
Here was a plague - tinbucket
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague
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YeGoblynQueenne
Let's not forget:

a) There still _is_ a plague, and,

b) It mostly affects heterosexual people:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Sexual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Sexual)

 _Globally, the most common mode of HIV transmission is via sexual contacts
between people of the opposite sex;[12]_

~~~
MrEldritch
Well, duh, of course that's the most common mode; heterosexual contact is
_overwhelmingly the most common mode of sexual contact, period._ The average
heterosexual encounter could be 10000x less likely to result in HIV
transmission and it would _still_ be the most common mode of transmission. But
the fact remains that in the US, two-thirds of HIV transmission is in fact
between gay and bi dudes; and that in the US, 10% of the 16,000,000 gay-
identified men born between 1951 and 1970 were dead by 1995 - a _literal
decimation_ within living memory. Numbers in the UK are similarly
disproportionate. Perhaps you can understand why people writing in English-
language publications might, perhaps, focus on AIDS as a "gay thing"?[1]

As for your first point, though - yeah, AIDS is absolutely still a thing. The
AIDS crisis has never ended; the situation is _still_ considered an pandemic.
We are just now, _finally_ , starting to reach a point where the tide may
begin to turn in wealthy countries like the US, and it's undeniable that
treating the _global_ problem as something specifically dominated by
homosexuality would be a terrible idea.

[1]Gay _male_ thing specifically; most forms of lesbian sex have a
_microscopic_ transmission rate. There's just a whole lot less fluid exchange
involved.

