The New York Times reports that HIV infection rates in gay men under age 30 rose 32 percent between 2001 and 2006. Rates were higher among blacks and Hispanics. In boys 13 to 19 years old, the number of new diagnoses doubled. The one bright spot was the 22 percent decline in infections among men over 30. 

Guys my age — thirtysomethings — are in a sort of unique niche.  We caught the tail-end of the AIDS epidemic of the eighties when we were coming of age sexually.  I only knew two or three people who died of it, and they were all middle-aged.  But friends of mine who are in their forties and fifties now tell me they lost legions of friends and lovers, men in their primes, at the height of the plague.

Even though many in my age group didn't experience the crisis to that degree, we lived in its shadow.  The whole gay community was reeling from the losses.  Something somber hung over the scene.  You couldn't go anywhere or talk to anyone in a bar, where it wouldn't come up.  And, of course, condoms were de rigueur for casual sex (and at least the pretense of practicing safe-sex is still important in my cohort). 

I had the misfortune of being a tall, lanky kid during the time gay culture was emerging from this nightmare.  I'm around six feet tall, and in my twenties I weighed about 145 lbs.  I wasn't sickly, just thin, like a lot of guys in their teens and twenties tend to be.  But being skinny in the age of AIDS was hard on your sex-life. It was basically mass PTSD we were dealing with.  We'd all seen people wasting away with this disease.

I did a big coming-out European tour in my early twenties, and everywhere I went — from Amsterdam to Rome — I'd strike up a conversation in a bar or a bathhouse, and they'd ask me if I was "positive."  You couldn't even joke about it.  You couldn't wax ironic, and be like, "yeah, I'm very positive.  I consider myself an optimist!" And that seemed to sum it up.  The affirmative answer was "negative."  That was hooking up in the shadow of AIDS.

At first, it pissed me off. I was young and hung, and full of spunk, but I knew I wouldn't be forever. I wanted it to be easy while it could be. But when foreplay is the recitation of your medical history, it tends to kill the mood.  The culture of casual sex had changed.  And I recognize now that it's a good thing for me that it did.  I was pretty trusting in those days, and I'm lucky to have met some great older guys (older being younger than I am now) who took me under their wings, and instilled in me the importance of taking proper precautions, to be careful of myself and others.

After a few false starts, the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties was a smorgasbord of great sex for me, as they should be for any healthy, red-blooded hunk abroad.  As red hot as life on the Blue Danube was in those early days after the fall of Communism when the East was opening to the West (in more ways than one), I can count on one hand the times over a period of ten years that I rebelled against the proscriptions and prohibitions of safe-sex. 

And as HIV became more manageable, and you didn't see "AIDS victims" wasting away, but "Poz" guys rippling with muscles and looking for play, I sensed a sea-change in attitudes towards safe-sex.  Not only in the way it was referred to ("safer-sex" entered the online hook-up site lexicon) but in what it seemed to symbolize for some. 

Back in Boston now, it seemed to me that self-identified tops, especially, found safe-sex an unnecessary inconvenience.  If they were exclusive tops (hard enough to find tops, period, in this town, much less ones that don't bottom after one beer) they started asking why they had to play safe, when they were being told their risk factor was minuscule.

I actually had this conversation with the phlebo at Project Trust the last time I was tested, a few months ago.  I asked him: "if I exclusively top, am I at risk?" And, after qualifying his answer with "if you're having unprotected sex, you're at risk," he said "but not really." So if I were an impressionable guy who thought of himself as an exclusive top who only bottoms for total-top straight guys, I'd have left that HIV testing center with a clean bill of health and carte blanche to bareback*. 

The extent to which people my age or older are sick of hearing about safe-sex was brought home to me on a recent trip to Montreal with an old friend, who had actually been a social worker — an end-of-life counselor, no less — at the Fenway in the eighties.  The B&B we stayed in put a little basket of goodies in each room.  I picked it up, foraged around in it, and came out with some brightly-colored condoms.

"Ooh, look!" I said, holding up a blue one.  "Can't wait to try this one on.  It matches my balls!"

"Condom nazis!" my friend snarled.

"Whatever," I said.  "More free stuff for me!"

But it's not just him.  It seems a lot of gays are sick of having condoms shoved down their throats (you know what I mean).  I've noticed in the past couple of years people in general getting a lot laxer about safe-sex hook-ups.  They will ask you if you're safe, and if you say yes, they're like, "me, too.  So, we're OK to bareback then, right?" Clever.

Barebacking has made a huge comeback (pardon the pun, again) in porn, too.  And in a culture where that's a lot of young people's only source of sex-ed, that's significant.  I freely admit that I prefer "pre-condom classics" in porn, but I also understand that's partly because it's fantasy fodder.  The reality of it is, that generation of porn stars was decimated by AIDS. 

I know people who knew people who died.  But there's a generation coming of age now that, maybe, knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who died.  Nowadays, it's like AIDS is an urban legend. 

I'm not sure if it's nihilism or blind hope that's to blame for the crisis that's brewing.  Maybe it's just forgetfulness.  Lack of vigilance.  Lack of caring for each other.  Lack of interest in minorities and low-income and vulnerable communities in the midst of our middle-class victories in marriage equality. 

Gay people should know, there are fights you've got to keep fighting.  HIV is very real, and it's making a tragic comeback.  Could be, the new fight is the same old fight, after all.
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*I did leave with a clean bill of health, by the way.  It's true what they say about abstinence.