Yawning Bread has two posts here and here discussing a letter by Alan Chin against the ‘high-risk gay lifestyle’.
When I first read the letter in the newspaper, I felt that something was wrong with the numbers and the way it was used to support Alan Chin’s arguments. I didn’t give it further thought because I was on my ‘throne’. Alex has discussed the flaws with the numbers and the argument made by Alan Chin in his two posts linked above so I won’t go much into that aspect.
The second thing I thought about was, gosh, that guy hates gays so much that he doesn’t care about the women. Seriously… Its like if the Titanic is sinking and there is only one lifeboat left and his lady(i.e. gf or wife or mistress or whatever) needs to get on it to survive, instead of helping her get on it, he would rather chase the bunch of gays he saw making out at the back round the sinking ship just so he can plant a bullet in between their eyes. Dude…Priorities man. Priorities.
Ok. So what am I driving at?
If our concern is about high-risk lifestyles then we really should be (?more) concerned about the majority of men who have HIV. While it can be argued that as a percentage of the general population, their number is smaller than that of gays with HIV within the MSM community, I think the statement ‘Therefore we still have time to do something before the situation gets worse’ is extremely cavalier. I say cavalier because no one can know for sure if we are on or not on the verge of a tipping point. There is no time. We can’t just shelve plans to help those people as we wage a war against gays fueled by our own self-righteousness.
My guess is that the assumption underlying this complacency is that Alan Chin believes that the heterosexual men who have HIV are part of a closed community. I’m using my ‘mind reading powers’ here, but the above statement is made based on this line in the letter - ‘This group was infected overseas or by local unlicensed prostitutes; our licensed prostitutes are screened for HIV.’
Dude. Firstly, just because prostitutes are screened for HIV doesn’t mean they don’t have HIV and won’t be passing it around. There is a window period between getting infected and being tested positive. During this window period, the carrier can infect others. Loving is sharing.
I mean, seriously, that statement just smacks of ‘my whore is cleaner than your whore’ mentality. Gosh… Do we even need to compete on this?
Second, seriously, you think these horny jokers are just going around having sex with prostitutes whether local or foreign talent. I mean, these guys could also be having sex with our local gals. And these local gals might not go for checkups because they think their guy is faithful or that he just doesn’t look like that sort of ‘i bang whores in my spare-time’ kind of guy.
Also, there seems to be the assumption that the prostitutes based in Singapore just have sex with the men who visit them as prostitutes. These ladies could also be trying to find romance and a nice relationship. You know what that means? More people who aren’t actively participating in the sex industry are at risk of being infected.
That statement forgets that people who regularly have ONS are also high risk.
Basically it makes the assumption that paid sex is the only route to HIV infection for heterosexuals.
When you throw the ratio 15:1 at me, you know what that tells me. A whole lot of women probably don’t know they are infected and there is a whole bunch of women out there waiting to be infected.
However the numbers were derived, be it from extensive research, being shit out of the ass or God told you so, the numbers tell me one thing. Your argument is mainly against gays, not HIV.
Our real argument should be against HIV. Focusing on one group of high risk individuals makes the rest of us complacent to the real issue - that if you wanna bang, use protection.
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