The Gay Men’s Health Crisis paired with the AIDS Project Los Angeles to create a several hundred-thousand dollar website addressing drug use and unprotected sex among the gay and M-T-F community, as reported in The Gay City News. The website, mysexycity.com, is a clumsy animated series of scenes that invites visitors to create a sort of “Choose Your Own Adventure” in an interactive format. Text bubbles inform using the harm reduction as opposed to abstinence model, an approach that tries to inform people how to modify their risky behavior rather than expecting them to quit using drugs and stop having sex altogether. The site shows the consequences of various drug mixing, needle sharing and unprotected sexual encounters. While they are fighting the good fight and I wish it well, the cartoons are too funny looking to take seriously and will most likely only be effective if people visit it for a laugh.

But would the GMHC have to be digging for some way to communicate the important information about these health crises if our mainstream media would do their job and actually report on the issues? Okay, the NY Times, Washington Post and the LA Times have reported here and there, but they’ve been unusually slow on the uptake. Crystal meth has been linked to risky sexual behavior among gay men for several years, so I won’t applaud Andrew Jacobs for his NY Times piece in February, 2005 “Gays Debate Radical Steps to Curb Unsafe Sex” because NYC’s Department of Health issued explicit links and warnings about the use of meth and its relation to increased incidents of HIV.

Also according to the DOH statistics 94,495 people in NYC were living with HIV/AIDS, 26,311 of whom were men who contracted it by having sex with other men. I’d say if 26,000 people had the bird flu in New York City, the press would be freaking out. Obviously that has to do with our media’s necessity for “breaking news” and new angles. It has the severest attention deficit disorder especially when it concerns the ongoing struggles of minority groups. It’s been left to queer and small publications to keep us posted. In The Detroit News Deb Price wrote a heartfelt piece about the damage of crystal meth in Detroit’s gay community, offering the empathy missing from the bigger players.