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Comment by drewbug01 | Hacker News Reader

> The first was to spend billions of dollars hoping to find a cure while certain behaviors continued to spread the virus.

And yet here we are, with governments spending billions of dollars to find a cure when we can stop the spread of COVID-19 by reducing certain behaviors.

The difference in government response to the (ongoing, btw) AIDS crisis and COVID-19 has a hell of a lot to do with the fact that COVID-19 is not seen as a “gay” disease, and is not “othered.”

Having sex is all it takes to get HIV. Once. I won’t sit here and listen to you claim it’s “selfish and destructive behavior” to have sex. Once.

Take your thinly veiled homophobia and moralizing elsewhere please. It’s not a good look, and I don’t want to hear it in my professional community.

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Funnily enough, in Italy (where I grew up) there was next to no association in the public mind between HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. It was linked to drug use and sexual promiscuity, but it was drilled into us that any kind of unprotected sex (and for most people, that was automatically construed as heterosexual sex) was a risky behaviour.

I was honestly very surprised when, towards the end of the nineties and early 2000s, it gradually dawned upon me that elsewhere there was a connotation of HIV/AIDS as having been somehow associated with homosexuality ‘abroad’.

For us, in Italy, it was very much perceived as an activity-related risk, not an identity-related one. (As I dare say it should be, methinks.)

Sure, but getting AIDS from "regular" sex is pretty rare and difficult. The chance of infection is very low.

My point is that the governmental message was deliberately tailored to address promiscuity and unprotected sex, rather than single out any specific demographic or minority.

It can't be that difficult. Look at Africa, for example.

Google 'dry sex and AIDS' first. You might have to broaden your definition of normal.

My definition of 'normal' includes men fucking each other in the butt. I hope yours does too.

Everyone who's at all serious about tackling AIDS in Africa (rather than making some kind of veiled political or moral point) is focused on reducing unprotected sex.

Absolutely - I'm the poster child for tolerance.Why would you jump to such an ungenerous assumption?

Would you say, on reflection, that you followed the site guidelines by taking the most positive interpretation of my post possible?

Same (growing up in Israel). Didn’t realize it’s “gay” until much later.

Here’s from 1992: https://youtu.be/rQTbSFojYRE

Transmission rates vary widely by sex act. 2/3 of transmissions in the US are between homosexual men. It's not homophobia to observe that some populations are at more risk from HIV.

You’re right. But the homophobia isn’t in the statistics (which the commenter didn’t provide, anyways). The homophobia was in the comments about “destructive lifestyles” and stating that it was because of rampant sexual partners.

As I stated, you only have to have sex once (and I don’t believe that statement is controversial) to contract HIV.

Please examine your own biases, because if your takeaway from the comment that I was addressing was “what, it’s true that gay guys are more likely to get it” then it would seem that you take the comment to readily describe “gays” writ large, which is also pretty homophobic.

And in Africa most transmissions are between heterosexuals. But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.

It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.

Your facts may need complementing, as only 30% of transmission in Africa is sexual "between heterosexuals". See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12665438/

I am talking about sexual transmission, not transmission in general. The study you link to does not suggest that gay sex is responsible for the majority of instances of sexual HIV transmission in Africa.

>It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.

Here's a thought: it also might not be appropriate for straight people to tell gay people how to live.

>But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.

We did. Sort of. Heterosexuals weren't singled out for caution about promiscuous sex, because most of the public messaging assumed heterosexual relations anyway. But the emphasis was always on promiscuity.

No, you did not see rhetoric accusing heterosexuals as a class of being prone to promiscuous behavior. Unfortunately, even in 2020, it seems to be necessary to spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining what homophobia is until people get it. Here is an article from 1987 that does some of the work:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-07-20-me-2954-s...

Understood. But Covid is of course a different disease, and different in many ways. No consent is required to obtain it from another person. No time spent in private naked. Just be near someone in line at the bus stop and a sneeze. So there's that.

Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!

And yet, here we are. It’s a tempting comparison for a lot of people because it’s the worst thing in recent memory.

And that leads to the other thing that gets me fired up - people trivializing HIV as “not as bad” or even sometimes as an example of a “good” public health response. It’s just so different in almost every respect that it’s inevitably insulting.

(Of course this is not directed at you, I’m vehemently agreeing with you I believe. :)

> Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!

God, please tell this to my coworker. He's a biology teacher at a high school for God's sake, and he's going around saying that we should go back to school because we don't shut down for HIV, and that the novel Corona virus isn't any different. The kicker is he, of course, still wants his soccer team to practice and be able to play their games and such. And he's, sadly, likely going to get his wish. But, seriously, the man is a biology teacher arguing this. It's so damn frustrating, especially as the school won't do anything about it.

He is not worong, the coronavirus is not as scary as being reported. The death rate are very low.

I wouldn’t expect every biology teacher to be an expert on disease, of course... but wow. I would indeed expect a biology teacher to grasp the fundamentals of disease transmission.

I did not know that getting HIV required consent, or being naked.

But you get the idea. You could opt out. People did. And it didn't take totally isolating yourself in a clean room.

Unless you mean rape or something. But that's a violent crime, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the public health issue that is an infectious disease.

I wasn't paying much attention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Probably I was reading Tom Clancy novels about Jack Ryan. White privilege, etc.

Exactly. One of the biggest risk factors for COVID-19 is obesity. (See https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... )

Is our government demanding that people whose lifetyle makes them obese or overweight pay for the cost of the coronavirus epidemic?

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