Casual sex among Cambodia's MSMs an HIV timebomb

0 Comments | AFP, October, 2007

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — In the fading daylight they come out by their dozens -- young men in small groups or alone, cruising Phnom Penh's parks for sex, not with female prostitutes but with each other.

"Having sex with men is just something I like to do, it's relaxing," says a pub manager who gave his name as Pov as he sat among drinkers, all men, at his bar a few blocks off of the capital's busy riverfront.

In Cambodia, as elsewhere in the region, men having sex with men is nothing new.

But Pov's world, like that of many Cambodian men who are known as "MSM," is defined by secrecy and, in some cases, self-delusion and denial.

MSM -- men who have sex with men but who may not consider themselves to be homosexual or bisexual -- account for four percent of...