ABSTRACT
A number of behavioural studies tracking the response of gay and bisexual men to AIDS have commented on an increase over the last one to three years in the percentage of men reporting anal intercourse and, in particular, a number of men fucking in the late 1980s, who in the mid-1980s were not doing so. Most researchers (e.g., Stall et al., 1990 Sherr and Strong, 1990; Adib et al., 1991) have taken these data to indicate that gay and bisexual men are ‘relapsing’ to unsafe sex.2 This notion of relapse threatens to inform the next generation of health education initiatives for gay and bisexual men, yet it remains a beguiling but imprecise idea that is conceptually untenable, empirically dubious and politically naïve.
