According to the "peer aids educators" in my high school, anal sex is the riskiest sexual activity because it is most likely to lead to tears in condoms.

I would assume though that when it first started homosexuals probably weren't wearing condoms as frequently either  because pregnancy isn't an issue. Both of these factors would lead to a higher rate of transmission in homosexuals.

It is my current understanding that AIDS is more likely to be transmitted to the receiver than the giver.  Of course, condom use and anal sex affect these probabilities, but I think that is more well known.  In heterosexual relationships, it is more probable to transmit from male to female than female to male.  So there is one higher probability transmission (male to female) followed by lower probability transmissions (female to male).   In male homosexual relationships, the receiver can switch roles to a giver, which allows for higher probability transmissions to continue to other others.  I suspect that if gays were to pick a role and stay with it, then transmission rates would go down.

Actually, the whole “patient zero” thing turned out to be in large part poor investigative technique and was repudiated by the people who did the original investigation. Realistically, AIDS is a form of venereal disease and as such, it's spread is conditioned on people engaging in specific risky behaviors (or receiving tainted blood products).

Sure, back in the day when there were like 200 people who were symptomatic (and no other testing existed), contact tracing was done in an attempt to limit the spread of the disease. As it happened, when the lists were all sent to the CDC in Atlanta, there was one guy who turned up as being connected in several cities.

When they finally got the deal on the guy, it turned out that he was a flight attendant and thus had free travel access. He was also into anonymous sex. The fact that he managed to turn up as a possible contact for about a quarter of the people who had what was called at the time GRID (gay related immune disorder) is, in retrospect, hardly surprising.

Really though, consider that we now know there can be a very long incubation period. From the late 70's when the first cases were being noticed, it is not too hard to track back and say that the disease must have been around (granted at a much lower prevalence) during the end of the free love era.

In fact, it was. There are libraries of stored frozen tissue that go back many decades and researchers have identified several people who had the HIV virus and even some symptoms going back to the 1960's. There is even one case that goes back to the 1950's but that case can't be used for much due to possible laboratory contamination.

Also, it bears noting that 200 known infected people is a very small statistical population and it is really not very easy to prove all that much from it. Add to that the fact that the population was divided up across several large cities. So we could even think of this as several much smaller groups of perhaps a few dozen people. This makes it even harder to figure out what was going on, compounded by the fact that Haitian men and hemophiliacs were also turning up with Something that looked like GRID (and really was the same disease).

Yah B166er, you have a valid point in regards to religion trying to force everyone into a box that no small number of people are not willing to live in. However, that is not something that automatically selects for homosexuals.

As I noted above, AIDS is a disease that is dependent on factors related to the range of contact that infected individuals have with others. Hence the reason why hemophiliacs also developed the disease early on. Granted, hemophilia is quite rare but I don't see a reason why hemophiliacs would not visit hookers at about the same level as anyone else. So they must have had a role in spreading the disease among non-monogamous straight people. It is not their fault.

India had an interesting vector early on. During the 70's, they had a population control program that rewarded men who were voluntarily sterilized. Also, there were incidents where men were rounded up and forcibly sterilized. Because these men were seen as “safe” to women, large numbers of them became straight male prostitutes. You do see how this would be a problem?

IV drug users are also a vector worldwide. However, if IV drug users take some reasonable precautions such as using new fresh packaged gear and labeling it with their initials to minimize even accidental sharing, then they can do whatever they want and not really have to worry about spreading diseases.

I only meant that it hit the homosexual population, for the most part, first and hardest for the reason I listed (living in the closet). Heterosexual adulterers had a LOT more options when it came to where they could choose their partners. Any bar/club/event for the most part would do, where gays had to go to very specific places to meet people. Unlike gays, heteros could go almost anywhere to find people to have sex with, where gays were pretty much stuck in the "gay ghetto's". So when the first infected people had sex with someone in that "gay ghetto", the concentrated nature of it led to the infection rates exploding.

I in no way meant to say that they were the only reasons it is the epidemic it is today, and if that's what it sounded like, I'm sorry to have given that impression.

Currently, the approximate time when the virus jumped from other primates to humans is between 1915-30, which means that all those religious bigots were stupid when they called it a "punishment from god", as if that required saying.

