Condoms are great help if you're going to have sex with someone who has a disease. If my guy worked at a hospital, picked up the wrong needle, and got HIV, we would be using condoms instead of giving up our sex life after 17 years.
The thing is, people are taking the same approach for a one-time random orgasm with someone they're never going to see again. Is that one orgasm with someone whose real name you might not even know really so incredibly important?
Yeah, maybe, for someone who is lonely enough and horny enough at the same time. But it doesn't obviously make sense on its own.
The other thing about HIV is the way it spreads. It kind of goes off like a domino, infecting one person, then their next new hook-up a week or two later, then the next stranger another couple of weeks after that, in a chain reaction of randoms. Or like a disease grenade at sex parties. People don't even realize they've picked it up before they go giving someone else a chronic life-long infection. Was that orgasm so important to them that they'd make another person take medication for the rest of his life?
Condoms can break that chain, usually. But as gay men why are we setting up those dominoes in the first place?
We've spent 30 years telling people to carry on sportfucking half the town for as long as they like, as long as they wrap it in plastic. If that worked, HIV would have died out 20 years ago. We don't ask the right question.
Once again I'll post Elizabeth Pisani, who makes totally different points to what I do, but still has lots to say, and who educated me about how HIV travels in bursts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoXAAEy6YQU#t=450
