The gay sexual free-for-all provided the perfect environment for HIV to proliferate in the gay community. The intimate acts between gay men, and the sheer number of men engaging in them with one another, allowed the virus to spread from man to man like wildfire. As gay activist Gabriel Rotello (1997), former editor of the one-time major New York City gay newspaper Outweek, explained in his controversial book Sexual Ecology, “Sexual versatility (one’s willingness to take both insertive and receptive roles in anal sex) became valorized and widespread in gay subculture beginning only in the 1970s; it contributed significantly to epidemic amplification (of HIV) because viral transmission occurs primarily unidirectionally in anal sex, from the insertive to the receptive partner. In mathematical terms, sexual versatility compounds the rate of viral transmission to epidemic proportions”. Thus the convergence of the explosion of gay men acting on their sexual desires combined with the development of large numbers of men engaging in anal sex with versatility allowed HIV to spread and flourish. There was no way at the time that gay men could wrap their minds around the possibility of a lethal sexually transmitted epidemic such as HIV. But the news of a mysterious disease that was killing gay men sent shock waves though the entire community. Some refused to stop playing, but eventually they could not ignore the fact that they were playing with their lives every time they had sex with another man. The rules of the sexual playground changed.

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, writer Larry Kramer (1983a, b, c) began to raise the alarm in ways that stirred controversy. Using language worthy of an Old Testament prophet, he said it was incumbent upon gay men to change the way they were having sex so as to prevent the spread of the virus. His opponents struck back in kind, calling him “antisex” and “homophobic,” a “reactionary” and a self-loathing gay man. The virulent intensity of the exchange cannot be understood without taking into account the long-standing Puritanism of American culture, and the pervasive sense among gay people, after the Stonewall riots of 1969, that this same Puritanism was the foundation stone of the closet. Kramer’s preachy and patronizing tone was deliberately provocative, and the anger it provoked was intensified by the moralism of his notorious earlier novel, Faggots (1978). But despite all of this, Kramer was clearly being targeted as the bearer of bad news. It was difficult for many to believe that their hard-won sexual freedom could have negative consequences. Large numbers of gay men dismissed Kramer’s passionate exhortations. To many, they smacked of a kind of antigay rhetoric the gay community was used to hearing from queer-hating conservatives — that gays would pay for their “sins.” In fact, leaders on the right wing of America’s political spectrum blamed the AIDS epidemic on gay men’s “immoral behavior” and claimed it was God’s punishment for their perversions. These messages activated some gay men’s own internalized homophobia1 and they came to believe, or at least question, whether God really had sent a plague to smite modern-day Sodomites. Some gay men refused to apologize for their sexual revolution and would not hear anything that smacked of “preachiness” or moralizing. Activist and writer Eric Rofes (1996) suggests that from the onset of the earliest AIDS prevention messages, both the tone and content of the “safe sex” campaign turned off a sizable number of people in the community. Kramer’s sometimes shrill, but nonetheless prophetic, warnings were an early example of the failure to reach the targeted audience of sexually active gay men in a way that helped them reevaluate the risks of recreational sex.

As the era of unrestrained sexual expression came to an end and the time of funerals and memorial services began, sex became more dangerous and frightening than ever. Gay men learned to fear bodily fluids and to shun sexual encounters altogether. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, many sexually active gay men were consumed with fear that they might have already contracted the disease, and if somehow they had not they were desperate to avoid becoming infected. Faced with a disease that had few treatments and no cure, the health care and AIDS activist communities developed campaigns to try to prevent HIV and other STD infections. Beginning in the 1980s, programs were developed to help gay men eroticize safer sex (Palacios-Jimenez & Shernoff, 1986; Shernoff & Palacios-Jimenez, 1988; Shernoff & Bloom, 1991).

This sex-positive approach was one of the programs that was successful in stopping the sexual transmission of HIV. For many years, rates of STDs and new HIV infections among gay men dramatically fell .