When the folks at BeOneCity asked me revisit and revise a piece I’d written on safe sex four years ago I was thrilled. I love revisiting sex as often as possible!

I also thought the timing perfect. Now you may be thinking, “Oh great—how lame—he’s gonna tie this to the recent political conventions.” Puhleeze! I have a little more imagination than that. Right outside of the Democratic Convention Center is where I’d actually like to begin my re-visitation.

You see, as anxious as I was to see what pantsuit Hillary would be wearing and what tie Barack would be sporting, I found one of the fringe events far more titillating. For even as the Dems began politicizing practically across the street Rolling Stone magazine and Trojan were sponsoring a Condomvention. I kid you not. With the theme “GET IT ON” and Bill Maher hosting, it was billed as a “night of condoms, cocktails, comedy and hopefully change.”

O.K., so maybe that is a lame tie-in. But by the way things are going, let’s hope those delegates took time to check it out (and focused less on the cocktails and more on the condoms!). After all, with the recent acknowledgement by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that they’ve been underestimating the rate of new HIV infections by almost 40% for years, it’s certainly time for a real national focus on the issue.

These new stats may, in fact, be just the jolt for justification the politicians need. For the first time since the death toll started over 25 years ago BOTH parties seem intent on addressing AIDS as a national crisis and on a national scale. Obama even goes as far as to say he is “committed to developing a National AIDS Strategy.”

It’s the kind of push we’ve obviously needed for a long, long time. As much as we’ve accomplished as a community—by those who are, like myself, virally-enhanced and those fortunate enough to have remained negative—the message of safe sex continues to elude us. This fact became painfully clear to me during this re-visitation.

When I wrote my original piece for HX Magazine over four years ago, the rate of new infections among gay men in New York City was surging once again. For those of you unfamiliar with HX, it’s basically a weekly NYC party guide for the boys, with mostly a bar distribution--definitely aimed at a party crowd. So when the editor asked me to write a safe sex piece for their annual sex issue I was impressed. It wasn’t the type of article HX is noted for. I mean, hey. Their major funding comes from hustler’s ads--focusing on safe sex isn’t exactly part of their marketing strategy.

It seemed routine enough and I was excited to do it. I thought, “Wow! If a party guide like HX is heralding safe sex things really must be dire.” As the editor got more specific, though, my excitement cooled. “Talk about the history,” he said, “Why were safe sex messages so prevalent and powerful in the ‘80s, why’d they wane and why are they coming back?”

Simple, I thought at first. Shouldn’t be a problem. “Make it fun!” Now in the interest of brevity, I won’t go into the number of times he used the word “fun” as he continued to share with me his vision for the piece. Suffice it to say, I quickly realized that what he really wanted was a party piece; something palatable to a readership that usually has a cocktail in one hand (an old-fashioned, pre-AIDS, real- thing cocktail) and HX in the other while cruising the boy across the bar. It’s an audience for whom HX is more often a convenient prop than anything else. (Do any of those boys even read the articles?!)

I wasn’t at all sure what to write. “Fun fun fun” kept echoing through my mind. And yes, sex is fun. Safe sex is fun. But safe sex was born of tragic necessity, and it was that same necessity that carried the message so efficiently and effectively in the early days of AIDS.

I remember those days (yeah, I’m on the other side of 40). The idea that a condom could protect you not only from STD’s but also from AIDS, was just gaining steam when I volunteered with GMHC in 1984. From the get-go the idea of practicing safe sex was rife with controversy. “It’s all a government plot,” I remember a man telling me in a bar, “They just want us to stop having sex.”

Part of me really wanted to believe him. But then I went to the hospital to see my first GMHC client. The elevator doors opened and there he stood—a man so emaciated and frail that I was amazed he could stand at all. His face and arms were covered with the bluish-purple spots of Kaposi’s sarcoma. I’d seen it before—you saw it everyday back then. Still my face must have registered horrific pain. He tried to alleviate my discomfort with a stab at humor, “All I can say is, don’t eat the blueberries.”

Such visions kept the message of safe sex strong and viable during those initial years. So what happened?

Ironically, success may have led to failure. “The facts of the mid-1980s are not the facts of the late 1990s,” wrote activist Eric Rofes in 1999. “The pages of weekly gay papers are not filled with obituaries anymore, and everyone we know who tested HIV-positive in the 1980s is not dead. A syndrome once considered lethal to every carrier of the virus has been undermined not only by the new drug cocktail, but…by the undeniable presence of long-term non-progressors in our midst: those infected for more than a decade who retain fully intact immune systems that have somehow stifled viral replication.”

More recently, in Attitude Magazine, Johann Hari was more acerbic in his assessment of the inherent irony of success. “Some HIV prevention experts label the treatments ‘protease disinhibitors’, because they have lulled gay men into believing that contracting HIV is less like getting cancer and more like getting diabetes, merely a matter of swallowing a few pills a day.”

Being one of those virally-enhanced, pill-poppers myself, such statements make me shudder. Whoa, I think, am I the reason young gay men stopped using condoms? You read it right—I’m one of those long-term non-progressors. I tested HIV-positive in March 1987. Reading more, I realized yes, my very existence is a factor. Just the fact that folks like me are still here and still healthy makes the crisis-driven messages of the ‘80s lose urgency for many men.

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