Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, promiscuous gay men knew how to find each other. In many cases they used to get together for sex at gay bathhouses, or perhaps they’d meet up at respectable bars and their not-so-respectable “back rooms.”
First — the symptoms of meningitis are here. Read them. It’s easy and not scary. Describe Meningitis Symtoms.
Gay men who wanted sex and only sex often lurked in the wooded areas of city parks and in public restrooms. Bathrooms in large department stores were often labeled in the gay underground as “tea rooms” and the whereabouts of these tea rooms was often listed in gay books and magazines and most often by word of mouth. This is how gay men found each other for sex back in the days before cell phones and computers.
Of course — and many will scream their heads off — the bathhouses and the other places where promiscuous and anonymous gay sex were in full throttle, HIV – the virus that causes AIDS — got a really keen jumpstart and before you knew it, gay men were getting sick and dying by the thousands.
Most gay activists and politically correct people denied it then — something that cost the gay community thousands of lives — and they still deny it today. But, the truth is that promiscuous and anonymous sex with multiple partners in the gay community is a hazard that often leads to disease. You can live in denial and call this a homophobic rant, but it’s anything but a homophobic rant — it’s my attempt to save the gay men of today from falling victim to the new bathhouse and the new back room. It’s my intention to try to warn in advance about the dangers that lurk in gay social networking apps like the most popular disease spreading app – Grindr.– ( pronounced GRINDER)
Grindr is a social networking app that you can download to your cellphone. When other gay men download Grindr, their phone identifies your phone when you are within a certain proximity to one another. In other words, Grindr is the 21st century way for cruising gay men to find each other. It’s the new tea room or bathhouse. Sounds harmless right? It’s not. Grindr is the new disease mover and it’s causing the spread of serious illness just like the back rooms and bathhouses in 1970s and 80s New York and San Francisco.
Naturally, it is the duty of both sex partners to practice due diligence so as to ensure a safe “hook-up” but no sex is really safe sex. It’s only “safer” sex — and when you add up the numbers what good does that do when the new disease in question is spread with or without a condom.
Already, a strain of deadly meningitis is being linked to the Grindr app when it was applied in certain parts of Brooklyn, New York and gay men in the area are being told to get a meningitis vaccine as soon as possible. Evidently, and in my opinion, there is a patient zero who harbors this virus and he seems to be using Grindr. Of course Grindr is not causing the disease, but it is making people in small areas available to each other much more readily much in the same way the bathhouses and back rooms used to back in their day.
If anyone is interested in the history of gay disease, it should be mentioned that gay men fell victim to all kinds of diseases long before there was AIDS. Right before AIDS took over the scene, the villain was the dreaded Hepatitis B – a serious disease of the liver that is spread in much the same way as HIV. Back in the very late 1970s and early 1980s, city clinics offered free Hepatitis B vaccines, and since the vaccine was newly invented, the gay population was the perfect model in which to begin trials. The vaccine worked and soon mobile vaccine clinics prowled about gay trysting places in an attempt to stop the spread of the frequently deadly Hepatitis B virus.
Sadly, the HIV virus has not so easily been conquered in spite of the fact that incredible strides have been made wherein new medications have worked remarkably well and many of those infected are living happy an productive lives. These drugs are not fool proof nor are they free from side effects, but the specter of AIDS as death sentence has been somewhat vanquished — but has it really?
People still contract HIV in the USA via carelessness simply because it is no longer as feared like it once was. Anonymous and condom-less sex is at an all time high among the youth of American and Europe. Some in the gay community actually “chase” or “risk” getting the virus so as to eventually acquire it and thereby stop the doubt or worry. They have it and that’s that. The trouble is that 30% of HIV infected individuals do not tell partners they have the disease and another 30% of those infected don’t know they’re infected. It’s a recipe for disaster, because AIDS is, at the very least, a chronic and debilitating disease.
“Kids today don’t know the fear of AIDS the way kids in the 1980’s did,” said one research scientist. “They see HIV/AIDS as a sort of annoying thing that you have to take a pill for, and recent headlines that state the disease is being cured in many cases, is not helping the cause. People still die from AIDS. Some people do not respond to the medicines or they develop incurable cancers and brain degeneration. Today’s youth lives in a haze where HIV/AIDS is looked upon like a from of diabetes or something of that nature — but it’s not true. Now we have these new cell phone apps like Grindr and what do you think will happen? Gay men will start — and they already have en masse — to meet up like the bathhouses of old and already we have this meningitis this going around — what’s next?”
It is the opinion of this writer that Grindr users should be warned about the dangers of anonymous sex. Of course one would think by now that the average American dude knows the dangers, but many don’t know or don’t care. I think it is the duty of Grindr to educate its users. What do we have to do if a full blown epidemic of meningitis breaks out? Do we have to shut down Grindr the way we shut down the bathhouses of New York and San Francisco back in the early days of AIDS? It could happen — just read this — http://www.towleroad.com/2012/10/meningitis.html — it will tell you all about the meningitis outbreak and what to do if you think you may have been exposed.
