ABSTRACT
In Britain as in the rest of Northern Europe, Australia, Canada and elsewhere in the developed world, HIV has had a vastly disproportionate impact upon gay and bisexual men compared to its effects on other social constituencies. One of the greatest challenges to the development of effective HIV/AIDS education, care and service provision stems from the fact that throughout the developed world powerful lobby groups-including churches, politicians, newspapers and others-continue to refuse to accept that gay men constitute a valid social constituency. Rather, we are frequently regarded simply as voluntary perverts, who have somehow ‘chosen’ our sexual orientation and, by extension, are thought to have ‘chosen’ to be vulnerable to HIV. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Chaim Bermant epitomizes widely held opinion:
When I first heard of them they were known as bum-boys. Then it was nancy-boys, and pansies and fairies, and fruits and fags and faggots and poofs and poofters and queers and gays. Gays was the name they eventually chose. Now they are reverting to queers, but given their disposition should they not be calling themselves kamikazes? I ask the question in all seriousness, for they not only seem to have a death-wish themselves, but an apparent readiness to inflict death on others.1
