Even among heterosexuals, with a tradition of monogamy and children to rear, marriage, the engine of much misery, today is in a shambles. Rotello tells us that in 1978 only 14precinct of gay American men were in monogamous relationships. Even in the face of AIDS, gay men have shown no widespread inclination to monogamy, a measure of how little it satisfies significant numbers of us. With many finding it purgatory, enforcing Rotello's utopia would take extensive, invasive social engineering. Openly nostalgic for the epidemic's early years when dread and ignorance enforced sporadic celibacy or makeshift pairing-off, Rotello advocates fear and stigma to lead reluctant gay men to monogamy.
Fear is an animal response to threatening conditions, but it's an emergency response.
As such, it's an ineffective base for long-term AIDS prevention. And protracted fear is phobia. Only 48 percent of heterosexual serodiscordant couples consistently use condoms. Serial monogamy is AIDS prevention only if its defenders accept either of two repugnant implicit subordinate arguments. By contrast, current AIDS prevention efforts care even about those lives that are, in the chilly abstract, epidemiologically insignificant, nor do they demand that gay men segregate affection.