to do either. I can easily imagine there are some guys who don't like it, but also don't mind it, and would be fine with doing it as just another job.

Only if you make eye contact

Obviously but the distinction exists because a surprising proportion of gay and bisexual men just openly deny they’re gay even as they openly have sex with other men.

The terminology was selected because at least some of the dudes in question say "no", and asking about "MSM" is (supposedly) easier than trying to convince the men in question that they are gay. And that's okay.

Not if you keep your socks on!

to publicly call upon homosexual men to refrain from (...) b) donating blood?

This is backwards I believe. The problem was not with homosexuals donating blood. The initial association with homosexuals delayed the realization that the disease is in fact not specific to homosexuals and should be expected to pop up among the general public. The vast majority of blood donors are not homosexual, but it took too much time to realize that all of them are potential vectors and should be treated as such.

a) having unprotected sex with strangers altogether

Nil; also, mostly irrelevant. Here again, it's not the gays as such. It's the failure to admit that the disease is not limited to them. Which is turn would require talking openly about their lifestyle making them a perfect breeding ground for a new STD and consequently a public health hazard, very much a CW topic at the time.

also, mostly irrelevant

How on earth is this irrelevant given that it was the astronomical promiscuity rate specific to gay men that made them the perfect, ha, breeding ground?

Timing, mostly. There was presumably a window when the administration could have done something to mitigate the spread of a new disease but didn't (see the original question). Within that window, it was already too late to do anything realistic about the gays. Ten years prior, before anyone in the US knew anything about HIV or AIDS, yeah maybe. By the time the healthcare system started noticing the first wave (mostly gays coming down with late stage disease) the infection was already spreading beyond that particular group.

Reminder that HIV infection has a latent phase measured in years.

Within that window, it was already too late to do anything realistic about the gays that were already sexually active and engaged in promiscuity.

This is backwards I believe.

How so? The vast majority of donors might not be homosexual, but the rates of contracting it are so skewed you literally have lower chances are almost as likely to get infected from a random straight person's blood, than from a gay person's that's been tested negative. The fact that straight people can also carry the virus is immaterial to the fact that it's a bad idea to let gay people donate blood.

Nil; also, mostly irrelevant. Here again, it's not the gays as such. It's the failure to admit that the disease is not limited to them. Which is turn would require talking openly about their lifestyle making them a perfect breeding ground for a new STD and consequently a public health hazard

I don't understand how the first sentence is not contradicted by the last.

The "donating blood" bit is probably unavoidable-- but also I suspect it's just not very salient, even for leftists fighting the culture war. My dad didn't give blood for a long time because there was a mad cow disease outbreak in the region he lived and at some point he was told not to. And honestly, he just didn't really care. Giving blood is an act of charity. People get more mad about the idea that their community doesn't care about them than the idea that the community doesn't need as much of their help.

I'll concede that the "no unprotected sex" thing would probably be looked at unfavorably no matter what, but at least hypothetically reagan could have pissed off different people. Imagine if instead of saying, "no sex," he'd said, "instead of penetrating each other, why not try out these bizarre fetishes?" and subsequently promoted, for example, full-body latex condoms, humping in fursuits, teledildonics, tying up people in chairs and verbally abusing them while they pleasured themselves, etcetera. In a degenerate alternate universe reagan could have enraged the conservatives instead of the liberals by trying to convince America that penetrative sex was for boring straight people.

The "donating blood" bit is probably unavoidable-- but also I suspect it's just not very salient, even for leftists fighting the culture war. My dad didn't give blood for a long time because there was a mad cow disease outbreak in the region he lived and at some point he was told not to. And honestly, he just didn't really care. Giving blood is an act of charity. People get more mad about the idea that their community doesn't care about them than the idea that the community doesn't need as much of their help.

Yeah, after I visited China was I banned from donating for a period of time because when I went to Xi'an it was technically in a malaria zone. Didn't seem like a big deal.

