Posted on 07/09/2004 7:15:36 AM PDT by Pikamax
HIV infections rise among gays More and more young homosexuals forget about the risks of AIDS
By Peter-Philipp Schmitt Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The test had been long overdue. But Tim decided to have it done once he realized that he had another problem anyway. “I only went because I had contracted syphilis,“ he says. The results were not the news Tim wanted to hear: He had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Around Germany, increasing numbers of young German homosexuals like Tim are learning that they, too, are carrying around the deadly virus. While the number of new infections has remained stable during the past few years in Germany, at around 2,000 per year, the total has risen among young gay men, especially those living in large cities. In Munich, the number of positive AIDS tests more than doubled from 17 to 38 in a short period of time.
The shift is occurring at a time when public efforts aimed at blunting the spread of the disease are seeing their funds cut, interest in their work drop and a generation gap evolve between today's uninhibited gays and yesterday's gay crusaders. Tim's story offers some insights into the shifts sweeping through the homosexual community. And one of these changes is a swing in attitudes toward the dangers of AIDS.
“I knew the rules,“ says Tim, a 27-year-old Frankfurt resident who asked that his name be changed for this article. “But I also have friends who have been living with AIDS for almost 20 years now.“ As a result, he says he didn't think that much about using condoms. “If I had realized that contracting HIV could mean dying within two years, I would have always used a condom,“ he says.
The first person to whom he spoke about his infection was one of his best friends who co-founded the group 20+pos. in Frankfurt, a self-help group supported by Deutsche Aids-Hilfe (DAH), a German non-governmental organization. Until he tested positive, Tim had nothing to do with the group's representatives, usually males from the gay movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “After all, they are from a totally different era and know little about what's going on today,“ he says.
The managing director of the DAH in Bremen says he has been watching this estrangement develop between the generations for years. Young homosexuals “often only use the gay community to get quick sex, while we, the older representatives, built it up or at least grew up in it so that we could be there for each other, to make friends,“ says the managing director, Thomas Frenkl. Instead, today's young gays like to turn to drugs and places like techno parties for their good times, he says. “They completely let down their guards,“ says the 43-year-old Frenkl.
Studies also have shown that men who have sex with men have changed the way they deal with risks - in Germany as well as in all large western European and American cities. The epidemic spread of syphilis and the sharp increase in other sexually transmitted diseases are signs of this development. At the same time, the sale of condoms in Germany fell from 207 million in 2000 to 189 million in 2003.
In Frankfurt, the local DAH office faces another problem as well - the decrease in funding. Once founded as a gay self-help group, Germany's largest DAH office will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year. The past few years have been tough: Public funding has been cut. Most of the 100 full-time employees are working as much as before but will again have to do without a Christmas bonus in 2004.
Things used to be different. In the mid-1980s, when AIDS filled people with fear, the Federal Center for Health Education spent 50 million German marks ($31.4 million) on AIDS public-service campaigns each year. Since 1998, it has spent only EUR9 million ($11 million) a year. It doesn't come as a surprise then that only 30 percent of Germans consider AIDS to be an extremely dangerous disease. “Those who were born after 1980 only experienced the tail end of AIDS education at best,“ Tim says. Jul. 9
LOL
No, I think they just use a long list of show tunes instead.
No doubt.LOL
Well, now here's some breaking news.
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