New York Newsday - Thursday, February 23, 1995 GIULIANI'S SHUTTING ALL THE WRONG PLACES by Gabriel Rotello New York - In an era when unsafe sex clubs are proliferating and the Giuliani Administration is doing little about them, it seems bizarre that the city would harass and close legitimate gay bars and discos. But that's what's happening. And it had better stop. Case in point is Sound Factory, New York's most popular gay disco, which was closed two weeks ago. People did not go to Sound Factory to have sex, safe or unsafe, or for than matter even to cruise. People went to Sound Factory to dance, period. The place didn't even serve liquor, just great music. A lot of people who have abandoned alcohol soaked nightclubs felt that Sound Factory provided better exercise, and more sense of community, than any gym. So what was the problem? Sound Factory, which was only open on Saturday nights, never really got going until after four am, and the Consumer Affairs Department utilized that fact to push the club through a weird loophole in the law. The state liquor code says that as long as discos stop serving booze at four am, they can stay open all night. The city's cabaret code says no, they must close at four am. The courts have ruled that the state liquor law trumps the city cabaret law, and discos can stay open well past four - provided, of course, they have a liquor license. Sound Factory didn't. It's whole purpose was to cater to alcohol free dance fanatics dancing way past dawn. Hence, it had to go. Weird? You bet. But it wasn't the first time the Giuliani administration has forced a famous gay night spot out of business. Rounds, a restaurant and piano bar on the upper east side, was padlocked by the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement last August, ostensibly for allowing solicitation. Rounds indeed had a reputation as a place where "rent boys" met well heeled businessmen. But it was hardly some tawdry dive. It had one of the best piano bars in town, a decent restaurant, a famous and eclectic clientele and a self consciously classy image. I remember being turned away at the door one night with flamboyant club kid James St. James because Rounds considered itself tony and discreet and James - in combat boots, a black mini skirt and a little fairy wand - was not properly dressed. Another time a friend dragged me in to hear his favorite singer and I found myself sitting next to, of all people, Vladimir Horowitz. Are you here for the music? I asked the great maestro, then probably in his 90s. "Ugh, please, this is nothing but a horrible screeching noise to me," he said, smiling impishly. "I am here to flirt." Now Rounds attracted rent boys, true. And Sound Factory stretched legal hours. And the Giuliani Administration had grounds to close them both. I guess. But both were respectable businesses (and gay institutions), neither allowed unsafe sex (or any sex whatsoever). And both were closed by an administration that hasn't moved a muscle to enforce the health code against scores of places that allow unsafe sex and HIV transmission on their premises. A lot of gay people support the idea that the city needs to clean up such places. But they're afraid the administration won't know where to stop, that once it starts it will go on a homophobic rampage and start closing all kinds of gay and lesbian night spots on all kinds of technicalities. Such fears hardly seem paranoid when the only major places closed under Giuliani's watch have been ones that didn't allow any sex at all. If the city is going to enforce the health code, it will need gay support. If it continues harassing and closing gay night spots that don't violate the health code, it stands to lose that support. And that would be a deadly shame. New York Newsday - Thursday, March 2, 1995 ON THE THRESHOLD OF AN AIDS DISASTER by Gabriel Rotello New York - In some ways it's the most hopeful study about gay men and AIDS prevention I've read in years. In other ways it's the most terrifying. I'm still trying to decide which. The study is called "Effect of Sexual Behavior Change on Long-term HIV Prevalence among Homosexual Men." Its authors are Martina Morris and Laura Dean, two researchers at Columbia University's School of Public Health who have spent years tracking the AIDS epidemic. Last year they set out to predict its future path among local gay men. Morris and Dean report that in the years before the epidemic, gay male New Yorkers had an average of about 11 "unsafe contacts" per year, an "unsafe contact" being a person with whom one has unprotected sex at least once. By 1991, after years of education and behavior change, gay men had reduced that number to just one per year. Morris and Dean tried to figure out whether that was enough to lower HIV transmission below the epidemic threshold. Epidemic threshold is the point at which the average infected person infects precisely one other person. Anything above that point and an epidemic will relentlessly grow. Anything below it, and the epidemic will shrink and eventually die out. Using models that have proven remarkably accurate in predi cting the epidemic so far, Morris and Dean spun out the next 35 years based on the 1991 average of one unsafe contact per year. At that level, transmission among gay men lies just below the epidemic threshold. As the years go by the percentage of gay men infected with HIV slowly drops from around 40 percent today to a mere five percent in 2030. To me, this is the most important, hopeful finding in AIDS prevention in years. It means that at 1991 levels of safer sex, gay New Yorkers had succeeded in prevention's fundamental goal. Even without a cure or a vaccine, even if we just continued what we were doing in 1991, future gay generations would be spared the devastation that engulfed my generation in the 1980s and 1990s. That's the good news. The bad news is that Morris and Dean created a second model to predict what would happen if gay men slipped just a little bit in the direction of unsafe sex. Their second model assumed that gay men had returned to a level of two "unsafe contacts" per year instead of one, a fairly plausible assumption considering that the original number back in 1981 was eleven. That small difference - between one unsafe partner and two per year - produces disaster. Transmission rises well above the epidemic threshold in every age category. The charts flow upward instead of down as the years roll by, and instead of a 5% level of infection in 35 years, gay men over 40 have a 65% level of infection. In other words, the difference between one unsafe contact and two is the difference between an almost AIDS-free future and absolute catastrophe. There are two powerful messages here. One is that it is indeed possible for gay men to eliminate the epidemic through behavior change alone. In New York we even know precisely what level of safer sex is necessary to get us there. We know because we lived that level back in 1991. But the other message is how little it would take to push us over the threshold. And how enormous the consequences would be if that happened. "The implications of even temporary returns to unsafe practices are not simply an increase in individual risk," wa rn Morris and Dean, "but also the persistence of HIV transmission at epidemic levels in the [gay] population." Where are we today? The last time anybody checked, levels of unsafe sex were rising among gay men in almost every study. But Morris and Dean can't really say what the figures are. Their funding has run out.