Monkeypox is back, only this time it has a new variant that kills 10% of the people who get it. Currently, the disease is still in Africa, but that can change. For that reason, it’s time (again) that we talk about the problem of promiscuity among gay men, since they were monkeypox’s primary vector in 2022.

One of the biggest topics in the 1980s was AIDS, a sexually transmitted disease killing gay men. It got them because of their lifestyle choices.

Back in 1981, while I was in college, I worked as a secretary for two virologists who were on the frontline of research into the constellation of diseases that eventually coalesced into the single diagnosis of AIDS. That’s when I learned about gay men’s nights of unbridled licentiousness when they had sex with dozens of anonymous partners, something made possible with lots of drugs.

In San Francisco, Ground Zero for these orgies was the bathhouses. I won’t go into the details of what happened in those bathhouses, but Joseph Sciambra, a born-ago Catholic, has written graphically about what gay orgies were like during the 1980s and 1990s when gays stopped being so afraid and went back to their old ways. Be warned: It’s stomach-churning stuff. You can also get a sense of the debauchery by looking at Zombie’s 2015 photo essay about the Up Your Alley Fair in San Francisco, which is, quite literally, a street orgy.

Image: Monkeypox blisters. Public domain.

After a prolonged legal battle, combined with the bathhouses losing customers to death and fear, the era of the bathhouse ended. However, the orgies continued in homes and clubs.

The reality is that women temper men’s sex drives. Women not only have lower sex drives, but they’re also biologically programmed to demand an emotional connection in exchange for sex. Only in that way can they tie a man to any resulting progeny. Also, women are more vulnerable to garden-variety sexually transmitted diseases, which can leave them infertile, give them cancer, or infect their babies during pregnancy. Purely male relationships have no such brakes.

Naturally, the rising leftist movement within the once working-class Democrat party couldn’t acknowledge the fact that AIDS was primarily a gay disease in America. Certainly, in Africa, it struck everyone, but that was driven in significant part by the fact that African men (a) were too often unconstrained by monogamy and (b) their sexual practices were more likely to leave the woman bleeding—and blood plus semen equals the spread of AIDS. Michael Fumento wrote extensively about the pressure to make AIDS seem like a threat to everyone rather than the result of poor lifestyle choices.

After AIDS became treatable, it vanished from the headlines. However, in Spring 2022, a new gay-related sexually transmitted disease—monkeypox—popped up. Monkeypox is variola, like smallpox and, in its 2022 iteration, it was mild, giving people a really nasty rash that blisters, fevers, swollen glands, etc.

Some people, though, noted that monkeypox was mostly confined to the gay community. Indeed, it started its spread at a gay pride festival in Gran Canary. Gays, who had resumed their orgies after AIDS, were spreading it. It was anathema to suggest that they might rein in their behavior. Instead, gay men were told that they should freely continue engaging in sexual activity as before. We were also told that the disease shouldn’t even be called monkeypox because that stigmatized gay men and blacks.

Well, it’s 2023, and maybe people should start thinking seriously about the virtues of both sexual restraint and stigmas. That’s because monkeypox is apparently back and badder than ever:

A deadly, fast-spreading strain of the monkeypox virus has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on high alert.

The variant of the virus, which causes the severe disease known as mpox, kills up to 10% of the people who are infected, according to the World Health Organization.

This more lethal variant is still confined to Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo), but that doesn’t mean it won’t arrive here. Like AIDS and the initial monkeypox variant, it spreads through sexual or bodily fluid contact.

There is a vaccine available. Given that monkeypox is a variola, it’s probable that the vaccine is like the smallpox or chicken pox vaccines people have taken for centuries and decades, respectively. A few people will react badly, but most will be spared the scourge of a deadly disease. Sadly, though, it’s hard today to trust “the science” when it comes to vaccines.