A slow-news end of summer had mainstream newspapers falling back on old
habits to make new headlines. Most sensational was the story of the
“syphilis fraternity”—seven gay men who tested positive for the STD
after frequenting SFM4M (San Francisco Men for Men), an America Online
(AOL) chat room used by Bay Area boys to arrange get-togethers. What
made this newest skirmish in the epidemic’s familiar public health–
vs.–personal freedom war a first was that it took place on the
Internet, pitting public health against the right to privacy.
The AOL members’ anony-mity—and the discomfort of most media when faced
with the unregulated underbelly of web culture—proved a highly
flammable mix. One of the men in the virtual bathhouse, gasped USA Today,
“is known to have exposed 47 partners [to syphilis].” The late-breaking
fact that as many as five of the men had HIV only added icing to the
cake. The Syphilis Seven (and their 99 total possible infectees) loomed
as a health crisis because of their anony-mity, and AOL was put through the ethics wringer for protecting the men’s identities.
That’s when volunteers from PlanetOut, a gay-focused website, dropped
in on SFM4M to provide sex education and referrals to men known only by
their user names. AOL—one of PlanetOut’s owners—had requested the
intervention, a first for the news-and-entertainment company, though
the prevention information was identical to what street outreach
programs have been dispensing for years.
For those who dreamed that cluster-study panic went the way of Patient
Zero, this event was a rude awakening. Reporters seized on the “first
disease cluster in cyberspace” as a lead. It was the adult version of
kiddie-porn Internet warnings: Try looking for love—let alone sex with
strangers—on the dark, sticky web, and you can count on some nasty
virus as punishment.
Although big cities from New York to San Francisco had already
announced an up--surge in syphilis infections, the total cases remained
tiny (the CDC reported 46 cases during the first half of 1998). Adding
fuel to the fire was the simultaneous release of a University of
California at San Francisco study in which a quarter of the gay male
participants reported unprotected anal sex with a partner of the
opposite or unknown status. With the AOL story’s anecdotal evidence
sharing column space with the UCSF data, each only confirmed the
other’s most sinister point: The gays—HIV positive, reckless and
predatory—are at it again, and now they’re at large in cyperspace.
The demonization of gay sex never left mainstream media, even in papers
that use “PWA” instead of “AIDS victim,” but as the dog days of August
dragged to a close, disease-carrying insects in the Northeast took
syph’s place at the top of the hour. Stay tuned for the next
horror-headline comeback: “First case of mosquito-to-human HIV
transmission!"
