In recent days, CDC officials have been acknowledging this forthrightly. Gay men are not the only people at risk, but they do need to know that, right now, the condition appears to be spreading most actively within their community. For many years, following the outbreak of HIV, the fear of being judged or shamed has dissuaded some gay men from being tested.īut as a gay man who studies the history of infectious disease, I worry that public-health leaders are not doing enough to directly alert men who have sex with men about monkeypox. “Experience shows that stigmatizing rhetoric can quickly disable evidence-based response by stoking cycles of fear, driving people away from health services, impeding efforts to identify cases, and encouraging ineffective, punitive measures,” Matthew Kavanagh, the deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, recently said. And as public-health authorities investigate possible links to sexual or other close physical contact at a Pride event in the Canary Islands, a sauna in Madrid, and other gay venues in Europe, government officials are trying hard not to single out a group that endured terrible stigma at the height of America’s AIDS crisis. A disproportionate number of cases in the recent monkeypox outbreak have shown up among gay and bisexual men.