And people wonder why I'm so adamant about my support of science and my opposition to fuzzy headed faith based thinking. Just hoping won't create a vaccine or cure to this deadly disease, but science gives us a chance.

For my mom's cousin Leo, who died of AIDS in 1994. An amazing guy, full of life and love. He is sorely missed...

Speaking of Leo, his partner of 15 years at the time had a gene, called the chemokine gene i think, that made him immune to HIV infection. I was wondering if anyone has heard of any new studies for a vaccine/cure using what we know about it? I think it is one of the more promising possibilities in fighting this disease.

And I read elsewhere that an AMA study determined that lesbians with HIV always or almost always contracted it from IV drug use or sexual contact with a man. I'm sure that there is some sort of Kinsey scale style explanation as to why a lesbian would have gotten HIV from sexual contact with a man.

How do you get HIV? Having sex with a man, using IV drugs, blood transfusion, or your mother if she has HIV. To a much lesser extent a man having sex with a HIV+ woman can get it. Hypothetically a lesbian with sores or cuts on her fingers or mouth could get HIV through sexual contact with another woman. If I remember that AMA study correctly, that hypothetical scenario doesn't seem to actually occur in real life.

What does this mean for you if you don't want HIV? Wear condoms, no anal sex, limit number of sexual partners, don't be a hemophiliac, do not have sexual contact with a man who has sex with men or a woman who has sexual contact with a man who has sex with men, get tested.

But in practice people ignore a lot of this advice. I mean, if you are a gay man what are you going to do? Be abstinent your whole life? What if you need a lot of surgeries and keep getting blood transfusions? What if you get drunk or use crystal meth and keep making terrible choices about who to have sex with? And it was almost funny when I was asked if I have ever had sex with a woman who has had sex with a man who has sex with men. How on earth could I possibly know that? I'de have to be psychic or something to have that information.

I asked a worker at an STD testing facility if I could have gotten HIV from getting someone's blood on my busted knuckles. He said it would be theoretically possible, but in all reasonable likelihood the answer is 'no.'

                  When you get down to it homosexuality is just one pain in the ass after another.  Is that what you ment ZuS?

Rich Woods knows his STIs............

Hypertechnical, dude......

The devil is in the details, which is where I live; at least for technical stuff.

Although it is correct to say that HIV lives in the blood and ultimately goes from a person's blood cells to another person's blood cells, it can travel through other fluids along the way, but this path needs to go into the other person's blood stream for infection.

Butter this post is really very sad. I thought better of you.

First of all, the largest concentration of AIDS victims is not the gay population, it's Africa, which as we've seen is MILITANTLY homophobic.

I'm also getting really sick of this half-assed, quack "sociological assessment" that gay men are "promiscuous." Let's look at the percentage of people who are gay and then compare that with the percentage of heterosexuals who have engaged in extramarital activities and then we can talk. It's the same sort of morally self-righteous bullshit I'd expect from theists.

And I'm quite confident that not a single person in this thread has grasped the tragic cultural ramifications of this epidemic arriving on the scene at the end of the 1970s.

This is a decent summary of some of the more reputable studies that have been done: http://humbumbershoot.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/are-gay-men-more-promiscuous-than-straight-men-analyzing-research-results/ 

Politically inconvenient though the fact may be, gay men are somewhat more promiscuous. It's nowhere even remotely near the level that the anti-gay mob would have the world believe, but we are. 

So are you or are you not a little Obsessive-Compulsive in your daily, routine endeavors?

I do not consider myself an old fart...yet...but these seem like recent examples to me....

I am very selective about my obsessive-compulsiveness, but none of it is daily or routine. 

And to the judgemental people on this thread, I see this as more of a conversation where at the end of it, we all are hopefully a little wiser after reading the information that people are sharing. I do not think that anyone has claimed to write a dissertation about this and know these things with certainty. Lets stay civil about this and learn from each other.

It has been steadily getting worse since Reagan was in office.  The whole hoopla about the "moral majority" was the kickoff.

Well, hello to you too.

Admin of the site, not a mod.  I tend to stay out of moding people issues, such as yours

That quote was addressed to people who were taking an unhelpful tone towards people whose only problem was sharing their less-than-perfectly-informed/expressed thoughts in a civil manor.  While I find under-informed conversation annoying, I am not going to create a standard for conversation that will discourage people from learning.  I should add that what I said is said as a fellow member of the community and not as a mod.