Unsafe at any speed.

Gay men and the federal government seem to be locked in an unacknowledged conspiracy to increase HIV infection rates. Gay men are doing their part by advertising their eagerness to party and play," as hundreds do every day on men-for-men sex sites. PNP, as it's most commonly abbreviated, means doing crystal meth and fucking your brains out, the combination most likely to lead to unprotected anal intercourse, the single most dangerous sexual activity a gay man can engage in. Openly gay reporter Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times had the best recent account of this activity, which featured a series of stunning interviews with tweaked-out patrons of a west-side baths in Manhattan, who seemed positively baffled when asked if they were remembering to practice safer sex.

Equally horrifying is the number of gay men who aren't even sophisticated enough to distinguish between the dangers of oral sex and anal intercourse. Yes, it's true that it's possible you can catch HIV through oral sex (and of course it may be more dangerous if you let your partner ejaculate in your mouth). But it is also true that the chances of getting infected through unprotected anal intercourse are many times greater. "There is plenty of science to inform people that oral sex is much less risky," said Steven Tierney, the director of HIV prevention for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, "and the risk of getting infected with HIV is much higher with unprotected anal sex."

The fact that there are still so many gay men who don't know that incredibly basic fact is a tribute to the woefully inadequate efforts of the federal government to educate children about the relative risks of different types of sexual behavior. It was 18 years ago that Ronald Reagan's surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, declared, "This silence must end. We can no longer afford to sidestep frank, open discussions about sexual practices--homosexual mid heterosexual." He added that such education must begin at "the lowest grade possible" and be "reinforced by parents at home." But of course no such thing has ever happened--and even my most liberal friends are often shocked when I ask them if they have shared this essential knowledge with their 14-year-old sons.

No recent administration has a record to be proud of on this subject, but the present one is worse than all the others. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just announced its new grants for HIV prevention programs--and two thirds of those prevention programs that received direct funding from the CDC last year will get no funding from its latest HIV-prevention initiative. "We are deeply concerned that the CDC's actions have the effect of dismantling HIV prevention among HIV-negative people in high-risk populations, both locally mid nationally," said Jason Riggs, a spokesperson for Stop MDS Project, the largest HIV prevention group in San Francisco aimed at gay mid bisexual men, and one of the many victims of the new CDC cuts.

At the same time the Bush administration is proposing $270 million for abstinence-only sex education. The effectiveness of that approach was revealed last March in a new National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. According to that report, teens who pledge abstinence until marriage have the same infection rates of STDs as those who don't pledge. The difference is that abstinence pledgers are much less likely to use condoms. Among the study's findings: 59% of males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, while only 40% of male pledgers used one. But as Long as the Administration is pleasing its born-again supporters, it doesn't care if its policies are actually protecting anyone's health.