Gabriel Rotello

About the author: Journalist and gay activist Gabriel Rotello is a former columnist for New York Newsday and author of Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men.

AIDS became an epidemic for American gay men in the 1980s because of the collective sexual behavior of that group, which included practices such as multiple concurrent partners, versatile anal sex, and widespread promiscuity centered in commercial sex establishments. The gay community must rethink its position on what gay liberation means in terms of sexual behavior.

Experts argue that the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among sexually active gay men in the early eighties resulted from a fatal confluence of the biology of HIV and the collective behavior of gay men. While the invention of safer sex in the...