NZAIDSFOUNDATION

New Zealand AIDS Foundation

Reuben Chapple

Gay activists often claim that heterosexuals are the fastest-growing group of people with HIV/AIDS and that more heterosexuals than homosexuals now suffer from these infections. They are actually misusing aggregated statistics to take the heat off the fact that the majority of those with HIV/AIDS in the developed world are homosexual or bisexual males.

The fact that AIDS is a heterosexual disease in the third world (“heterosexual females are the fastest growing HIV-positive population in the world”) is often advanced by gay spin doctors as “proof” that gay sexual behaviour can’t be singled out at a disease vector.

It is. We now know that HIV is extremely selective and only produces epidemics only when a population’s behaviour provides it with a niche. The manner in which HIV has spread around the world shows that AIDS is a biological epidemic exploiting certain behaviours, chief among them the practice of having large numbers of sexual partners, straight or gay.

In “Sexual Ecology,” gay activist, Gabriel Rotello demonstrates that human societies are made up of sexual ecosystems consisting of groups of people who choose their sexual partners from among others like them.

Each social system has its own sexual ecology. For example, students at a university typically date one another and their sexual activity is characterised by high levels of casual partner exchange compared to the rest of the population.

Because student sexual activity occurs in the same pool of partners, their sexual ecosystem is characterised by high rates of fast-moving STDs such as gonorrhoea and chlamydia, which spread quickly where people switch partners before they discover that they are infected and get treatment.

Married couples change partners mostly in the form of occasional adultery, divorce and remarriage. Since the social and financial costs of adultery, divorce and remarriage are far more onerous that the casual partner switching among university students, partner change is understandably far more infrequent, and STD rates are a fraction of those of university students.

Gay sexual behaviour, on the other hand, is extraordinarily conducive to the transmission of HIV. As Rotello puts it: “gay men created almost laboratory conditions to amplify STDs within highly active core groups of individuals and spread these diseases throughout the gay population.”

Practices that facilitate the spread of AIDS in the gay population include anal sex [“butt-f*cking” “fisting,” “rimming”] with multiple partners, sex games with urine {“golden showers”) and excrement (the deliberate oral ingestion of human feces for sexual gratification), the existence of core groups of men who engage in extraordinary levels of sexual behaviour, and high rates of sexual mixing between people in those core groups and the rest of the gay population.

A growing emphasis on “versatile” anal sex in which partners played both receptive and insertive roles meant that a person injected with the AIDS virus could switch roles and become the injector into others, who could themselves become infected passively, reverse positions and pass it on to others in their turn.

HIV is difficult to transmit and needs to be injected into the body and bloodstream, making it easier for the insertive partner to infect the receptive one. This creates what some epidemicologists call the “dead end” factor, that inhibits HIV transmission from women to men in the developed world. Where strict role separation is practised the virus is likely to hit a dead end.

For this reason, the AIDS virus has failed to produce a self-sustaining heterosexual epidemic in the middle class population. As the NZ AIDS Foundation (“NZAF”) acknowledges on its website, “Heterosexual transmission of HIV has so far failed to become the dominant mode of transmission in any developed country.”

Twenty years into the AIDS epidemic among gays, the absence of a self-sustaining heterosexual epidemic can no longer be explained by the fact that it hasn’t had time to occur. It is not occurring because the sexual ecology of middle-class Western heterosexuals does not promote the efficient spread of HIV, and it will not occur unless there are major changes in the biology of HIV or the behaviour of heterosexuals or both.

Most heterosexual HIV infection in developed nations has resulted from bisexuals or IV drug users passing the virus on to their sexual partners and children. The number of bisexual men who didn’t tell their wives and girlfriends that they also had sex with men is alarmingly high.

A 1996 NZAF study found that of 1,852 men who’d had sex with another man in the past five years, one third were currently, or had been married or in a long term relationship with a woman. More than half of those surveyed had never told their female partners they also had sex with men.

