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Notes -
The mechanical elements are a major part of it, but the social element is probably larger. I just finished And the Band Played On, which was excellent, and I have an effortpost in my head about the characters that pop back up like bad nickels.
But something that runs through the early years of AIDS is the process by which they kept trying to shut down, or at least soften the activity in, Bathhouses in SF and NYC and other cities, and they didn't do it. There is simply no hetero equivalent, none, for that kind of normalized, regular, random, high partner count sexual activity outside of a brothel. Not all gay men used the bathhouses, but basically all knew people who did.
While there are heterosexuals who engage in that kind of sexual athleticism, they tend to cluster together: whores and whoremongers, rock stars and groupies, etc. So for a random heterosexual, you're fairly comfortable that your partner has no connection to that kind of thing. For a random homosexual in the 1980s, unless you're talking to a virgin the odds are that he's no more than a few degrees of sexual separation from the bathhouses.
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