Homosexual Demography: Implications for the Spread of AIDS

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 1998 by Christopher Hewitt

The original locus of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s was among the preferential homosexuals, particularly those most involved in the gay community. The sexual lifestyle of this group could have been designed to facilitate the spread of AIDS. A 1989 National Research Council study on AIDS notes that:

   Before the viral cause of AIDS was known or detectable, behavioral research
   had shown that being sick with AIDS or showing laboratory signs of immune
   deficiency was associated with (1) a large number of different sexual
   partners; (2) receptive anal intercourse; (3) the use of bathhouses for
   sexual contact; (4) frequent infection with sexually transmitted diseases,
   particularly gonorrhea, syphilis, and enteric parasites (p. 11).

Gay liberation in the 1970s was accompanied by an explosion of gay sexuality, especially in tolerant cities such as New York and San Francisco, where gays concentrated. The director of the New York City Department of Health describes the situation as follows:

   By their own reports, many men had large numbers of sexual partners
   annually, often numbering in the hundreds and even in the thousands.
   Frenetic casual and anonymous sex was widespread among homosexual and
   bisexual men. Bathhouses, back rooms of bars and clubs, and other public
   settings such as erotic bookstores and movie "heaters were, in effect, wide
   open. Sexual practices such as anonymous group sex, sado-masochistic
   fantasies enacted with physical trauma, penetration of rectal orifices with
   penises, fists, and blunt objects - all of these practices and more were
   accompanied by extremely high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and
   set the scene for the rapid transmission of HIV once it appeared in the
   late 1970s. Rates of rectal and oral gonorrhea in males soared (Joseph,
   1992, p. 98).

But what of the other groups of men who had sex with men? How likely were they to become infected, and to infect their female partners? Situational homosexuals are a very low risk group, in part because they have sex with men only intermittently. Most important, if Humphreys (1970) is correct, they rarely engage in the most dangerous behaviors, such as receptive anal intercourse. They are also unlikely to transmit the HIV infection to their wives since they rarely have sex with them, which is why they resort to sex with other men.

Repressed gays, if they completely repress their desires are, of course, at no risk at all. Hunt (1974) reported very low annual frequencies of five to six encounters among closeted homosexuals. Bell and Weinberg (1978) found, however, that some married gays take several years before leaving their wives, and during this time they often have sex with men. The median length of marriage was 3 to 5 years, but 25% lasted more than 10 years. Since there is generally an inverse relationship between homosexual and heterosexual activity, with the frequency of marital sex declining dramatically by the last year of marriage, this considerably reduces the risk of the husbands infecting their wives.