When I as in middleschool, there was a kid with Hemophilia. Had a rough time of things. Felt like every few weeks he'd be on crutches cause he got a bruise on his leg or something. I remember in 7th grade science class when we were learning about the AIDs epidemic in the anodyne way it might be taught about it effecting everyone and everyone needing to be careful, he flew into a rage. Kept yelling over the teacher that it was those damned gays that spread it absolutely fucking everywhere with their promiscuous lifestyles.

Of course, he was a hemophiliac child in the 80's when HIV positive gays were contaminating the blood supply. I never put two and two together then, but I always wondered if he was personally effected by that, or merely righteously angry that he was put in harms way.

I'll concede that the "no unprotected sex" thing would probably be looked at unfavorably no matter what, but at least hypothetically reagan could have pissed off different people. Imagine if instead of saying, "no sex," he'd said, "instead of penetrating each other, why not try out these bizarre fetishes?" and subsequently promoted, for example, full-body latex condoms, humping in fursuits, teledildonics, tying up people in chairs and verbally abusing them while they pleasured themselves, etcetera. In a degenerate alternate universe reagan could have enraged the conservatives instead of the liberals by trying to convince America that penetrative sex was for boring straight people.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex". There seems to exist a certain vocal segment that gets their way that any insistence that gays use protection or practice monogamy is akin to trying to get them to stop being gay.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex".

I think that's a framing issue, not something intrinsic to communicating with the gay community. I think there are ways the same advice could have been conveyed and been well received. But-- I admit that that's never going to happen in practice, because the only way to alter a group's community norms without pushback is to credibly present yourself as part of the group and working in your own best interests. Key word: credibly. For minority groups that see themselves as marginalized, the only way to avoid "uncle ruckus" accusations would be to simultaneously display high-cost signals of group affiliation. And politicians are notoriously averse to sending high-cost signals*. Jared Polis could have given effective monkeypox advice, but only if he'd done it in the middle of a livestream while blowing his husband's back out.

* Trump is notable for being an exception to this. His base is rabid precisely because of how many high-cost signals he sends them. As an equal and opposite reactions, his enemies (including myself) hate him for the exact contents of those signals.

I don't hate him for the signals, I hate him because I think he actually possesses the vices he signals. But the basic point applies - part of Trump's success is being maximally offensive to pretty much everyone outside his base.

Hemophiliac are treated with clotting factor that's pulled from a huge number of people's blood donation so if one of the people who donated I'm the say 10,000 people whose clotting factor they got had HIV they got it! Government policy in the 80s murdered hemophiliacs to be polite to the gays. Then it used the Ryan Whites their policy gave HIV to to humanize the disease to straights.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex". There seems to exist a certain vocal segment that gets their way that any insistence that gays use protection or practice monogamy is akin to trying to get them to stop being gay.

My interpretation of it was more that, if you decouple 'advice given to gay people' from 'advice given to straight people', those who harbour animus against gay people could then tell gay people to abstain from any sex, even in a monogamous marriage, while placing no burdens on straight people, and there would be little to no motivation to ever lift that injunction. One could avoid this by imposing the same interventions on straight people, and not lifting them on straight people until one lifts them on gay people.

"Do not participate in massive unprotected orgies" is an intervention that can be equally applied to both straights and gays. And in fact, straight people were already de facto banned from participating in massive unprotected orgies based on the many, many restrictions placed on gatherings. And yet my recollection is that gays thumbed their noses at the rules, and were allowed to, even when it was causing a mini-pandemic within the pandemic.

Minor correction- there’s a vocal segment which makes no distinction between ‘gays should use condoms when they gangbang strangers’ and ‘the gays will all be executed- BREAK OUT THE CONSTRUCTION CRANES’.

Quite right, the infamous Salo Thread on HIV has extracts from a book where certain gays compared closing the bathhouses they were using to have lights-out orgies to gas chambers.

We can never criticize the genre-unawareness of zombie movie protagonists when stuff like this happened in real life:

Many members from the gay community were at that meeting. Bobbi Campbell, who was already infected with AIDS, was standing at the back. I remember at least three members of the gay community, nude, just with towels around them, holding signs that said, "Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens." They meant that, if we let you close the baths on us, next thing you'll quarantine us, then we'll be in jail, then you'll destroy us, like a Hitler. It was very, very extreme.

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