From: pgr@crhc.uiuc.edu (Paul Ryan)
Newsgroups: ca.politics,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Gay/Lesbian Equal Rights Needed
Date: 16 Dec 92 21:17:37 GMT
Organization: Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NNTP-Posting-Host: copland.crhc.uiuc.edu

># It takes somewhere around 10 years from the time one is exposed to HIV
># and the time one starts to have opportunistic infections that define
># AIDS.  

cramer@optilink.COM (Clayton Cramer) writes:
>I used to hear the number "five years" used.  Then "seven years."
>Now it's 10 years.  

And growing.  You heard "five years" five years after we first identified
AIDS in people who weren't sick yet.  You heard "seven years" two years
later.  Now you're hearing 10 years, because we now have people we found
HIV in 10 years ago who still aren't sick.

I predict that you will hear the words "fifteen years" ... about five
years from now.

>In any case, you only have to read soc.motss
>for a while to realize that even among homosexual activists, there
>are still people taking absurd risks engaging in unprotected sex
>with strangers.  

Prejudiced, stereotyped, hatred-based bullshit.

The gay community has embraced safer-sex and risk reduction like no
other group in the country, and we have healthy people and leveling
infectin curves to show for it.

>In any case, the health hazards of promiscuity were clear and well
>known (though seldom lethal) in 1982.

And the implied next thought is that it's all they gay's faults.

The seventies were a sexually liberated decade.  Modern science found a
cure or a treatment for many STDs, the pill freed women from fear of
pregnancy, and America went through a sexual revolution to which gay
sex was only a footnote.

In the early 80s, the health hazards of promiscuity did become clear, and
the entire nation, gays and straights alike, took a hard swing toward
the conservative, sexually and socially.

>So why are so few straights getting AIDS, except through contact with
>prostitutes and IV drug abusers?

Because you are in denial.  You are clinging to this foolish belief that
AIDS is somehow a gay disease, and burying your head in the sand.

from the January 1992 issue of Discover Magazine (page 52)

        "Now, in the world as a whole, at least 70% of the people infected with
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are believed to have caught it from their
heterosexual partners."

        "While infection rates among homosexual men in this country have begun
to drop, among women they are soaring.  In 1990, 4,890 teenage and adult women
were diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, and at least 100,000 more are feared to be
carrying the virus.  Among adolescents, a group in which the disease is making
especially rapid inroads, straight sex surpassed gay sex for the last two years
as a way of spreading the infection."

>No question, massive education is needed.  But it won't solve the 
>problem of the person who is suicidal, and completely unable to
>control their sexuality (i.e. the average homosexual).

This is a completely gratuitous, knee-jerk insult with absolutely no
redeeming pretense at a factual base whatsoever.  In short, it's exactly
the kind of prejudiced, stereo-type based, hatred filled bullshit I expect
from you.

Paul

-- 
Paul Ryan                  (pgr@crhc.uiuc.edu)     1308 West Main St.
Center for Reliable High-Performance Computing     Urbana, IL 61801
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign         (217) 244-7179
Newsgroups: ca.politics