Date: Sun, 9 Apr 1995 21:52:24 -0500 From: DENLEWIS@DELPHI.COM To: Multiple recipients of list GLB-NEWS Subject: "60 Minutes" Report on Gays & Unsafe Sex Excerpts from "The Second Wave," a report on the resurgence of unsafe sex between gay men. The report, by Ed Bradley, was broadcast on "60 Minutes" April 9. (Note: "60 Minutes" does not superimpose titles identifying guests. I attempted phonetic spellings of most of these names, so if anyone on this list knows any of these people, please excuse any "butchering" of their names. -- DSL) +++++++ Introduction (by Ed Bradley): Though new research indicates the rate of HIV infection is highest among heterosexual women, it is gay men who remain the most susceptible because so many of them are already infected. ... And yet in the face of this, some gay men are again having sex without condoms -- enough that many warn there could be a second wave of the AIDS epidemic. ... It was just a few years ago, in the late 1980s, that gay men proved they could beat the virus by practicing safe sex so consistently, the number of new infections dropped to almost zero. So what's happened now to send the numbers back up? Gay men are just beginning to talk about it ... (Carlos Corderro): I am now infected -- that did not come because I am out on a suicide mission or I wanted to challenge the virus -- I was in love, and I was making love to the person I felt comfortable with, and I did not see the risk there. (Bradley): Two years ago [31-year-old Carlos Corderro] became infected. After months of protected sex with his lover, the two began to have sex without condoms as a symbol of commitment. Corderro was HIV- at the time, and his lover believed he was, too. But he turned out to be wrong, and months later Corderro also tested HIV+. (Corderro): Here I am with someone I understood to be HIV-. I am in love with this person, and I feel safe, and the thing with someone's ... HIV status is that it is as good as the last test. So, sure I was trusting the last test, but you never know. ... (Bradley, to Corderro, who is an AIDS educator): I can see someone looking at you, saying 'Wait a minute -- he's teaching this and he's doing that.' " (Corderro): I don't see it that way. I see myself as a person. When I have sex, I am not an AIDS educator. When I have sex, I am not a gay person. When I have sex, I am not a Latino. When I have sex, I am a human being, and like many people that are watching this program -- picture yourselves in a situation with someone that you love. Do you see the risk there? Do you see the need to practice safer sex there? If the answer is no, we need to understand how we can bring it back to using protection, because everytime we do not use protection it is a window of opportunity for the HIV virus to come into our lives, and I am a prime example of that. (Mark Shupp, AIDS reporter for the Village Voice): The number one reason that gay men are having unsafe sex is because they are in love and they want that kind of physical intimacy that people in love have. Put yourself in this situation -- here you are with somebody, whether you're gay or straight, it doesn't matter -- you're in love with somebody. You like this person; you trust this person. You're having sex and you want to show your affection. All you have to do is think about yourself in that moment of romance, you I think it becomes perfectly understandable. (Bradley): But unprotected sex is not only increasing in serious relationships -- it is happening in casual gay encounters. Take Michaelangelo Signorile. The 34-year- old gay activist and writer says he knows better than to have unsafe sex, but he's had it anyway. (Signorile): When I was in Hawaii, working on a story, met a nice guy in the military, a Navy petty officer, and one thing led to another. We went back to his place, and I did not demand that he put a condom on. And at that moment you have all these absurd rationalizations that go through your mind that allow you to do that, but they are not absurd at the moment because there is the heat of the moment. It is the height of passion -- they make sense for that moment ... things like, Well, he's in the military, he must be very responsible. He didn't put a condom on, he must be negative. This is Hawaii and the AIDS problem isn't like it is in New York. He's so attractive that if I say something, he may say "forget it." It is not until later that you realize the absurdity of all of those reasons, when it's too late. (Bradley, to Signorile): When it's over and you have the chance to think about it afterwards, what do you think? (Signorile): Terrible, terrible anxiety, terrible anxiety attack, realizing that you'd engaged in profound carelessness. (Dr. Marcus Conan, physician to AIDS patients and AIDS researcher): People want to have sex. People want to have sexual partners. People want to have sex without condoms. Early in the epidemic, everyone believed that this was something very strange