@Seed,
A good point. Epidemiologists at one time claimed that HIV was brought to North America by an airline steward who had been in Africa and had availed himself of male prostitutes. He then spent a vacation on Fire Island, and it was claimed that the disease thereby spread to the homosexual population of North America. It could just as easily have happened that way with heterosexuals. By the way, i'm not insisting upon that scenario, and don't know if epidemiologists still take that line--the point, though, is that the spread of HIV among homosexuals was coincidental to the circumstances.
One could as easily blame intravenous drug users, whose behavior is far more risky than other groups in the first place, involving as it does the spread of other diseases, such as hepatitis B. That just underlines that there was a pre-existent hysterical and hateful attitude toward homosexuality. Homosexuals have not been condemned because of HIV, they were condemned before HIV arrived on the scene. HIV just tends to give ammunition to the haters, who already operate without reference to logic.
