There's an editorial today in The New York Times on young gay men and HIV. It was sent out today over a listserv I'm on run by NY's CHAMP (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project), and I just blasted a critique of it back over that listserv. I was particularly peeved by this:

"Silence now seems to be winning the day. Nearly 6,000 gay men died of AIDS in the United States in 2005; still, many young men appear to have persuaded themselves that the infection is no longer such a big deal."

In particular, as a sociologist who has qualitatively researched young gay men's experiences with HIV (and as a young gay man myself!), their claim that young gay men have "persuaded themselves" that the disease isn't an issue any longer is totally Byzantine. As if! This is the problem with most people doing public health work around HIV in the US: they've been caught up in the dominant neoliberal health discourse that puts all of the responsibility for disease on *individuals* (e.g. "persuaded themselves") as if *structural* factors like, oh I don't know, abysmal sex education efforts around HIV; stigmatizing public responses to HIV, gay sex, and in particular anal sex; government crackdowns on public / communal drug consumption (which I would argue has led gay men out of the public clubs doing E and into their private bedrooms doing meth) combined with the general pattern of demolition we're seeing of urban gay dance spaces -- as if any of these more *structural* issues aren't playing a HUGE role in why young gay men (and in particular young men of color) might be testing positive more frequently.

The NYT's analysis is tired. It's time for a new approach to HIV - clearly the old responses aren't doing us much good. We need to throw out the "silence = death" / crisis rhetoric that worked in the 80s, but now sounds terribly cliche. It just doesn't work anymore.