Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucla-cs!Hoffman.El_Segundo@xerox.com
From: Hoffman.El_Segundo@xerox.com
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: Not a high risk group?
Message-ID: <40291@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 17 Oct 90 23:50:45 GMT
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Note:	Copyright 1990 by Daniel R. Greening.  Permission granted for
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Archive-number: 2657


  Jim,

OOPS.  Sorry about mixing up your name with your email address in my earlier
note!

I do believe "that we shouldn't publicize risk groups as that can foster denial
in the people outside these groups."  (That was Ward Chanley's earlier point.)
But you downplayed the other reasons I strongly object to the term "high risk
group":  for all too many people, it justifies their hatred of and even
violence against those groups.  I think that's pretty important, too.  And,
finally, I believe "risk group" is imprecise and unnecessary.

I still fundamentally disagree with you when you want to call "all gay men" a
"risk group".  If I practice safe sex *exclusively*, I truly HAVE REMOVED
myself from "people who engage in unsafe sex".  I do not agree with you that I
am now "having safe sex within a risk group".  By my behaviorally-based
definitions, if I am having safe sex, I am not at risk (for sexual transmission
of AIDS) at all.

You ask why I am concerned about whether or not I am at risk.  Seems to me like
a sensible thing to worry about.  Equally important, I find knowing that I am
in control of my own risk empowering.  That is, I cannot (and do not wish to)
remove myself from the group of "all gay men", but I CAN (and have) changed my
sex behavior, removing that sort of AIDS risk from my life.  Maybe that doesn't
soothe you, but *I* like it.

I don't understand your and others' insistence on the term "risk group" when
"risk behavior" is so much more precise, and avoids all the denial and
discrimination side effects of "risk group".

I do not wish "to redefine the risk groups to pare them down".  I don't want to
talk about risk groups at all.  I very much DO want to focus on risk behaviors,
which, far from being a smaller number of people, is probably larger,
unfortunately!  Such talk would not foster unjustified denial in, for example,
your or my straight friends, as talk about "gay risk groups" might.

You can re-assure your teenage straight friends who wonder how you deal with
"being even more at risk then they [are]".  You're not!  If you are practicing
safe sex exclusively, you and they are equally FREE of (sexually-transmitted)
risk.  And, if you are practicing safe sex and they are NOT, they are the ones
at risk, not you, despite their being straight and your being gay.

I apologize to those who feel I'm repeating myself.  I hope I've made my points
sufficiently clear.  Thanks to all for bearing with me.  Stay well.

  -- Rodney Hoffman