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(06-06-2014 10:23 AM)Col. Tigh Wrote:  

At first I thought the idea ludicrous, but recently I've come to think the most likely cause of male homosexuality is a pathogen. Arguments for this hypothesis are set out pretty well at this blog post.

In the comments of this post, a fantastic article about a doctor at the forefront of the NYC gay community around the time of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and STD's in general. It discusses his experience as a researcher at the forefront of AIDS research at the time, and its coincidence along with other STDs and infections.

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In the mid-seventies, Sonnabend's office was crowded with people suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea of the penis, the mouth, the anus. Chlamydia was also rampant in the gay community. But there was a lot more than the clap walking through Sonnabend's door. Hepatitis B was almost epidemic, and even tuberculosis was making a comeback. Oral and anal herpes were so common they barely were worth a mention to those infected. Sonnabend thought the gay population, at least the slice of it he was seeing in the Village, was clearly sicker, with stranger diseases, than the populace at large.

In the late seventies, a new wave of disease hit his community parasites. Amebiasis, giardia lamblia, shigellosis, and cryptosporidium, a parasite that usually inhabits the bowels of sheep. These enteric diseases are caused when certain organisms get into peoples, gastrointestinal tracts. How they were getting there was no mystery. The parasites are present in fecal matter.

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It was extraordinary research: clear, simple, and the first of its kind. Sonnabend showed that the immune system of an entire community, the gay community, was under severe stress because of constant attack by syphilis gonorrhea, chlamydia, and other STDs. He showed that these diseases were wearing down an entire group's protection against infection.

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The more research Sonnabend did, the more convinced he became that the breakdown in immunological function was due to simultaneous infection by at least two viruses, CMV and EBV, hitting people already weakened by previous exposure to a series of STDs. Until 1984, when the virus was found that was said to be the cause of AIDS, Sonnabend continued to believe in a multicausal theory for AIDS based on CMV and EBV. Even afterward, he remained convinced that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS. It needed a cofactor, something else to trigger it off.

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Then Sonnabend wrote the same warning in the New York Native. He said that the fast-lane gay lifestyle was killing people. He said they were going to have to stop being so promiscuous, that having hundreds if not thousands of sex partners was making them very sick and very vulnerable.

It was a message the gay community didn't want to hear at that time. After fighting for the freedom to be themselves, they didn't want to hear about restraint. Indeed, for a large part of the male gay community, freedom was not simply the ability to love other men without legal or social restraint; it was defined in terms of sexual promiscuity. For many, to be young and gay and liberated in New York City meant having anonymous sex with two, three, four partners a night, night after night, year after year, STD after STD.

Sonnabend began to preach to his practice. He told them to stop screwing dozens of men every week; to stop the crazy stuff, the fisting, the rimming, all the oral-anal sexual practices. He advocated condoms long before "safe sex" became fashionable. Condoms would reduce most of the venereal diseases afflicting his patients, both the old-fashioned ones and this new epidemic.

Sonnabend's Native article and his personal message to his patients provoked a tremendous storm of protest. He was perceived as agreeing with the most right-wing, religious moralizers of the new Reagan era in America, of blaming this new "gay disease" this "gay cancer" on the gays themselves. The victim was to blame, or at least the victim's lifestyle. In truth, Sonnabend was telling them they had some responsibility for this new epidemic.

For his efforts, Sonnabend was denounced by virtually all of the gay community's leaders. He was vilified in the community itself. It seemed that everyone, except perhaps the thirty patients who participated in the "sluts" research, was angry with Sonnabend. He couldn't quite understand it. It was simply logic. He had done an experiment and proved a point. He was trying to save their lives. Not only was the uproar baffling, it caused Sonnabend tremendous pain. His own community was turning on him. It was a betrayal.

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Very few people in the gay community could accept the idea that the sexual freedoms they had fought so long to obtain were suspect.

http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htm