There is another interesting article in the most recent issue of the New Yorker about the rise in HIV infection rates among gay men. While I have issues with the shrill, moralizing overtones of the article (is it really necessary to describe online hookup sites as "numbingly similar," where the ads "couldn't be more explicit?"), the article provides an interesting thesis, which is this: The rise of HIV infection rates is due to the perfect storm of rising amphetamine use and online hookup sites. In other words, HIV is on the rise because users of crystal (which increases libido and decreases inhibitions) can find easy, anonymous hookups online.

While some statistics are simply shocking (the article reports that the number of gay men who use condoms "regularly" is below fifty percent, to which I ask: Who are you people?), the most interesting statistic to me is that the average age of newly-infected men in San Francisco is 40.

Why is that? I would have expected the average age to be lower. If anything, I would have expected that the rates of drug use and use of online hookup sites would be greater for younger men than for older men. Is it that younger men have sex or use drugs less? Is it that younger men tend to have sex with HIV-positive men less than older men (assuming (1) that men hook up with people near their age more often than with men either significantly older or younger than they, and (2) that the incidence of HIV is greater for older men than younger men (as a residual effect of HIV infections in the '80s and '90s))? Is it part of a "gay man's midlife crisis," where older men embrace the fast life of sex and drugs to reclaim their youth? Or is it simply that older men get tired of being good all the time?