During the first wave of AIDS, I lost over 200 close friends. Today, when people say “you have so many friends and do so much”, they are shocked when I tell them I really have only 2 close friends. The rest were dead in their 20’s and 30’s.

Now, when I get asked by an acquaintance to support their efforts to raise money in an AIDS ride or walk or whatever, I ask “why bother”.

I’ve found other outlets more deserving (and appreciative)of my contributions than the health and welfare causes of my GLBT community.

Issues which address general rights for all LGBT people fully deserve to be front and center. HIV is in my experience a minor issue among lesbian. Moreover the issue of AIDS/HIV tends to blow back on lesbians and transgendered people not contributing in any significant fashion to the HIV problem.

Thanks to the spread of “abstinence only” education in many states, many young people are not getting any kind of safe sex message at all.

AIDS no longer grabs headlines, even in our community’s media. As much as I disliked how badly the mainstream media and the tabloids sensationalized and negatively portrayed AIDS (and therefore provoked violence and prejudice against gays), at least they made AIDS visible and scary for us. Between the absence of this and the success of AIDS drugs, AIDS no longer seems scary and is no longer in the forefront of our consciousness, and less awareness = unsafe sex.

The fact that we’re so focused on marriage equality, ENDA, DADT, hate crimes, etc. has also pushed AIDS not just to the back burner but off the stove.

Your three stories are all of men in their 40s or older who should know better. But there is also a huge amount of unsafe sex going on among younger gays. These people weren’t yet born or were small children during the “first wave.” They haven’t lived through seeing their friends get infected and die, so it’s not “real” for many of them yet.

Bareback porn is now readily available. Around 1990, when porn was produced by a relatively small number of companies, those companies heeded the pressure to stop producing, and therefore eroticizing, unsafe sex. Now, thanks to the internet and cheap technology for producing DVDs, there’s homegrown cottage-industry porn everywhere, and many of these purveyors know that the way to make a buck is to sell unsafe sex.

I’m afraid that the only thing that will wake people up is another wave of infections and deaths. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I always get something from reading your columns. From this one, I got two things; the first is that our elected officials care little about people in this country – whether it is AIDS, health care, poverty, etc. The second is that even after our community has been devastated by this disease, after so many have died, there are still far too many men in denial about AIDS transmission. I was infected in 1984 and am now the only one of a large group of friends still living. As soon as we knew that AIDS was sexually transmitted, my late partner and I began practicing safe sex and informing potential sex partners of our status. As long as there are gay men willing to risk their lives and the lives of others, this disease will continue to claim more victims. The government has a great deal of responsibility in this matter, but so do gay men. How many wake up calls do we need?

The problem is that structural issues in society which led to the first “wave” you lived through have not truly changed yet. Gay people are still subject to discrimination every day, and in fact are now suffering from campaigns to make sure that discrimination is explicitly legal. That kind of messaging can be boiled down to society telling gay people, “You are expendable — we don’t think you are worth as much as other people are.”

No matter how you fight it, that kind of society-wide message, over time, finds a home in a person. Its effect is that people don’t value themselves or others as much as they could — and so taking care of oneself long-term doesn’t seem to appeal when, in the short term, a person can find a distraction from all of that hell out there.

Prevention messages and interventions based on behavioral theory don’t fall on deaf ears entirely, but they work on very short timetables because the larger societal message of lesser worth overwhelms messages of personal value (which includes health).

Also, be reminded that gay people are not the only American sufferers with HIV who are neglected by the government’s shamefully short shrift on the issue. Black and Hispanic people have much higher rates of infection, too, though not nearly as high as gay men. Black gay men, at the intersection of populations devalued by the general public, suffer most acutely.