Joseph Sonnabend and Richard Berkowitz

About the author: Joseph Sonnabend is a physician who treats victims of HIV/AIDS. Richard Berkowitz is an AIDS activist who cowrote the 1983 pamphlet "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic," one of the first published articles to advocate safe sex and condom use to prevent AIDS.

In his controversial 1997 book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, Gabriel Rotello wrote that promiscuous sexual practices of gay men in the 1970s and 1980s furthered the spread of AIDS. Rotello concluded that gay men cannot use condoms and practice safe sex with enough consistency to prevent a "second wave" of AIDS, and he called for gay men to embrace sexual restraint and monogamy. However, a closer examination of the health data indicates that the...