The Gist

More AIDS delusions

Apparently because many of his own followers thought Andrew Sullivan's non-response response to Gabriel Rotello's lucid, fact-based critique (re: Sullivan's AIDS denial) was not adequate, the clearly perturbed Sullivan responded again...and again...and again.

Actually, the last two responses are just part of that trick Sullivan performs: He doesn't have comments on his site, and on an issue he's insecure about he often reprints the emails from fans who completely agree with him, which these posts are, making it seem like he got some sort of groundswell of support.

But in his second attempt at actually responding to Rotello, he is drawn out a bit. He claims that he needed to say that AIDS ended in '96 because he needed to save lives and alert people to the fact that protease inhibitors existed -- as if the media wasn't hyping the AIDS cocktail and there weren't glamorous ads for HIV drugs in every gay newspaper and magazine (to this day). Yes, pretty laughable.

But his most dangerous and ridiculous reasoning for why AIDS is supposedly "over" is that "sero-sorting" -- in which men choose partners of the same HIV status to have unprotected sex with -- is working remarkably well! Gee, tell that to the 67% of HIV-positive young black gay men who, according to one study, have no idea of their status (yes, they're sero-sorting alright, thinking they are negative). In several other studies the number of black gay men who do not know their status has been higher (90%), and is high among Latino gay men and white gay men as well. Maybe that's why we have in fact seen wave after wave (second, third, fourth, etc) of infections among younger generations of gay men, contrary to Sullivan's baffling insinuations that there's been no "second wave" of infection. Thankfully, because of the drugs, we have not seen the death and suffering of the 80s. But to imply that there has not been wave after wave of new HIV infections is simply false.

Rotello tells me he will be responding to Sullivan's claims on Huff Post.