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Because of his HIV status, Klein said he is willing to accept the consequences of unprotected sex, including other sexually transmitted diseases besides HIV. Klein, who is HIV positive, said he uses the Internet to search for other HIV-positive men with whom he can have unprotected anal intercourse. “There hasn’t been enough acknowledgment of the fact that the sexual freedom of the ‘70s was for a lot of people a really, really wonderful thing,” said Klein, 50, who has lived in San Francisco for 28 years. Sitting in his ornate living room in San Francisco’s largely gay Castro district, travel agency owner Jonathan Klein expresses hope that chat rooms will bring about a rebirth of sexual exploration. “You just jump in and you connect, you hook up,” said the publicist, who has a live-in boyfriend. And many men like the idea of skipping the small talk at bars and dance clubs. “That number is rising,” he said, “as people find that it’s an efficient, easy, 24-hour way that they can meet people without having to brush their teeth or comb their hair.” Gary Cohan, a Beverly Hills physician whose practice treats 2,500 HIV-positive patients, said that as many as 30% meet sex partners online. The sex-seekers are not only showing up for their trysts, physicians say, they are landing in clinics with infections-notably in California, which has both a large gay population and a high rate of Internet use.ĭr. At that time, you’re governed by rules that are far beyond the scope of our organization.” “You have to physically show up and interact. “You can’t get while chatting with somebody on the Internet,” said Lowell Selvin, CEO of PlanetOut Partners, parent company of Gay.com. But they say they are not responsible for unsafe sex any more than the telephone company is for prank calls. Gay.com executives say their site voluntarily provides information on safe sex. Right Now,” says 150,000 members sign on to the chat rooms every day.
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The provider, which markets its ability to help men find “Mr. At any given time, up to 18,000 people around the world are conversing in Gay.com’s chat rooms. Gay.com reported nearly 17.7 million chat sessions in April, up from just 4 million sessions in January 1999. No one knows the precise number of gay men who go online searching for anonymous sex, but judging from use of chat rooms and personal ad sites, it’s a significant subset of the gay population. Worse than that, “we have little sense of what approaches would be effective.” Peter Kerndt, director of sexually transmitted disease control for Los Angeles County. Officials have no means of systematically monitoring the sites, no new money to launch prevention campaigns and no power to trace infections by demanding that Internet companies identify their clients. Moreover, the Web can be an inviting venue for men who don’t typically go to bars or bathhouses and perhaps wouldn’t otherwise engage in high-risk sex. Closing it off or passing out condoms isn’t an option. Health officials are woefully ill-equipped to respond. Now, just as research is suggesting that many gay men are tiring of safer-sex practices, the Internet is opening up a sexual superhighway. In the past, officials tried to control the spread of such diseases among gays by targeting common meeting places: closing bathhouses in the 1980s, or requiring condom distribution at bars and adult bookstores.