But, if nothing else, the rate of infection of people who were just really unlucky would be lower if there were fewer people getting infected because they were stupid, because HIV wouldn’t be out there as much.

That “HIV Stops WIth Me” poster ELeven blogged about is a great example of the kind of thing that should be done, and done a lot, I think.

Brava. I think the mistake HIV/AIDS education groups might be making is to be oversensitive (to a fault) to the feelings of those living with HIV. It’s possible to stigmatize the disease without stigmatizing the people living with it. It takes creativity and guts (and the participation of PLWAs), but… aren’t we homos supposed to be the brave, creative ones?

I was born in 1980, so I grew up in the post-AIDS-epidemic world. I had the good fortune to be educated at a school, in an area, in a country, where abstinence-only education wasn’t considered to be the way to go; we got taught about contraception, and our tests included which ones could or could not prevent the transmission of various diseases, including HIV.

The message, fundamentally, was along the lines of: “You are, right now, too young to have sex. Seriously, guys, wait a while.” (We were 12-13 when we started learning.) “But when you do, this is how you can try not to get pregnant, and this is how you can try not to get incurable diseases that could kill you.” A year or so later, an HIV-positive homosexual gentleman came and gave us a talk about HIV and what it’s like to live with it. (Combined message about not stigmatising it, and also about But Seriously It’s Pretty Much Preventable Kids.)

My generation is lucky - we were born after the first wave of it. We haven’t watched our friends die of it - it’s somewhat medically containable these days, as I understand it, but more than that, we got the chance to know the risks before we started sleeping around, the odds of getting it by blood transfusion are much lower, all that stuff.

We’re lucky we got that when we were young, but I just don’t fucking understand the people who, now, when everybody can know this stuff, know it and ignore it. Older people who did see the worst of it and don’t take all the care they can to avoid it, younger people who grew up with the knowledge that HIV was Out There and don’t take the precautions that we all fucking well know we should.

I don’t know. When I was younger it seemed like the general message we got was “HIV is fucking scary, HIV will kill you, HIV is out there. If you’re going to have sex, be safe.” And we just don’t seem to get that message any more at all.