How AIDS changed sex in America. Or did it?

Brian Alexander • E-mail

At first, AIDS appeared to be a disease of gay men. But by the time the virus responsible, HIV, had been identified a few years later, fear that sex, whether gay or straight, would kill millions of Americans shadowed every discussion of the topic.

America’s sex life seemed poised for a dramatic change.

But 25 years later, AIDS' true impact on the American sexual landscape has been muted, and, experts say, the changes that did occur were not always the ones we expected.

Perception of what the sexual atmosphere was like before AIDS often relies on a convenient metaphor, like, say, Studio 54. Fueled by sex, drugs and disco, the New York nightclub had a debauched three-year run as a hangout for movie stars, sports heroes and the fashion crowd before its two founders, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were thrown in jail in 1980 for tax evasion.

The next year, AIDS arrived (Rubell eventually died of it). But the story — first we partied, then we paid — is too tidy.

While Studio 54 achieved a kind of infamy, the vast majority of Americans could never pass beyond the velvet ropes. The vast majority were not having anonymous sex in nightspots, nor going to gay bathhouses, nor swinging in suburbia.

But AIDS, or, more accurately, talk about AIDS, was everywhere from national magazine covers to school board meetings in rural towns. Just 17 years before the first American AIDS patients checked into hospitals, comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted for referring in his stand-up routine to things that now appeared on nightly newscasts.

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So the conversation about sex did change, at least for a while. Couples took sexual histories over second-date cocktails. Going to a medical lab for testing became a dating ritual. Condoms turned into fashion accessories.

The most important change in the conversation occurred in the nation’s schools. “Before AIDS we were debating whether to teach about sex,” recalls Martha Kempner, the vice president of education for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).”

AIDS won that argument.

Condoms in the classroom
According to government surveys, in 1982, about 47 percent of teenagers 15 to 19 years old had had intercourse. By 1990, 55 percent said they had. But it has since fallen back to 1982 levels, and the teens who do have sex are more likely to use condoms.

But it's overall sex education, not fear of AIDS directly, that's responsible.

In fact, as time has passed and as drugs keep the HIV-infected alive for years (Magic Johnson was diagnosed back in 1992), the specter of AIDS is far less threatening to teens who were not alive for the original scare.

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“I think they are more concerned about other STDs,” says Douglas Kirby, senior research scientist for ETR Associates, a non-profit organization that creates sex education programs. When asked why they use condoms and why they don’t have sex, “roughly a third are concerned about pregnancy, a third other STDs, and roughly a third, HIV,” Kirby reports.

Experts speculate that education instituted after AIDS hit may also be responsible for a switch in the order of sexual practice among young people. It's possible, they say, that teens now start with oral sex rather than intercourse as a way to avoid all the STDs they learn about in school.

“Part of this is a reflection of the way we have been teaching,” suggests Debra Hauser, a vice president of Advocates for Youth, an educational group that develops health curriculum. “If you say it is high risk to have intercourse, and oral sex has a much lower risk, then if you are going to be sexually active, you pick the lower-risk behavior. And in schools with abstinence-only education, there is a high premium placed on virginity.”

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