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Weird question. When I was in 4th grade, in the early 90s, we did a multi-day segment on AIDS, where they just went and scared the shit out of us.
So in my 20s any time I did something remotely risky, I'd freak out and go to the doctor. And they'd always ask if I was gay. And when I said no they seemed like they stopped taking seriously the possibility that I contracted it.
And looking back on it it finally just hit me. Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?
If so I feel honestly betrayed. It feels extremely wrong to use children in that way, even if the end seems like a good one.
Correct, straight men who aren't junkies basically just don't get HIV at all. The exceptions are rare enough that it isn't even worth thinking about for straight men. Women that only have sex with white and Asian men rarely get HIV as well. HIV really is entirely trivial to avoid for most people. My impression is that the public health people did the same sort of routine we saw with Covid, which was a combination of them being sincerely histrionically risk-averse with telling noble lies to get people to care about a disease that is basically irrelevant to their health.
Straight men don't tend to get HIV unless (as in the worst-affected African countries and in Russia and Brazil) a large population of prostitutes becomes infected and acts as a reservoir (even if only a small percentage of interactions between an infected prostitute and a john result in transmission, it adds up):
Sure, Russia in 2015 was perhaps a moderately homophobic country, but it's clear heterosexual transmission in Russia was and is a problem, as it is in South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
AIDS center can't check actual source. Even worse, the 43% you citing in bold refers to subset of people who answered the center's question about source of infection (more than half of people declined). So, proper way to present numbers is something like:
60% declined to answer
22% said IDU
17% said heterosexual
0.6% said homosexual contact
Heterosexual transmission as main way of infection manifests in that there are more HIV+ women than HIV+ men, South Africa and Zimbabwe have it, Russia doesn't.
According to polls, homophobia in Russia is still increasing since ~2005.
It needs to be added that Russia doesn't have methadone replacement therapy and IDUs are more problem.
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