Seriously—why can't public health leaders just suggest gay men stop having insanely risky sex?

Why is this so difficult???

Earlier this summer we learned that public health leaders in New York City, dealing with extremely high rates of monkeypox infections among gay men, were really, really frightened to just tell gay men to stop having profligate, wanton sex all the time. A lot of them were really worried that if they did that, they’d seem like they were shaming gay men for having risky, anonymous, often group-based sex. So there was this huge amount of feet-dragging and hemming and hawing while the virus spread unabated through New York’s bathhouses and other gay hookup spots.

Well, you’ll be amused to know that, after two months, public health officials are still really, really reluctant to tell gay men to stop doing the one thing guaranteed to stop the spread of monkeypox cold:

The White House is continuing to aggressively push messaging to de-associate the monkeypox outbreak with the gay male community as the vast majority of cases continue to manifest among men who have sex with men. 

Biden administration National Monkeypox Response Deputy Coordinator Demetre Daskalakis argued at a White House press conference on Wednesday that the virus is "a piece of DNA wrapped in some fat" unable to select for certain sexual orientations. 

"It’s not smart," he argued. "It can’t distinguish between people based on their sexual orientation or gender." He argued that the virus is "just an infection.  It’s not linked to an identity." …

Daskalakis conceded that public health messaging should give some weight to the prevalence of the virus within the gay male community. 

"[S]ignaling to people who are in the gay, bisexual, other-men-who-have-sex-with-men communities, and also transgender people who have sex with men that it’s really important to have awareness if it’s circulating in the community is really a critical part of the messaging," he said.

Yet the coordinator warned public health officials against "generating, you know, inordinate concern and really focusing on the infection as linked to an identity."

This is just really, really bizarre. I do not get it. What’s the point of this? Who does it serve? What does it take for someone to say, just point-blank, “Hey yeah, monkeypox can infect anyone, but more than 90 percent of cases are among gay men, and we know it’s because many gay men have a ton of anonymous unprotected sex all the time. So if they stop doing that for a bit then the problem will pretty much solve itself.” What exactly is stopping the CDC from saying this? It would be so easy!

Is it a fear of offending the gay men in question? Um, not to go on and on about it, but is this particular sub-demographic of gay man really that easy to offend? How touchy can you be if you spend a lot of your time in unsafe group sex with strangers? I mean, it’s not even like you have to truly insult anyone—you can just be like, “If you do that stuff your chances of catching monkeypox go way, way up. Stop doing it for, like, five weeks, and the whole thing will burn out—and hell, then you can go back to doing it again if you want to.” Is that somehow a controversial message?

Again, who is this meant to serve? Is it meant to protect gay men by covering up the reckless sexual behavior that’s helping drive the monkeypox epidemic? Well, two things: First of all, everybody already knows that a lot of gay guys do this stuff. Conservative or liberal, gay “ally” or sexual traditionalist, everyone knows that this is going on, so refusing to address it is fooling precisely nobody.

Second of all, why would gay advocates want to cover this up? Are they secretly ashamed by it? If so, why? The whole point of the gay liberation movements of the past several decades, after all, has been to de-stigmatize pretty much all forms of sexual interaction, up to and including the truly staggering number of sexual partners that a sizable portion of gay men regularly have. Are we now to assume that this is actually a rather embarrassing phenomenon the gay community would rather not openly discuss?

Here is the most likely explanation: Most progressives—including especially most LGBT advocates—are intensely, almost pathologically afraid of being mistaken for conservatives. This is a pretty well-established fact. Telling someone to control their sexuality in any way, even at a minuscule level—and even if it’s to help stop a repulsive communicable disease from spreading—is the kind of advice that might, in a pinch, be mistaken for something distantly adjacent to conservatism. And so it cannot be said.

Rather than help stop the transmission of a literally pustulant disease, advocates are instead reduced to saying things like, “The virus can’t distinguish between people based on their sexual orientation or gender.” Anything at all to avoid even the vague, remote appearance of conservative thought.

Thankfully, monkeypox is essentially a non-fatal disease. But suppose it wasn’t? Could you see the public health response being any different? I would wager not. If a truly deadly disease starts making its way through the gay bathhouses of the world, you can expect our public health experts to similarly keep their mouths shut out of cowardice and political calculation. “It’s not smart.” Neither are they.