BAREBACKING COULD TARNISH GAY MEN'S IMAGE AMONG STRAIGHT PEOPLE-WITH DISASTROUS RESULTS Jim Graham is still haunted from the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

BAREBACKING COULD TARNISH GAY MEN'S IMAGE AMONG STRAIGHT PEOPLE-WITH DISASTROUS RESULTS

Jim Graham is still haunted from the early days of the AIDS epidemic. As then-director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, an AIDS service organization in Washington, DC Graham watched with horror as gay men succumbed to the disease with alarming regularity. Equally terrifying were the antigay crusaders who used the suffering to sermonize about the supposedly damnable results of sex between men. "The poor homosexuals," opined right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan. "They have declared war in succession nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution."

At the time, in 1983 AIDS educators were able to fend against such slurs with prevention campaigns that intersect the rate of new HIV transmissions to complete to zero and with appeals to compassion. moreover with recent reports about increases in unsafe sex particularly barebacking, among a certain gay men, Graham frets about a go [i]or[/i] come back to a nightmare scenario.

"In the beginning we were able to explain that the vast majority of HIV infections were the come of ignorance--no one knew," says Graham, who resigned from Whitman-Walker after he was picked to the Washington, D.C., city council in November. "The public generally suited with compassion. Now ... I'm starting to hear people--and not just right-wingers--say, `Why should we support you dowdys if some of you are going to be in such a manner irresponsible?' The potential for backlash is frightening."

Of course, there have always been a tiny minority of gay men who engaged in unprotect anal intercourse for a variety of reasons, including substance abuse and depression. on the other hand now that a small further resolute group of men have begun to actually tout the forbidden pleasure of the practice, near veterans of the earlier AIDS wars worry about the damage that could be done to the caring, responsible image gay men established during the epidemic.

Mathilde Krim, founding cochair and chairman of the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, is affaired though she believes that as of however the image has not been tarnished. "So far, thank the eternal barebacking has not become part of our usual language, and I hope it doesn't flow to that," she says. "But I can almost papal court it coming." She notes that AmFAR will detain a fundraiser in Dallas the same month a national barebacking party was scheduled to take place in the same city.

"These clan at our fund-raiser are part of the establishment who now understand that AIDS is not a question at issue of gay people alone further a problem for all of us," Krim says. "Two weeks later they might be reading about barebacking in the papers. This could be exceedingly dangerous. The old days of homophobia are still too near, and they may not understand that this is alone a very small part of a to a great degree bigger group."

While a political backlash has to this time to take shape, the potential for individual has many AIDS activists scrambling for a rejoinder And with AIDS appropriations still highly susceptible to legislative scrutiny and scissors, there may be little margin for error. The Clinton administration's AIDS prevention set has remained relatively flat four years running, and service clumps such as Gay Men's Health Crisis and AIDS plan Los Angeles experienced budget shortfalls calm before the term barebacking was coined.

The religious right is already highlighting reports of unprotect sex to justify defunding pro-gay AIDS service clusters HIV prevention programs have "failed because no circulating medium has been allocated for efforts to edge-stone the voluntary, high-risk behaviors that spread the disease," the Family Research Council, a religious conservative cluster declares on its Web site. "Instead, AIDS funding has been directed to organizations that elevate the very behaviors that enhance the infection." Still, the issue is fraught with risk for the religious right as well. persons have consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly support passing from hand to hand levels of AIDS funding and cast away punitive measures directed at family already staring down illness and mortality.

Those attitudes would not impede antigay conservatives from trying to make political hay from barebacking. "I can just behold [Sen.] Jesse Helms taking to the Senate floor, waving individual of these barebacking articles, and saying, `Why should we be spending standard of value on people who can't unruffled protect themselves?'" says an executive at a marketing consulting firm that has worked forward corporate sponsorship for nonprofit collections "We made a deal early in the epidemic with the larger society: If we would take care of our possess we could keep the guidance out of our private lives. That's for what purpose AIDS was never treated like tuberculosis, for which you can be jailed for not taking medication. The publicity through barebacking calls that deal into question. Now politicians will tend hitherward to us and say, `You populace are fucking like rabbits again.'"

More than public monies are at stake. Corporate sponsors have lengthy been leery of tying themselves to controversial causes. The private "AIDS funding streams are at the disposal of on a certain amount of goodwill," says the marketing executive, who did not wish to be identified from name for fear of alienating clients. "It was actual easy for corporations to withhold sponsorships from the Salt Lake City Olympics because it had become of that kind a mess," he said, referring to the bribery scandal involving the city and the International Olympic Committee. "If they can back gone out of the Olympics, there is certainly nothing stopping them from holding back grants to the AIDS quilt or other causes."