As monkeypox strikes gay men, officials debate warnings to limit partners
Today, 04:43 PM
Source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...-gay-safe-sex/
As monkeypox strikes gay men, officials debate warnings to limit partners
Sex is a major driver of the global outbreak. But health officials and longtime HIV activists say calls for abstinence don’t work.
By Fenit Nirappil and Amrita Jayakumar
Updated August 4, 2022 at 3:55 p.m. EDT|Published August 4, 2022 at 6:54 a.m. EDT
SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands of gay men clad in leather, latex — and often much less — partied along Folsom Street here last weekend during the annual kink and fetish festival. Even after the city had just declared the monkeypox outbreak striking its gay community a health emergency — one day after the World Health Organization urged men to sleep with fewer men to reduce transmission — San Francisco public health officials made no attempt to rein in festivities or warn attendees to have less sex.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighs whether to recommend limiting sexual partners, health officials in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other U.S. cities battling surges disproportionately sickening gay men are avoiding calls for sexual restraint, wary of further stigmatizing same-sex intimacy.
Public health authorities typically emphasize safer sex over abstinence to prevent the spread of diseases through intimate contact. But monkeypox is presenting new challenges in calibrating the right message to stop the rare virus from becoming endemic while limiting government intrusion into the bedroom.
“If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex,” said California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is involved in the city’s monkeypox response. “I know people who normally go to sex parties who will not. People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels.”
More than 6,600 cases of monkeypox have been detected in the United States, prompting the Biden administration to declare a public health emergency Thursday to galvanize awareness. The virus primarily spreads through exposure to an infected person’s rashes or lesions, and this is the first outbreak in which contact during sex appears to be the significant driver. While infections are heavily concentrated among men who have sex with men, others can contract the virus through nonsexual contact and sharing contaminated items.
Many public health officials and activists who spent decades on the front lines of the battle against HIV/AIDS say they have learned it is futile to tell people to have less sex. That stance puts them at odds with the WHO, a top New York epidemiologist who condemned the city’s messaging and others within the gay community who say gay men deserve direct warnings before it is too late to end the outbreak.
“It was devaluing gay men’s lives and health not to warn gay men,” said Dan Savage, a sex columnist who has criticized the public health response to monkeypox. “Now, here we are, really on the verge of monkeypox being endemic in gay communities all over the world, and how is that for stigma?”
Savage, who is no prude as a proponent of non-monogamous relationships and exploring fetishes, said public health officials should have advised gay men to curb their sex lives at the start of the outbreak in May, which experts suspect was supercharged by large festivals in Europe with rampant sexual activity.
Savage is taking his own advice, limiting sex to his husband and his boyfriend and skipping San Francisco’s Dore Alley festival this year.
A dozen Dore Alley attendees interviewed by The Washington Post said they took monkeypox seriously — without the government scolding them to do so. Many revelers kept their clothes on or donned full latex outfits inside crowded bars. One man sheathed himself in a monkeypox-inspired costume — a clear plastic rain suit over a rainbow outfit decorated with white polka dots that he said he wore to “make a statement” about the importance of avoiding skin-to-skin contact.
Several said they planned to avoid casual sex at afterparties...
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/04/monkeypox-gay-safe-sex/ As monkeypox strikes gay men, officials debate warnings to limit partners Sex is a major driver of the global outbreak. But health officials and longtime HIV activists say calls for abstinence don’t work. By Fenit...
flutrackers.com