ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s, in the era of the term "gay plague," the view usual among government functionaries, among people in the health-care industry, and maybe among American newspaper readers generally, had been that transmission in heterosexual sex was really likely only in Africa. In Africa, however, the naturally strong vagina deteriorated. For venereal diseases of many kinds must of course be endemic there, and medical care must be scanty and inefficient. So African vaginas would be raw and chancred in consequence of repeated venereal infections that were uncured or in-completely cured and these vaginas would therefore be disastrously open to HIV. News stories or posters on HIV transmission virtually never discuss risk levels in lesbian sexual behaviors. Marriage is no prophylaxis against AIDS; HIV is, oddly enough, indifferent as to whether or not its prospective human hosts wear wedding rings.
