This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.

Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering to the repressed heterosexual world.

Then came AIDS.

While a lot of people changed their behavior and many worked hard getting out the message of safe sex and responsible behavior, a significant number went the other way, becoming aggressively promiscuous and even seeing HIV seroconversion as some sort of rite of passage. They refused condoms, they all but moved into the bathhouses, and they didn't care how many they infected nor how many died. Die they did, by the hundreds of thousands.

We're seeing something of a repeat of that with the politicizing of COVID, the insanity of the antivaxxers, though COVID is not the death sentence that AIDS was.

When I moved back to Seattle after caring for my mother and her cancer as long as I could and looked up my good friend Michael Taylor, who by the way was black, I learned that he had died only a few weeks before, of AIDS. And I wondered if the person who had infected him knew that he was a carrier.