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They could just wear condoms and survive. In fact I've wondered if PrEP is going to usher in a wave of STDs as it makes not wearing condoms seems like a valid choice for some.
Also lesbians have especially low STD rates. Shall I accept that as a reason to advocate lesbianism since we are apparently concerned with STD rates? Or is this concern selectively targeted?
Condoms are cheap and plentiful already, often even free. Even so, 1 in 6 homosexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, with the number rising to 50% of gay black men. I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.
Sure, go ahead. Lesbians mostly slap each other around AFAIK, but that happens behind closed doors and doesn't require billions in health spending to prevent national contagions, so I'll freely admit I don't care about it as much.
The infant mortality rate was 46% a scant 200 years ago. Presumably it would reach that again in the absence of modern medicine and sanitation. Literally every demographic is heavily dependent on government and corporate spending.
You're ignoring the self-inflicted part. There's no inherent reason why gay men should be more exposed to STDs than any other population.
Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.
Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.
Didn't he point out that the issue of AIDS and other STDs is already preventable? If he hates them, it seems to stem from the lack of precautions they are taking, rather than them being gay.
Yup!
There's a lot of bad information on the effectiveness of condoms for preventing HIV transmission. They're useful, but it's probably closer to an order of magnitude difference for perfect-use, rather than a complete barrier.
((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))
No, this is the product of historical revisionism aimed at making homosexuals seem more sympathetic than they actually were and are. The scientists and experts who were at Ground Zero of the AIDS epidemic noted several times that many of their HIV-positive patients were intelligent, savvy men who understood the risks and transmissibility of HIV/AIDS as it was explained to them. They chose to continue spreading HIV anyway, because they simply did not care. See Marcus Conant:
Your cite is from this discussion, discussing philosophy during 1983 by doctors, written in 1996 from interviews in 1992-1995. The same piece also describes out, from the exact same time period (though a different doctor):
The interview references Oleske, but another certain famous asshole had outsized influence.
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