that was going to go away very quickly, like toxic shock syndrome -- we were going to find the cause and it would go away. And the gay community was told, wait a minute, there will be a cure; be there for the cure; hang on, it is coming. After the Concord data, from three years ago now, showing that AZT only had limited usefulness, the message seemed to be: It looks like this disease is going to be there for the rest of your life. For that reason, because gay men have said there is not prospect for this thing to go away, a lot of them have said I don't want to live like this for my life. They get tired; they get careless; they get infected. (Bradley): And research shows that about 2 1/2 percent of young men are getting infected each year -- a rate Mark Shupp says is cause for alarm. (Shupp): If you're 20 years old now and you're a gay man, at that infection rate you can expect roughtly to have one-third of your peers infected by the time you're in your 30s, and one-half of your peers infected by the time you're in your 50s, and that's an emergency. (Bradley, to Shupp): You know, it may sound crazy -- I know it doesn't to some people -- but knowing that risks, that a gay man would still in 1995 have unprotected sex ... that sounds crazy. (Shupp): That does sound crazy, you're absolutely right. It sounds crazy, given that every cigarette box has a warning that cigarettes are dangerous to your health, that people will pull one out, put it to their lips and light it. That's crazy. But giving that, what we're talking about is maintaining a behavior change, which is difficult whether it's dieting, smoking, wearing seat belts, whatever. Then you talk about changing sexual behavior, and sexual behavior is so complex ... you're asking people to change something consistently every single time that is that charged -- that is a tough, tough thing to maintain. (Bradley): But psychologist Dr. Waldo Detz, who specializes in treating gay men, says unsafe sex is not just about a lack of discipline -- it's about the need for intimacy, something straight Americans do not think applies to gays. (Detz): They don't understand that it is about intimacy, that it is about relationships, that anal sex is comparable to vaginal sex ... it has the same importance in a relationship, the same expression of intimacy. It is not dispensable. That this thing about if you don't like condoms, don't have anal sex, is something we don't say to heterosexuals. We would know that that was an affront in that vaginal sex is important. (Bradley, to Dr. Conan): There are people who will say, if gay men engage in unsafe sex and anal intercourse without a condom, they deserve whatever they get. If they persist in that kind of behavior, if they get HIV, that's what they ask for. (Conan): Well, there are people who say things like that, but we certainly don't say that the boy who rides a motorcycle without a helmet and has an accident deserves not to have emergency room care. Or the man who smokes cigarettes and develops lung cancer doesn't deserve care from this society. Or the young girl who has sexual intercourse and develops warts ... and gets cancer of the cervix from that, that she doesn't need treatment for cancer of the cervix, which is a sexually transmitted viral disease as is this. And don't forget, God in His wisdom keeps creating young gay men who keep coming into this pool -- these boys haven't heard the message; they don't know the danger. (Bradley): In fact, young men make up the largest segment of the gay community having unsafe sex. One recent study showed that more than one-third of the young gay men surveyed admitted to having unprotected anal intercourse in the previous year, and that many of them think that AIDS is an older man's disease, confined to big cities -- that it won't touch them. They are people like 25-year-old Christopher King. He became infected with the HIV virus the very first time he had gay sex. (King): ... I was 19 years old, in West Virginia. I was raised in a small town of 10,000 people, in a rural area, and my first sexual experience -- my first experience with sexual intercourse -- I was infected with HIV. And if it can happen in 1989 in West Virginia, it can happen anywhere in the United States today. (Bradley, to Shupp): We've been confronting this AIDS epidemic now for 14 years. ... We've had all kinds of AIDS information and awareness and AIDS prevention information ... it doesn't seem to work. (Shupp): AIDS education and safe sex education saved my life. I was in a relationship with a HIV+ man for 3 1/2 years, and I remain uninfected to this day. It saved my life knowing what to do. And the way to truly, to truly make this epidemic explode is to simply leave the field and say it doesn't work. What we have to recognize is that we've reached a turning point in the AIDS epidemic where it is no longer a short-term game. It is a game of life. And it is keeping people sexually safe for their entire lives.