Dan Savage takes on the Rolling Stone "bug chasing"/HIV+ gay sex story in his column today, and lambastes one of his favorite sacred cows, Gay Men's Health Crisis and other outreach groups that seem to have a lackadaisical attitude towards their clients' risky behavior. He's written about this before, in the case of Seth Watkins, an HIV+ sex education worker who admitted in the NYTimes he has unprotected casual sex at clubs. Does any of this coverage increase awareness of the still-plenty-big threat of HIV, or does it just make gay men look bad? Respectful discussion within...?
posted by serafinapekkala on Jan 29, 2003 - 42 comments

Andrew Sullivan rips apart a Rolling Stone Story that claims that 1/4 of new HIV infections among gay men are sought out by people both looking to infect others and looking to become infected. "Bug chasing" may have been around for a while, but according to Sullivan and this Newsweek article also debunking the shoddy Rolling Stone piece, it's nowhere near the numbers being exaggerated. This brings up so many issues: the speed with which false information is spread over the Internet; the decreasing responsibility of the media to actually report facts; how trustworthy are our news sources?; will Drudge, who also reported the RS story without any hint of its falsehood, ever be revealed as the sensationalistic closet case he is? (Okay, that last bit was a wee troll, so ignore!).
posted by archimago on Jan 24, 2003 - 20 comments