NZAF statistics show that to December 1998, there were 669 reported AIDS cases and 1336 reported cases of HIV. Some 82.1 percent were homosexual men, 4.8 percent were women, and 4.0 percent became infected through IV drug use.

Figures for female-male transmission were [unaccountably] not given, but as discussed, this mode of transmission is relatively uncommon in the developed world. Assuming female-male transmission rates of perhaps 2.4 percent, this leaves 6.7 percent who became infected through blood transfusions, were born to HIV-positive mothers, or were unsure of how they’d acquired the disease.

As we can see, gay men make up the majority of HIV and AIDS cases in New Zealand . A similar pattern of infection is evident throughout the Western world. The drop in new HIV infections noted in the developed countries in the mid-80s probably occurred because most of the susceptible gay men had already been infected. Now that a new cohort of susceptible gay men has become sexually active, they too appear to be becoming infected at rates not dissimilar to those of the previous generation.

The NZAF has noted a disturbing new trend in New Zealand . Bisexual men are no longer the major source of HIV transmission to their female partners: “[M]ost sero-positive straights are [now] either from or have had sex with people from places where heterosexual transmission of HIV is common’ i.e. from Africa and Asia .”

Heterosexual females are the fastest growing HIV-positive population in the world owing to the sexual ecology of Third World countries, particularly that of Africa. Many African men leave home for months at a time to work, contracting HIV from prostitutes servicing hundreds of clients, returning home to pass it on to their wives and unborn children. Their wives, left without financial support and with dependent children, often turn to prostitution themselves to make ends meet until their men return.

This sexual promiscuity, ignorance, and lack of ready access to medical care means men and women frequently have untreated venereal sores that allow the AIDS virus to enter the bloodstream directly.

African women commonly douche with astringents before intercourse to dry out the vagina and heighten sensation for their partners. This makes them more susceptible to the microscopic internal tearing through which the AIDS virus makes its way into the body.

It is dishonest spin doctoring to lump Third World statistics for HIV infection together those of developed countries without disaggregating them according to the sexual ecosystems from which they are generated. Such a device creates a false and misleading picture of AIDS as “everybody’s problem” rather than a disease caused by rampant promiscuity and unnatural sexual practices, and in the First World, largely presenting in male homosexuals.

While AIDS might be '”everybody's problem” in Africa and other Third World nations, in Western countries, it remains overwhelmingly confined to gay males. Gay activists are deliberately manipulating public debate to deflect attention from the unsanitary gay sexual practices by which HIV/AIDS is spread and avoid jeopardising the gains made by the gay movement over the last two decades.

In an article entitled “The Overhauling of Straight America,” (Guide Magazine, November 1987) gay spin doctors, Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill (aka Hunter Madsen) are quite open about this tactic:

"The AIDS epidemic is sparking anger and fear in the heartland of straight America. As the virus leaks out of homosexual circles and into the rest of society, we need have no illusions about who is [deservedly] receiving the blame. The ten years ahead may decide for the next forty whether gays claim their liberty and equality or are driven back, once again, as America's cast of detested untouchables."

In order to accomplish this whitewashing of the gay community: “[T]he masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex should be downplayed and gay rights should be reduced to an abstract social question as much as possible.”

A little closer to home, the taxpayer-funded gay lobby group NZ AIDS Foundation is pushing much the same line, as “Intimate Details and Vital Statistics” [edited and contributed to by gay rights activist Dr Peter Davis, Prime Minister Helen Clark’s husband] makes clear at p. 113:

“Since the advent of AIDS in the US , ‘gay rights’ campaigns had been steadily losing ground to the ‘family rights’ backlash. Scarce [NZAF] resources were now required to meet not only the enormous demands of AIDS, but also for the defence of the [gay] legislative gains of the previous decade.”

Hands up anyone who still believes the NZAF is committed to telling the truth about AIDS and HIV?