Important to note that once you adjust for the base rate (gay men being well under 10% of the population), the risk among gay men is still much much higher.
Plenty of HIV+ "hetero" folks are hiding their homosexual activities, for myriad obvious reasons, i.e. the stats probably aren't accurate.
Don't assume you're particularly well insulated because you think you're playing bareback in the non-gay pool. Plenty of folks are pissing in all the pools, there are no boundaries.
As if heterosexuals don't have anal sex. Back in my teens it was a running joke that the catholic girls would only do anal before marriage, give me a break dude.
Attended a catholic private school growing up in an extremely conservative+religious part of the midwest, not really interested in divulging anything more personal than that on the subject. But I can confirm it's not a pure myth.
Instead, here's a reminder that being prejudiced is quite normal. It's easier to associate gay people with promiscuity, to connect those dots, than to think of people differently along so many axioms of different traits.
I'm reminding myself as well. Can't judge another with one finger without the remaining fingers pointed at myself (well except for the thumb).
But what's also true is that gay people on average are much more promiscuous and much more likely to have anal sex. This is obvious to anyone who knows any significant number of gay people. And it is also reflected in countless surveys.
HIV diagnosis rates are subject to both a latent rate bias and a skewed sampling bias: if the average gay man gets tested 10 times (factor chosen at random) as often as the average straight man, then we would expect higher positive diagnoses in a smaller population without as much (if any) underlying difference in true positive rates.
I'm not saying that the infection rates are comparable, because I don't have any hard data to support that. But the story is much more nuanced than "gay people are significantly more likely to give each other HIV," and will continue to gain nuance over time.
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
HIV is positively correlated with overall morbidity: straight men who are in risk categories for HIV (in the US) are also in risk categories for overdose, violent death, and exposure (homelessness). We don't test people who die from these things for HIV, and we don't have a unified federal (or even state) tracking system for correlating those deaths with HIV diagnoses.
Even if these cases were a minority, you're still misunderstanding the basic statistical shape here: fewer than 35,000 people receive positive HIV diagnoses each year, and diagnoses frequently don't happen (especially in non-gay/MSM population) for years after initial exposure. In other words: our sampling for the straight population trails our sampling for the gay/MSM population by at least a decade. This is especially important to factor when you consider that PrEP only really became universally available in the last decade, and that the last decade has also seen an unprecedented rise in IV drug use.
No, the sampled rates for each are what they are. I've extensively described the sampling bias with each.
> There’s no reason to suspect a yet undetected spike in straight infections.
There doesn't need to be a spike for what I'm saying to be true. But even still, demographic trends support the (unverified!) hypothesis that straight men will continue to grow as a proportion of diagnosed HIV cases: increased IV drug use, increased availability of non-barrier prophylactics, etc. But again, I've said all of this before.